Pretty Messed Up is a limited series of conceptual mash-ups, the brainchild of Dutch director Peet Gelderblom. Movie mash-ups are perhaps the most cheeky of video essays. They tear down the artistic autonomy of a given film by mixing and ...See morePretty Messed Up is a limited series of conceptual mash-ups, the brainchild of Dutch director Peet Gelderblom. Movie mash-ups are perhaps the most cheeky of video essays. They tear down the artistic autonomy of a given film by mixing and mashing it up with footage from one or more other movies. It's a modus operandi not unlike the irreverent artistic strategies of the Dadaists or that of surrealist collages. Most often though, mash-up videos settle for laughs. The videos of Peet Gelderblom take the mash-up into conceptual territory, fully using the form's potential as a tool for essayist critique and questioning. For that is what his mash-ups aim to accomplish: they don't deal in definitive answers like a lot of video essays (try to) do, but instead evoke questions by juxtaposing footage from very different registers. Written by
David Verdeure
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