2002
The American Egypt, 2001
Still, 16mm film, color and black and white
With a background in visual anthropology (he earned an M.A. in this field from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Latin American Studies from UCLA) Jesse Lerner makes films that take the traditional tropes of documentary filmmaking and turn them on their ear. He is interested in hybrid cultures and particularly in the concept of borders — between truth and fiction, North and South, high culture and pop, for example. Through his films, he experiments with the various ways in which borders can be crossed, blurred or even erased. His films also critique the perceived "authenticity" of documentary representations while examining the historical relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.
Ruins, his 1999 feature-length film, uses appropriated footage to complicate notions of historical truth gleaned through material culture. The film tells the story of an expert forger of pre-Colombian art who managed to deceive even the Metropolitan Museum of Art into believing that his fakes were real. Lerner's 2001 film The American Egypt explores the historical role of the United States in the Yucatán peninsula and connects the evolution of the silent cinema with the emergence of the Americas' first socialist government, on the peninsula during the Mexican Revolution, between 1915 and 1924.
The American Egypt, 2001
Still, 16mm film, color and black and white