Hey Mack
A lively cinematic tone poem, ‘Hey Mack’ takes the insistent image of passing trucks, filmed from a pedestrian viewpoint, and sets them against the feminist perspective of songs by Disband, a New York-based group of women artists/performers.
The film is about things that made the most impression on me on my first trip to New York: the trucks – how big they were, how menacing they were, yet how toylike – and going to see Disband. These women manage to survive in New York because of their humour and their wit and their extraordinary toughness. Their capacity for life somehow manages to dominate the other aspects of New York. The film works on a juxtaposition between what we think is very macho and these women who, through their songs and how they sing them, getting louder and louder, manage to dominate the image.
– Tina Keane
Witty and imaginative short which uses modern poetry, sounds and images (mainly of lorries) in a transfixingly rhythmic way. The result is on the one hand a deft undermining of brute force (as in HGVs etc), and on the other (despite patchy film quality) a few pleasurable moments of creative cinema.
– Helen MacKintosh, City Limits
Description source: Circles Catalogue (circa 1983). Compiled by Helen MacKintosh and Margaret Gillan. Edited by Felicity Sparrow.
