With support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Lightcone, Disassociative Productions presents The Death Spiral Tour featuring M Woods’ three critically acclaimed feature films, Dailies from Dumpland, Body Prop, and Commodity Trading. As part of this programme Close-Up is delighted to welcome M Woods to present Commodity Trading: Dies Irae and participate in a post-screening Q&A with Mikka Woods.

Commodity Trading: Dies Irae
M Woods, 2022, 87 min

“Commodity Trading: Dies Irae provokes, amuses, and assaults viewers with a frenetic series of images edited into a palindromic film. The film is not constituted by discrete scenes, but rather a digitally expressionistic blur of movement and sensation. The closest semblance of a plot is a man’s manic odyssey around Los Angeles, which culminates in a virtual reality experience at a Culver City mall. Woods conjures a sense of hyperreality by layering a barrage of effects – extreme fisheye, blurs, animation – to create images that feel hyper-mediated. The film captures the fleeting thrills of digital life, mirroring the experience of someone feverishly doomscrolling through a TikTok feed full of bright colours and scenes of violence – a burning dollar bill bathed in red light cuts to a TV segment on George Floyd protests, which cuts to an overlaid black-and-white image of a Black woman’s face over a burning car, to a fisheye clip of a man in a Donald Trump mask and Mickey Mouse ears pointing a gun at the camera.” – Lucia Ahrensdorf