Local Filmmakers Showcase: Charles Fairbanks

Meet the 2012 Local Filmmakers: Part 9 of 9

CHARLES FAIRBANKS, Eustis, Nebraska
Director of  FLEXING MUSCLES, 21 minutes

Director’s Statement:  FLEXING MUSCLES is a wrestling movie about postmodern consumption and production: physical work and embodied culture for the digital age. It is also an immersive, participatory, experimental ethnography on Mexico’s spectacular masked wrestling — Lucha Libre — for which the filmmaker resumed his career fighting as The One-Eyed Cat (El Gato Tuerto), this time with a camera built into his mask.

Director’s Bio:  Charles Fairbanks is a wrestler and filmmaker.  His recent work focuses on Lucha Libre in Mexico, where the artist fights as the One-Eyed Cat with a camera built into his mask. Fairbanks grew up in rural Nebraska and wrestled at Stanford, where he studied Art and the History of Science. In 2010 he received his MFA from the University of Michigan, Werner Herzog selected him for the first Rogue Film School, and in 2011 Anthology Film Archives hosted Tender Muscles, a retrospective of Fairbanks’ five short films. Fairbanks is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and professor of media arts at Antioch College, while his new work emerges through collaboration with an indigenous Zoque community in rural Chiapas.

CHARLES FAIRBANKS:  WEBSITE

Previously in the Local Filmmakers Showcase:
Irma (2011)
Pioneers (2010)
Wrestling with My Father (2010)

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Film Streams’ 2012 Local Filmmakers Showcase | Curated by The Faint
Friday, October 19  – Thursday, October 25, 2012