Ray Pride

Lynn Hershman Leeson's urgent, provocative, activist, needfully paranoid documentary, "Strange Culture," is one of the more innovative in memory, largely out of necessity. Steve Kurtz is a member of a group called the Critical Art Ensemble, as well as an artist and college professor at SUNY Buffalo. In 2004, Kurtz prepared an exhibit that would allow visitors to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art to test food to see if it had been genetically modified. A few days before the opening, Kurtz's wife died in her sleep from heart failure and he called 911. Seeing the materials for his show, the EMTs called the FBI and his home was impounded, including the materials, his computers, his cat and his wife's body, imprisoning Kurtz under suspicion as a bio-terrorist. Kurtz, still under the threat of twenty years in prison by federal courts, cannot talk about certain parts of the case, which led Leeson to recruit actors Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote, Thomas Jay Ryan and Josh Kornbluth to recreate those events. News footage, animation and interviews comprise the rest of this eccentric project: let's call it a "Patriot Action." Why is Kurtz being punished for a crime without victims? Because. 76m. BetaSP video.

"Strange Culture" opens Friday at Facets.

(2007-08-21)

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