In the popular imagination, the American West is at once a place of peril, solitude and liberation – a vision most famously expressed in Hollywood westerns. It’s also a place of immense natural beauty, as reflected in Georgia O’Keeffe’s famed renderings of the New Mexico landscape. Both of these visions of the West intermingle in the US filmmaker Courtney Stephens’s film Ida Western Exile.
The experimental work plays out in a series of recorded phone calls in which Stephens nervously enquires about issues – from the amount of canned tuna one can eat without subjecting themselves to mercury poisoning, to the availability of something called a ‘zombie killer machete’ – that reflect her intention to spend some time alone, away from society. And her chosen destination seems to be the American West, as implied by a series of shots of its extraordinary, red-tinted and rocky landscapes, which are at times overlayed with the O’Keeffe paintings inspired by them. Through this framework, Stephens builds an idiosyncratic meditation on how, in her words, ‘emancipation is curiously coupled with risk’ – a truth that tends to be especially inescapable for women.
Director: Courtney Stephens
video
Design and fashion
The mundane becomes mesmerising in this deep dive into segmented displays
14 minutes
video
Physics
A song of ice, fire and jelly – exploring the physics and history of the trumpet
9 minutes
video
Architecture
Tour the European architecture that dreamed of a wondrous, fictitious China
16 minutes
video
Spirituality
Trek alongside spiritual pilgrims on a treacherous journey across Pakistan
6 minutes
video
Animals and humans
An artist and ants collaborate on an exhibit of ‘tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings’
5 minutes
video
Meaning and the good life
The world turns vivid, strange and philosophical for one plane crash survivor
16 minutes
video
Cities
The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith
18 minutes
video
Art
Inside the unique creative space where ‘outsider’ artists find their form
14 minutes
video
Physics
A dreamy tribute to the music of Brian Eno, rendered in paint, soap and water
2 minutes