Las Vegas in 16 Parts

Overview

"Each year forty million visitors descend on the Mojave Desert to have an encounter with chance and a timeworn narrative of excess, with the assurance that whatever they do there will disappear into oblivion. The mass media reproduces and celebrates the image of Vegas based on gratuity and transgression. LAS VEGAS IN 16 PARTS proposes a flirtatious dialogue with this collective perception through an aesthetic of appropriation. The film cannibalizes the sheen of the city’s voracious capacity for spectacle: from the 1950s, when atomic explosion tests became another tourist attraction, to the present, when a male stripper turns police brutality into the sensual fantasy of a bachelorette. A documentary about a concrete city, it inversely aspires to be a fiction of an improbable collective fantasy."