We are fans of Department of Eagles (featuring Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen). We are also both fans of Marcel Dzama, who, with Patrick Daughters (the brain behind the Two Weeks video) directed the video for Department of Eagles’s song “No One Does It Like You.”
The new work, which premiered recently at the Museum of Modern Art, is animated by Dzama’s alternately sweet and dark preoccupations. A clash between Eastern Front snowman infantry and ninja ballerina terrorists, bearing AK-47s and baring thighs, forms the centerpiece of the video. All the visuals are familiar: the uniforms, the flags, the skirts and stockings, the rifles, the leafless clawlike trees, the bedsheet ghosts, amputations and arterial sprays. Steeped in a palette of blood red and cloudy root-beer neutrals, the frame full of eerie blurs and grainy textures, the whole thing feels pitched halfway between reverie and nightmare. A skewed meditation on death. An apocalyptic fairy-tale that, in weaving a childish innocence with tokens of the past and images of violence, stands up as quintessential Dzama.
Meet the soft-spoken artist. Below, you can catch some behind-the-scenes glances at the choreography and costumes. Blue-screen tricks and handmade props abound.