A Knee Ad (1970)

A Knee Ad is a loose take-off on Virgil's Aeneid, but only in the limited sense that both are about journeys, and therefore about motion. In A Knee Ad the journey is not from Troy to Rome, although perhaps it is a journey to meet destiny ... if one takes destiny to be the terminus towards which all motions point. I do not think of A Knee Ad as a journey around New York, although most of the footage was shot while leaving, entering, or commuting within, this city. Instead what appears on the screen is a journey around the environs of the screen itself. The cinematic frame can be used as a microcosm of the mythic macrocosm: I think of A Knee Ad as a sort of camp mythopoesy reduced to the level of absurdity.