There is a film that has been haunting my imagination for a long time now and that has inspired me three different projects. The film is La Antena (The Aerial, 2007), a very original and magical Argentine movie directed by Esteban Sapir.
I love it for different reasons, first and foremost its main theme, the influence of mass media and the power of television in a futuristically surreal dystopic world. I also love the references in its sets to Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune and Fritz Lang's Metropolis and, last but not least, the subtler hints at Italian media dictator Silvio Berlusconi, represented in the film by the grotesque Mr TV.
The plot revolves around Mr TV trying to use the power of the hooded La Voz (“The Voice”), the only character, together with her son Tomas, who can still speak, to usurp people’s words, though an Inventor and his family will try and contrast Mr TV’s plans by broadcasting Tomas’s voice from an old station, simply called The Aerial.
From a fashion point of view I really love La Voz’s look, though I also find fascinating Dr Y, a mad scientist whose lower face has been replaced by a TV screen broadcasting images of a mouth moving.
Transmission, the power of the word, people being silenced by dictatorial governments and regimes and empowerment through imagination (used in the film by the Inventor to help the city regaining its lost voice) have been floating in my mind for the last few weeks, so, after finding an old antenna lying around the house, I decided to fashion out of it a simple accessory that can be worn as an ear piece.
The funny and surprise element is that the antenna is telescopic, so it can be extracted or entirely removed from the leather shell I built for it and used as a pointer.
I moulded the leather on my ear (the front looks really simple, though the back is slightly more complicated since I had to play a bit with the leather to make sure no seams showed from the outside) and anchored it with a metal ear clip.
The picture here doesn’t make it justice maybe (sorry, on a rush here...), but I can assure you I have a lot of fun going around wearing it and scaring passer-bys.
Stay tuned (excuse the pun...) for further La Antena-related projects, in the meantime, as Friday soundtrack, here’s an extract from the film with La Voz singing.
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Posted by: hostess a milano | July 30, 2011 at 06:41 AM
i'm so surprised that the antenna is telescopic...just amazing!
Posted by: replica watches | July 30, 2011 at 10:23 AM