Kino immer anders
Wiseman documents the early Reagan generation of the economic boom in all its verticality. Shot between Thanksgiving and Christmas at the flagship Neiman Marcus store and corporate headquarters in Dallas, the film immortalizes the 1980s peak of bourgeois consumerism.
The leading figure of American direct cinema works on a purely voyeuristic and fly-on-the-wall principle, never taking part in the selling. The result is a hybrid of narrative and documentary, one that sets out to expose the farce of mature capitalism’s customs. Juxtaposing clowns and customers, executive offices and escalators, he folds an entire social class into a single building-as-metaphor. All of it is captured in that grainy, crunchy 80s film texture. You witness the pre-e-commerce world of the upper class, staged across liminal spaces that leave a dissociative aftertaste of ambiguity and the uncanny. A monument to an economy that no longer exists, frozen at the exact moment of its excess. What Wiseman captures is not commerce but ritual: the choreography of a class performing its own abundance, blind to the fact that the performance is the product.
Pietro Grisanti
