Press Release
(Begin voice-over.)
Chapter One. Manhattan: an actual geographic place; a city and a population undergoing massive crises in identity and economy; a ruckus of monologues of urban experience; a blue rhapsody; a movie by Woody Allen’
Ken Okiishi’s (Goodbye to) Manhattan is a totalworkofart (minus men) teetering on the brink of the following phenomena: Manhattan-as-shopping-mall-going-out-of-business; the traffic of artists and culture between NYC and Berlin in the 2000’s; the malaise of transnational bourgeois cultural life; the failure of communication, translation, and dating; and the crisis of subjectivity of those of us who will be thirty-something in the 2010’s. In (Goodbye to) Manhattan, the Manhattan that circulates as an assemblage of neurotic ideas and narcissistic fantasies is brought to the foreground, taking literally the grandiose analogies that have led to questions such as, is Berlin the new New York’ Is this about ME’
‘1 moving picture (color/sound, 111 minutes, filmed in Berlin and Manhattan between 2006 and 2009)
‘6 lobby cards (somewhere between Ku’damm and Madison Ave.)
‘1 movie theater (split in two, in the basement)
Starrring: Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen as Mariel Hemingway as Tracy
Nick Mauss as Diane Keaton as Mary
Pati Hertling as Meryl Streep as Jill
On the walk home from the opening:
Mary: Tschau, tschau!
The taxi drives off. Ike and Mary cross the road and continue.
Mary: Hmh. I know.
Mary: Those are err funny. Mad people, and Bella is a genuine friend. She is a brilliant woman, knows you.
Mary: It is a genuine genius, a genuine genius!
Mary: I it by Jeremiah became acquainted with, mean ex man.
Mary: I do not understand you.
Mary: What to be called, ‘why is you you separate let’, hä’
Mary: What is for a question’ I hardly know you.
Mary: Well, I’ we had simply n heap of problems. We do not haven ourselves often argued and I, I could my identity
longer to a so brilliant, dominating man subordinate.
Mary: It is a genius, a genius, a genius. Genius!
A breakup:
Tracy: We have a lot of fun together. I take care of me to you. Your problems are my problems. We pass in bed tol.
Tracy: Yes, but do you love me not’ ‘Tracy: Is this true’
Tracy: You have to know someone’
Tracy (off): Did you talk with another’
Tracy: O ever. Suddenly I go far not good. (sighs)’
Courtesy of Alex Zachary.
Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan
Posted by Georgia Anderson
