Two ballet dancers versus stone giants. Two juxtaposed films. A conflict resolved thanks to love.



While the dancers dance, in another film of the fantastic genre, set in classical Greece, a stone giant terrorizes the people. Javier Otaduy creates the meeting of a 1960s American historical film about the myth of Jason and the Argonauts with a Soviet television production of an early 1980s ballet in which a couple performs a classical chorography. Both films are superimposed and the action in one influences the other; in this way, through their steps, the dancers strike the giant and the stone monster tries to capture the couple as they dance to the rhythm of a song about the power of love (or, better said, about falling in love). This extravagant display is masterfully brought to a close with a great simplicity of medium and process: superimposing the key images at the precise moment. A work of editing on found films following the style of the mashups where two pieces are brought together in some way creating a third which drinks from both wells and thus echoes them while, at the same time, being a unique piece in itself. The juxtaposition of both films means the dancers appear in the middle of a battle with giants and their movements are capable of defeating an enormous stone figure.



A traditional plot of “pastoral innocence and love overcoming all,” ironically interferes in a mythical story line which is also represented as naïve fantasy. Both coincide in their formal and conceptual status which is brought up to date in the editing, charging the end product with an atemporal timeline. However, the musical counterpoint played in an amateurish style by the author over an accelerated classical piano loop, converts the scene's violence into a melancholy declaration of love.