Wasteland Utopias explores the intersection of two radically different utopian thinkers: mega-developer Del Webb and outsider psychiatrist/naturalist Wilhelm Reich. Each found his way into southern Arizona's Sonoran Desert in the late 1950s—Webb building his colossal, panoptically-planned retirement community Sun City and Reich conducting his weather manipulation experiments using Orgone Energy. This unlikely pairing provokes a hallucinatory, magic-conceptualist examination of the disintegrating fabric that connects man with nature, evoking questions about both ecological and social sustainability. Using found footage, documentary interviews, and narrative tableaux, the film interweaves contradictory narratives and critically poetic observations. By juxtaposing these two thinkers—who represent ostensibly opposing visions of a still-undefined future—Sherman asks viewers to consider a multiplicity of perspectives on our endangered natural and social environments. The filmmaker, David Sherman, will be in town for a tasty Q&A session.

As flaky as a croissant, and nearly as enjoyable, this meandering experimental doc draws myriad discursive connections between the lives and legacies of two forgotten figures from the Cold War era: real-estate mogul Del Webb, whose Sun City development in Arizona  initiated the unsustainable urbanization of the Sonoran desert, and Wilhelm Reich, the ex-Freudian heretic who preached sexual freedom and imagined he could reclaim the Sonoran for mankind by bombarding the sky with invisible life-force quanta he called “orgone radiation.” I have no idea whether director David Sherman really believes in Roswell UFOs and an Eisenhower-era “Weather Control Act,” but he sure knows how to have fun messing around with stock footage, old newsreels, lo-fi video reconstructions, and crank ideologies. -  Cliff Doerksen Chicago Reader

 

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER: David Sherman was born in the Sonoran Desert. Early on, the desert’s ecstatic qualities of light and temporality informed his vision. Drawn to experimental cinema through his studies in philosophy at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, Sherman relocated to the West Coast where he enmeshed himself in the rich film culture of the Bay Area. Inspired by discarded 16mm films populating the dumpsters at the time, Sherman began to incorporate found images into his filmmaking. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1997, the same year his film, Tuning the Sleeping Machine, was included in the Whitney Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Sherman’s work focuses on the perceptual underpinnings of moving image media; his appropriation and collage based experimental films construct hidden histories through the radical play of form and material. Through digital manipulation, cast-off films are reinvented into mazelike tapestries of subconscious desire and distress. His work recently screened at the 2010 Chicago Underground Film Festival and national and international venues including Image Forum, Tokyo; LUX Center, London; Musée National D’Art, Paris. Upcoming exhibitions include Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945–2000 at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California.

 

He is one half of the artist collaboration known as Total Mobile Home. Recognized as founding the world’s first microcinema in San Francisco in 1993. Total Mobile Home has continued a practice of producing expanded-cinema performance and installations art. In 2004 they were artists in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California where they produced film based sculptural, sound and projected works. Sherman was Administrative Director of Canyon Cinema from 1989-2001 and was an Adjunct Professor of Media Arts at California College of the Arts from 1997-2004. He currently resides in Bisbee, AZ., where he is President of Central School Project, an artist co-op.