On the 29th of June, 1936, Pius XI addressed a pontifical encyclical entitled "Vigilanti Cura" to all the Catholic bishops in the United States. This encyclical was dedicated to "The Motion Picture" and justified his intervention by "the lamentable progress of the motion picture art and industry in the portrayal of sin and vice". I've appropriated the title of his encyclical for my film, putting it to a completely different use to that originally intended. The 'photogenic quality' of the Latin terminology has, however, been preserved and, as per Adorno: "like a neon light which has just been switched on, the commercial and promotional nature of contemporary culture glows brightly". Vigilanti Cura is an irreverent film; insolent and deliberately confusing; a grab-bag of immorality. The montage combines a range of archival imagery from Humanite magazine with images sourced from the media (the military parade of the 14th of July, the current sorry crop of political celebrities ...) or from the cinema (the automatic writing of a puzzle composed of motifs borrowed from existing films). Vigilanti Cura ... or merely a tacit admission of the downfall of contemporary man, drowning in a sea of political, social and religious fundamentalisms. Where is he to be found? Locked in a vis-a-vis with depression and ego. Psychoanalysis no longer serves as a pretext for the dissolution of sexual and social taboos; it now provokes withdrawal into an auto-reflexive isolation, to the extent that societal problems get frozen in the mirror of Auto-Medusification. The mirror has become our idol - let's destroy it!
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