Jake Mariani

Con artists. Architecture. City planning. A play (both real and false). A comedy? A farce? An absurdist romp through a 21st century American city? Coffee. Cousins? Ideals are dead. Grants. Capitalistic pigs. Four women. Rich kids. Dead on the floor? World gone mad? Ideals are dead. It is the world that has gone mad. Paranoia. What is there left to do? Who is mad? Ideals are dead. In a world gone mad.

Episodes from an Investigation is an essay/narrative film presented as a series of fragments from the lives of numerous cinephiles and radicals living in 21st Century America. The film cuts between three related narratives: a film collective on a journey to find a mysterious film theorist/filmmaker; a couple whose relationship is falling apart as they each work on pieces concerning the cinematic past and the cinematic present; and two cinematic radicals holed up in an unknown location trying to understand how to revolutionize cinema.