Thursday, April 12, 2012

Honourable Mention: Population: One

When I feature something on the blog called Population: One, you’d be forgiven for immediately thinking that this would have some form of I am Legend connection. It doesn’t.

Population: One is a surreal piece of eighties video art, rather than a film, directed by Rene Daalder and released in 1986. It featured artist and lead singer of LA Punk Band the Screamers Tomata Du Plenty as himself. The last survivor of a nuclear war – or the sole survivor of a mass suicide pact, as he puts it. He offers a psychedelic and surreal history of the USA told through song and featuring himself and Sheela Edwards.

Jazz Vampire
It is down to Sheela Edwards that this film gets its mention, as we meet her through the song Jazz Vampire, a song that sees her donning fangs in the worst 1980s MTV sort of way, as well as a crap bat. The whole piece is a bizarre journey powered by performance art that could only have been conceived of in the eighties, clothed in a mad collage of video.

The imdb page is here.

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