Magic for Beginners
2010 · 20m · United States
Directed by Jesse McLean
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, provocative, surreal
Woven from American television clips, fan testimonials and Andy Warhol quotations, the film follows a young woman's outsized love for Leonardo DiCaprio, an arcade nostalgist's memories and close-ups of tearful faces to probe how spectators live emotions by proxy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
McLean's collage-essay feels too reverent toward its source material—TV clips and Warhol quotes arranged into a tidy meditation on parasocial fandom when the real provocation would be to mess with those testimonials, corrupt the archive, make us *uncomfortable* with our own spectatorship instead of just contemplative about it.
A rigorously structured essay film that locates itself precisely in the lineage of Marker and Godard: the weaving of found footage, quotation, and voice into a formal argument about emotional labor and the image, executed with the kind of considered editing and tonal control that rewards close looking.
The decision to let the close-ups of tearful faces speak *without* the objects of their desire—to hold that gap between fan and idol as pure absence—is what transforms scrounged TV clips and archival footage into something that feels genuinely tender and strange.
Reviews
En revisitant la télévision et les nouveaux médias qui font intégralement partie de notre vécu, l'artiste américaine Jesse McLean dévoile comme par magie son regard inédit sur le phénomène omniprésent du spectateur sujet à l'émotion déléguée. Le film de Jesse McLean sort du champ des genres classiques, se situant entre vidéo art, cinéma expérimental et art conceptuel.