Polycephaly in D (2021)
Michael Robinson
Polycephaly in D Michael Robinson USAdigital 23 min2021
With Polycephaly in D, Michael Robinson brings his pop archivist sensibility into conversation with the current moment. Suffused with existential dread that taps directly into pandemic-era anxieties, the film tells a story of two telepaths through a montage of found footage of natural and man-made disasters, both real and fictional. In its most inspired sequence, scenes from The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the 1976 remake of King Kong, and the 1984 action-adventure comedy Romancing the Stone are intertwined into a weirdly romantic vision of the apocalypse. – Jordan Cronk
Informed by an underlying sense of anxiety and anguish, Michael Robinson’s Polycephaly in D nestles fragments of narrative within a collage of sound, image, and text that oscillates between the elegant and the discordant. – Andréa Picard
Streaming Details
This film is unavailable in France and Mexico.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Screen Slate.
Image credits: all artworks, stills, and portraits courtesy of the artist © Michael Robinson.
about the artist
Michael Robinson (USA) is a visual artist and filmmaker born in Plattsburgh, New York in 1981. His work explores the emotional mechanics of popular media, the nature of heartache, and the instability of the reality we inhabit. He received a BFA in Film, Photography and Visual Art from Ithaca College (2003), and an MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2007). Robinson has completed 25+ films since 2001, which have been exhibited widely at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including the Austrian Film Museum, The Walker Art Center, National Portrait Gallery, MoMA PS1, EXiS Festival, George Eastman House, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Gene Siskel Film Center, Anthology Film Archives, Flaherty NYC, LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, Blaffer Art Museum, European Media Art Festival, Pleasure Dome, REDCAT, Berlinale, Rotterdam, New York, Toronto, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Sundance, and Oberhausen Film Festivals, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, including the 2012 Whitney Biennial. He is the recipient of a Kazuko Trust Award (2016), MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2014), Creative Capital Grant, and Wexner Center Film/Video Residency Award (2012). He has been awarded numerous prizes at festivals worldwide, including EXiS, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, and Media City Film Festival (2006, 2008). Writing about his practice has appeared in Art In America, Frieze, Artforum, Film Comment, Cinema Scope, The Irish Times, and The Brooklyn Rail. He was co-founder and curator of Small Change Experimental Cinema Collective (2003–2005), and curator of a monthly film series at Cornell Cinema (2011–2021). Robinson has curated film programs for the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Whitechapel Gallery, San Francisco Cinematheque, Proekt Fabrika and State Contemporary Art Centre in Moscow. He is represented by Carrie Secrist Gallery. This is his seventh screening at Media City Film Festival. He is currently based in Los Angeles, California.