Alan Reid

Here are some short clips of The Trouble with Romantic Comedy, the short film I made with Ella Kruglyanskaya. It began as a title… almost all my work does, whatever follows is support. In this case, the title lead to a narrative rather than a painting. I wrote a block of text on a flight from my home in Brooklyn to Aruba last year, playing with ideas Ella and I had been talking about during the last several years… ideas about genres, Romanticism and comedy, about coupling. The text reads like a moody diatribe, and is almost aphoristic. I was thinking about Emil Cioran.

Later, we had the text read in a South London gangster’s accent, which changed the tone and made it seem more like a Will Self or Martin Amis audiobook, or I don’t know what. We set the voice against a backdrop of stock imagery of Montenegro. An almost Eric Rohmer-like Romantic escape. But in our film, there are no protagonists, just environmental ambiance.

The Trouble with Romantic Comedy is on view at Kim? Contemporary through the summer.