Sampled to perfection
Everyone from Tom Hanks to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles appear in the world premiere of Soda Jerk’s satirical new feature film, Hello Dankness.
If recent world events have had you scratching your head – or burying it in your hands – then Hello Dankness might be the satirical corrective you need right now.
Billed as “a bent suburban musical” by its creators, Soda Jerk (Australian-born siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro), the 70-minute feature film is composed entirely of samples taken from hundreds of films, TV shows and online memes.
“Hello Dankness is set in an American neighbourhood from 2016 to 2021 and bears witness to the psychotropic song and dance of the last two US election cycles and the collapse of politics into images and reality into spectacle,” say the duo.
Soda Jerk’s painstaking and timeconsuming high-tech approach meant it took four years for them to devise the film, which sees characters and sequences from one movie or TV show pop up in another thanks to the pair’s cut-and-stitch smarts. Expect surreal appearances from Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Bernie Sanders, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Napoleon Dynamite, Macaulay Culkin, Mia and Anna from Pen15, Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World, Ice Cube, Corey Feldman – and the Phantom of the Opera as Vladimir Putin.
“We’re interested in the lurch towards hyper-reality in these post-internet times and, in particular, the way this has altered the contours of the political spectacle and our relation to each other,” explain the siblings. “How can we be neighbours when the parameters of our realities are no longer shared?”
Emerging as visual artists in Sydney’s queer underground during the early 2000s, Soda Jerk value the political utility of civil disobedience. “This is how we first came to video sampling. We understood it as part of a broader resistance to cultural privatisation. The challenge our practice poses to intellectual property law has always been a driving force for the way we work.”
Soda Jerk’s previous film, TERROR NULLIUS (2018), is an Australian revenge fable that features BMX Bandits’ Nicole Kidman gate-crashing Mad Max while Grease’s Olivia Newton-John looks on in black leather, smoking a cigarette.
Alongside Hello Dankness, which screens daily during this month’s Adelaide Film Festival, you can also catch TERROR NULLIUS and other key works by Soda Jerk in their survey exhibition, Open Sauce. The exhibition opens at Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide on 18 October and runs until 16 December.
See Hello Dankness at Samstag Museum of Art unisa.edu.au/connect/samstag-museum
staple. So is pesto Pantesco, a freshly pounded sauce made from whatever’s in season – perhaps almonds, tomato and capers – tossed through pasta.
The diversity in Pantelleria’s food reflects both the island’s natural spoils and the many cultures who’ve called it home over the centuries – Romans, Arabs, Corinthians and Phoenicians among them. It creates a feeling of being on the African coast rather than an Italian island.
But it’s the wine industry that first put Pantelleria on my radar. An architect from Milan, Gabrio Bini, fell in love with the island in the early 1990s. He could see beauty in the severe landscape and began to resurrect a swathe of 80-year-old vines planted on terraces – a kind of traditional viniculture that has since been granted UNESCO World Heritage status.
The wines he produces are complex with a deep sense of terroir. Although there’s no cellar door on the island, Bini’s wines are available at many of the restaurants and my favourite is his Fanino, a blend of the white grape catarratto and red grape pignatello that’s remarkably fresh and pure. Bini chooses to vinify in a traditional method with minimal intervention. He converted his vineyard first to organic and then biodynamic practices and tends the land and vines only by hand and horse. After harvest, grapes are left uninterrupted in clay amphorae buried in the earth. Production is low but the wines are in high demand globally.
Much of the island’s charm is that it remains a place for the more adventurous traveller. What it lacks in the luxury hotels
and beach clubs of the Amalfi coast and other southern Italian destinations, it makes up for in natural beauty, a diverse culture and incredible food. Getting here is relatively simple.
The island’s small airport is located close to the main town of Pantelleria, while a ferry service from Trapani in Sicily runs most days. Scauri, about a 20-minute drive from the airport, has the largest concentration of villas, hotels and restaurants, while other small villages – Khamma, Kattibuale, Karuscia and Bukkuram – are lovely spots to take a dip or have lunch.
Little wonder that a host of European celebrities regularly visit, including fashion designer Giorgio Armani, who has owned a bolthole here for many years. In the summertime, the streets of Pantelleria’s towns are sleepy and quiet during the day. But they come to life in the evening – it seems everyone emerges to watch the sunset, aperitivo in hand. At the edge of the earth, encompassing the beauty of two vibrant cultures, Pantelleria captures me like nowhere else in Italy.