Your Brother. Remember? Images © Zachary Oberzan
As soon as there were VHS home-movie cameras, there were people remaking their favourite films at home. Maybe people were doing it before video, though no examples come to mind (tell me if you know of any…), but my hunch is that it’s to do with youth and timing. Home-movie technology on film was usually for adults, whereas the cheapness of tape and relative robustness of video cameras made that technology more accessible to kids and teens (perhaps with Super-8 as a halfway house). Add in the fact that home video players let kids rewatch favourite flicks to the point of obsession and you end up with a recipe for sweding avant la lettre.
I wrote about this for the Guardian a while back but was only able to glance at the work of Zachary Oberzan. This weekend, he’s bringing his extraordinary show, Your Brother. Remember?, to the Southbank Centre as part of their Being a Man season. It’s showing Friday night and twice on Saturday and is highly recommended for anyone interested in the way what we watch shapes how we think about ourselves, our relationships with our family and the way time mocks us all.
Oberzan first came onto my radar when I was living in New York and heard about his Rambo Solo project, which was based around a version of First Blood that he made on his own within the confines of his studio apartment. It was called Flooding With Love for the Kid and it blew me away: absurd at first, in a lofi homemade way, it became gripping and then hugely moving. Damn but I was rooting for his Rambo by the end, as he was holed up by the linen closet! The wider project was also fascinating for Oberzan’s complex relationship with the source material: Oberzan felt the Stallone film did a disservice to David Morrell’s original novel and was sincerely offering his rebuttal. (I wrote about this for the Guardian as well.)
Your Brother. Remember? is a great companion piece. It also draws on adolescent memories of an 80s testosteronefest – in this case, Kickboxer, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme – but adds even more layers. When Oberzan and his brother were teenagers, they created a VHS remake of the film; it’s a story about two brothers, which must have helped. When Oberzan rediscovered their work more recently, he was struck by how much had changed in two decades. His brother, Gator, had been a cocky jock type; now he was bigger, and humbled by years of addiction issues, jail time and other challenges, while Zachary had become a thriving actor and writer. They had drifted apart but decided to try to come together again by – yes – remaking their remake.
In the live show, then, Oberzan has three layers of screen work to draw on: the original movie; the teenage remake; and the adult remake of the remake. Also in the mix are notorious video nasty Faces of Death, which got the Oberzan brothers remake treatment back in the day as well, and some conveniently retrospective-melancholic words from Van Damme’s self-referential experimental movie JCVD.
As with Flooding With Love…, there’s a campy superficial absurdity to much of the material (though not to Oberzan’s own stage presence, which is resolutely straight-faced) but as a whole the project is an absorbing, emotional and provocative take on a raft of subjects; sibling love and rivalry, physical and emotional trauma, the way identity shifts over time, mortality itself… and, of course, the weird comfort to be found in basically lame 80s B movies.
When you think about stomping on those trashy flicks, the show seems to say, tread softly, because you tread on my VHS-lovin’ childhood soul.
Check out the trailer here then go see the show:
Your Brother. Remember? is at the Southbank Centre January 31 and February 1.
