Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives

WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME: THE EARLY WORKS OF LAURA PARNES

May 8 – May 11

May 8-11, 2025

“Sewn from the dark origins of reality TV, indie sleaze, and Edgelord conservatism of the nineties and aughties – my early work embraced the teenager as a symbol of rebellion at a time when advertising subsumed their counterculture.” –Laura Parnes

This series presents a survey of early works by the artist Laura Parnes, known for her critically acclaimed films and installations that fuse comedy with pathos. Featuring both shorts and feature-length works, the three programs chart the artist’s evolving style, from her early appropriation techniques and experiments with digital rotoscoping to her highly stylized, multi-platform works. Throughout her practice, Parnes has cast real-life artists, musicians, and other downtown luminaries in works that consistently blur the lines between experimental and narrative cinema. Revealing the psychosis of late-stage capitalism, her darkly sardonic, often madcap stories have explored the erosion of privacy, the anxiety of influence, and the cult of personality, among other themes. In the 1990s, this took the form of prescient meditations on the rise of reality TV, online chat rooms, and surveillance culture. In the aughts, using episodic and serial formats, the artist developed post-9/11 narratives with teen heroines inspired by canonical texts. These defiant characters gleefully subvert the sanctity of art and culture, and the institutions that circumscribe their production.

Throughout the work presented in this series, Parnes’s inimitable sense of humor infects her dark, chaotic tales with a willful ambivalence, creating terse, non-linear narratives that question ideas of complicity, truth, and the possibilities of resistance. At a time when the rise of authoritarianism in American society is impossible to deny, the relevance of these questions remains eerily evident.

Guest-programmed by Jane Ursula Harris, who wrote the introduction above and the individual program descriptions.

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