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The video THE MAD MASTERS consists of various acts recorded during a celebrity impersonator and look-alike convention in Las Vegas. The protagonists of the video are professionals as well prospective impersonators. It stays open, in which gradations an actual identification by celebrity impersonation takes place. But rather it may show a desire of becoming the other according to media images. The work deals with impersonation as a revenat of popuar culture and opens up questions of power as well as relationships between celebrity culture, cinema and archaic rituals.
Who are the mad masters, the possessed or the impersonated?
The title refers to the documentary ‘Les Maitre Fous’ (1955) by Jean Rouch, which is about a ceremony of a religious sect, the Hauka, which was widespread in West Africa from the 1920s to the 1950s. During this ritual the Hauka entered trance and were possessed by various spirits associated with the Western colonial powers: the governor-general, the engineer, the doctor’s wife, the wicked major, the corporal of the guard.
Furthermore the production of THE MAD MASTERS is also inspired by Rouch’s term ‘cine-trance’; a possession like state induced through the ‘eye’ and ‘ear’ of the camera, in which the filmmaker physically enters the stage to involve with the subjects.
more text: Anawana Haloba
- Sascha Pohle
Video stills
THE MAD MASTERS
