MEXICAN STANDOFF

Mexican Standoff* offers a reappraisal of B movies and popular culture over the past fifty years.

Cécile Babiole composes animated photomontages using visual quotations from movies and promotional material for films. Like the photographer in “Blow Up”, she enlarges and scrutinizes them under a magnifying glass until she penetrates beneath the weave of the print and the grain of the paper.

Laurent Dailleau modulates electronic sounds and voice recordings from highly varied sources (historical recordings, language-learning methods, films, shortwave radio, authors reading from their works, lectures…).

In this way, the two artists both construct and deconstruct a story that tells nothing but which at the same time awakens reminiscences of watching films in movie theatres, overlaid with other recollections, buried in our memories.

*Frequently used in action movies, a “mexican standoff” typically refers to a dead-end situation, where various protagonists all have their guns trained on one another. It is a recurrent stylistic figure in Westerns, notably those of Sergio Leone, and has been broadly taken up by John Woo and Quentin Tarantino.