Decked: The Rise of the New Male Spectacle 2001, Multi-channel film-loop installation

Decked employs film loops and sculpture to explore cultural shifts that position men in the traditionally female role of voyeuristic object.

Conceived and directed by Julia Halperin.

Technical direction by Jason Cortlund.

"Decked: The rise of the new male spectacle" (from the Cinematexas festival catalog, 2001)

Space, the final frontier. But not outerspace.

Use of space.

When you’re watching one of Julia Halperin’s films, the first thing you may notice is a scarcity of dialog. Her subjects just don’t speak very much. When they do speak, it’s often in the context of a requisite pleasantry or a mundane transaction. And it’s not because these people don’t have much on their minds. They’re all trapped. Whether it’s a timid girl behind the counter of her father’s pawn shop, a well-kept trophy wife, or a Depression-era traveling salesman. Their circumstances have enclosed them completely. And so the circumstances themselves take on the burden of voice.

Halperin relies heavily on the frame. Her compositions tell the majority of the story. This isn’t revolutionary. But to do it well, with meshes of complexity and without pandering to didacticism, is remarkable. Her experiments in mise-en-scene are ripe and often bold. She understands how to control the construction of an environment as a path to the inner voices of the inhabitants. Architecture favors heavily in evoking her spaces, as do detailed production design and rich ambient sound. When you’re there, the places are real and in action. They are not cardboard archetypes of Pawn Shop, Beauty Salon, or Strip Club Dressing Room. They’re real places that seem filled with the tell-tale traces of real lives, inner lives, emotional lives.

This focus on space is not pointed out to de-emphasize Halperin’s ability to direct actors. While the directed performance style tends to eschew the obvious or expository, it does not obscure the raw internal landscapes of the characters. Halperin exhibits discipline in not allowing any one intersection to dominate her work. The components weave together to form an opaque, unified cloth.

Space figures prominently in Halperin’s latest work, a media installation titled Decked: The rise of the new male spectacle. The piece is an exploration of the current marketing explosion of male fashion and beauty products. Halperin translates her work in evocative cinematic spaces and gender identity into a physical space that embodies an emerging cultural phenomenon/pathology.

Decked employs film loops projected onto a sculpture of men’s dress shirts. Each loop takes on an aspect of male appearance: eyes, feet, hair, clothes or body, and uses it to explore contemporary representations of male identity. Interventions of collage, painting, graffiti and text onto recent men’s fashion magazine iconography bring out the attitudes and contradictions embedded in the images.