Judy Sirota Rosenthalphoto
Wednesday, June 21, 2017 - The history of movies is a history of two parallel impulses: to record reality as faithfully as possible with a minimum of artifice, and to conjure illusions that look for something true beneath the real.
These are the traditions of the Lumière brothers and of Georges Méliès: of scientists documenting the movement of workers leaving a factory, and of a magician and acrobats shooting rockets into the face of a winking moon.
The End of TV, a new multimedia performance from the Chicago-based collaborative Manual Cinema, finds harmony between these two competing impulses in a show that embraces both artistry and its mechanics. It’s playing this week at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.