Jesper Just (2007)

Jesper Just references cinematographic idioms in his elaborately produced videos. His narrative fictions often challenge male stereotypes and create dramatic suspense while using song and dance as emotive forms of communication in place of words.

Correction to the program: the film presented will be It Will All End In Tears (2006). Includes the films : A Little Fall of Rain, And Dreaming is Nursed in Darkness, It Will All End in Tears.

Jesper Just
Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1974
Lives and works in Copenhagen
www.jesperjust.com

Since the beginning of the decade, Jesper Just’s short films have blended musical comedy, melodrama, film noir and drag performance in romantic intrigues designed to highlight certain taboos regarding homosexuality and generational conflict. Just’s ambiguously resolved narratives invariably feature staged encounters between older men and a young man usually played by the artist’s alter ego, actor Johannes Lilleøre. The action centres on performances by non-professional actors singing pop tunes or dancing clumsily. Ordinary men appear in situations that verge on the ridiculous and engage in behaviour generally considered antithetical to conventional male role models. In scenes that are erotically suggestive though not explicit, older men are always portrayed as vulnerable while young men hold the power, whether as seducers or as witnesses to the shattering of identity. In Bliss & Heaven (2004), a truck driver in drag wearing a long blond wig and a see-through scarf sings Olivia Newton-John’s Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting to an audience of one, a youth. The scene, at first surreal, becomes sad and even tragic when the man collapses on stage. Imbued with emotion, The Sweetest Embrace of All (2004) mingles homosexual attraction with the tension of a father-son relationship: a young man comes up to an elderly gentleman and hugs him in a suffocating embrace.