Shot during the opening stages of the First Gulf War, Kerr’s Cruel Rhythm revisits the American desert for a cinematic tone poem in the vein of The Last Days of Contrition. A canopy of sound bites of media coverage on the build-up toward the war is juxtaposed with the alienness of windmills in the desert, and a startling sequence of drifting faces of a crowd coming towards the camera in slow motion. A thought-provoking piece on media’s construction of societal paranoia Cruel Rhythm is an attempt to make a public, shared feeling intimate, or conversely, to make a subjective feeling of floating anxiety and dread into a shared representation. Unsettlingly, its ambiance is as poignant today as ever.
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