Cameron Jamie

This DVD examines the multiple points of cultural contact between the United States and Mexico. From the Santa Barbara Fiestas and South Carolina's kitschy "South of the Border" tourist complex, to a Mexican Beatles cover band and Chicano rap, this film reveals the borderlands as a laboratory of hybridity that continues to ignite the popular imagination of each nation. Working at the boundaries of experimental film and documentary travelogue, this film weaves together found footage, interviews, performance art, and music video, producing a masterful commentary that is at once poetic, disturbing and hilarious. Includes appearances by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Aztlán Underground, among others.

Recording of the annual Christmas folklore street ritual Krampus in Austria, in which people dressed up as hairy monsters scare the wits out of the population. The accompanying metal soundtrack by The Melvins provides a curious American perspective.

Filmed in the white working-class suburbs of Detroit, Spook House reveals a community reveling in the macabre. Front lawns are transformed into cemeteries, kitchens become mausoleums and dismembered ‘bodies’ are prepared for cannibal feasts. Cameron Jamie’s camera tracks the celebrants as the nights become longer and darker.

An intensely filmed look at the San Fernando Valley backyard wrestling scene in the late 20th century. Driven by a pumping soundtrack created by the Melvins (Jamie’s band), it is vivid, and visceral, and a little scary. It is part of a trilogy along with the films “Spook House” and “Kranky Klaus”.

Massage the History records amateur dancers, whom Jamie found accidentally online, who freely engage the quotidian domestic scene with their own sexually suggestive movements. Unintended for an actual audience, the automatic nature of their body language evolves from an intimate spectacle into a dreamlike scenario of transcendence through onanistic desire.