Australian artist Jack Feldstein's The fantastical world of scriptwriting is hilarious. In his characteristic neon-style, he satirizes the golden rules of screenwriting in an unexpected way. Feldstein rambles on and on, in humorous stream-of-consciousness style, advising people how to construct a compelling script with an ironic, tongue-in-chick style. Yet, what I find interesting is that mockery is not the end of it. There is a certain ambivalence, that at times might pass for reverence for that which he ridicules. In a way, it is a kind of ironic tribute to the art of screenwriting. As Feldstein told me in an phone interview all the way from Australia: “My great passion is screenwriting. I love it. I am ironic about it because, that's my life, I'm cursed with irony, but I love it. It's a beautiful art from”. Furthermore, he said that he felt compelled to parody the scriptwriting rules because “scriptwriting is an art and not a science. If somebody wants to try to give you the answer to an art, well... they're going to be always wrong.”

Before developing the neon style that defines his work, Feldstein worked for several conventional screenwriting projects for popular television series such as Superman (animation), Ace Ventura and Popeye, among others.

When I ask him how has his relationship to his craft changed after he began working on his own projects, he tells me: “I'm a lot freer now than I used to be, so in other words, when you write for someone, its very strict in a way, it's within very clear parameters so its within clear frameworks of what they want... and when you're writing for yourself, you're free and dancing in your own head if you want to be.” However, the long years of working for commercial projects allowed Feldstein to think about writing continuously: “I've been a writer for quite a while. As I was writing for all these things, I was also writing things for myself to speak about... about structural things, little things... in a way the rules that I wanted to think about and whether they were correct. And sometimes they're ironic and sometimes they work, but its always good to know them, so as I went through after many years, I wrote them down, until finally I came to 32 of them and I thought... OK, I'd like to do something with them now.” That something is The fantastical world of scriptwriting, which will be screened on the Impakt festival within the compilation “Dissecting Mimesis”.

Feldstein's past work has already been screened at Impakt, and at numerous other festivals in Europe and Australia. All of them have the characteristic look that he achieves by a modifying images in Flash, After Effects and the usage of rotoscoping. Feldstein promises that his upcoming works will also have the same look: “All my projects are in that that look. That's my aesthetic, I see the world in that way.”

Posted by Miguel Escobar  // RSS feed