Looking For Love

TRT 11.5 min, 2022, video

Synopsis:

A hallucinatory trip through Joshua Tree set to Handel; a talking ball blue desperate for love; a tap dance from the digital beyond. These sketches, among others- produced using Portapak cameras and analog video mixers - investigate how the materiality of image-producing devices activates [practices of] personal memory and longing

Screenings:

Vertical Cinema, Iowa City, IA

Onion City Film Festival, Chicago, IL

Cactus Club, Milwauke WI

Sam Taffel’s LOOKING FOR LOVE (2022, 11 min) is an examination of how this concept intersects with media representation. The description notes how the disparate sketches “investigate… the materiality of image-producing devices [and how it] activates practices of personal memory and longing.” I need not investigate further; from the second an audio clip from the finale of Bob Fosse’s ALL THAT JAZZ sounded, I was enthralled, memories from my past evoked and a sense of longing—in this case for that film’s singular exquisiteness—activated. A sequence wherein a bright blue blob appears to be giving a monologue about looking for love is oddly emotional, though abstractions like this temper any potential obviousness in Taffel’s premise. Desire is often as much about what isn’t realized as about what is.

- Kat Sachs, Cinefile - Chicago Guide to Independent and Underground Cinema