Film Catalogue

Melodramatic but never campy or over the top, and with Hollywood-quality production values, Just’s films probe vulnerable, ordinarily well-armored zones of the masculine psyche like grief, same-sex love, Oedipal conflict, and spiritual desire. In Bliss and Heaven, a young man dressed in jeans and a vest walks determinedly through a wheat field under the hot, midday summer sun in an eerily quiet landscape. This scene is interrupted several times by a view of the field shot from within a noisy truck moving on a road parallel to the field. When the vehicle approaches and passes him by, the young protagonist hides in the field and watches the truck driver—an older man resembling him and dressed similarly—disappear inside the boot of the vehicle that is now parked in a parking lot of what looks like a deserted power station… A film made shortly after his graduation from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen already encapsulates the key themes and concerns he will unfold later in his work.

Close-ups and parts of bodies belonging to a group of ballet dancers: Lying prone and passive, the dancers’ bodies are connected to electrodes that cause their muscles to jerk and contract. Usually, our movements are triggered by electrical impulses inside our body. Here, that control has been allocated to external electronics instead. The dancers’ bodies, usually responding actively to music with empathy and sensitivity, are reset and rebooted: they become vehicles for a dance performed by a computer interface. This work is full of circuits: the circuit of bodies, the circuit between music and body, and the circuit between the individual parts of the fragmented image. Electricity, music and bodies, sensitivity and control: all these aspects shift within the wider circuit of people, things, and technology.

The film shows musician ‪Kim Gordon, former bassist of the legendary band Sonic Youth, in a landscape delineated by a long fence on the US-Mexico border. Gordon, donning a tutu and cowboy boots, runs a stick along the border fence, creating a rhythm in a childlike gesture, but one executed with intention. The wall, a symbol of division and divisive politics, suddenly becomes a musical instrument. By reassigning its meaning and transforming it into a productive object, capable of creation, the power structures between architecture, territory, and function are rearranged. Rather than a border, the wall becomes a monument, stripped of its intended pragmatic function, linking the viewer through space and sound through a universal experience of sensation and impulse, not devoid of humor and defiance.‬

A young woman sits in a cubicle in a strip club. She is obviously afraid, and in an inner monologue memorises passages from the fairy tale The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Just like the princesses in the fairy tale, she has eloped in order to dance her secret dance. This time, however, her prince is no prince in a shining castle. Rather, he is a bloke at a strip-club. Does he desire her too? Do they know one another? When she finally tries to kiss him, he thrusts her aside, and the situation suddenly changes character… A video that not only dialectically inverts the power struggle in the gaze, but also the power struggle at work in a topos that functions as a crucible of unspoken—or unspeakable—fantasies and motives.

A depiction of feelings of partly mystical love between two men of two different generations. The first of three acts which takes place in New York chooses a hazy oriental garden as its setting where a man wanders about looking for a young man. The second act refers to a citation by Jean Genet from the Miracle de la Rose. This time the protagonists are in a deserted courtroom. Men who could be confused with the jury start screaming in a rather comical manner the words from Cole Porter’s famous song I’ve Got You Under My Skin. Finally, the last act takes place on the roof of Silver Cup film studios in Brooklyn, where we see the two men before watching some fireworks which illuminate the New York skyline. Despite changes of decors and action which could seem beyond understanding, the story of this meeting presents an astonishing melodramatic continuity.

Llano is set in the ghost town of Llano del Rio, founded in 1913 by the socialist Job Harriman – at its origin, the promise of an ideal community; in its present state, an empty, forgotten space. Llano del Rio’s architect, Alice Constance Austin, imagined a proto-feminist, gender-neutral design, including communal kitchens located in tunnels between the homes, intended to liberate women from domestic work. But the failure of irrigation and water supply finally caused the project, and the town, to be abandoned, nearly a century ago. Observing this desert and the vestiges of this utopian city in the sheeting rain, it becomes evident that the film seeks to explore this ruin, both as a concept and as a historical and archaeological object, full of inherent dualities. At the center of the ruins, a woman struggles to prevent the collapse. Like Sisyphus pushing his rock, she replaces the bricks and stones falling from the already disintegrated structure. According to Just, “Llano is a ruin of a place that is no longer, but also a place that really never happened. Here, we have a double meaning – a strange mix of utopia and dystopia, filled with failure as well as potent ideals.”

Several men sit in silence, waiting for the telephones in front of them to ring; a telephone starts to ring during the first frame, but it does not belong to the man who anxiously answers it. The tense opening section develops into a father-and-son unsettlingly singing a duet over the telephone, an old 30s love song, while the other men in the room provide a chorus for the eerie libretto. Another tragicomic episode, where the male protagonists (lovers, companions or fathers and sons) experiment with the different possibilities of their own identity and their sexual roles.

The work examines the relationship between two juxtaposed characters. An older man is seen dancing wildly in a courtyard. In front of him, a younger man sits on a bench, sobbing. The relationship between them is ambiguous. The older man's dance is clearly intended for the younger man, but the reasons behind it remain unknown. While a first assumption might be that they are lovers, as the film continues, the relationship appears to be more platonic, perhaps that of a father and son, or of a mentor and his apprentice. Just's strength is in the way he leaves it up to the spectator to decide on the backstory of the characters he presents. By eliminating verbal communication and using sound and hand gestures, the spectator must empathize with the characters in order to understand them.

Allowing us to explore the architecture of anticipation, staged intimacy, and choreographed seduction, the camera from the stage pans the interior of a strip club. We see five men spread throughout the room, two of whom are a couple. They sit stiffly, staring into space. Then they begin to move, drinking beer, and smoking cigarettes. The camera zooms in on their faces. A young man who breaks out into a sentimental song and a pony-tailed man at the bar with skeptical expression and uncertain gaze are particularly noticeable. We instinctively feel that there is a closer bond between these two men, a suspicion that increases when the young man begins to weep, as the man at the bar stands, assuming the pose of Christ, his deep voice providing a resonant background bass tone. With the situation’s oblique references to the Chorus of Greek tragedy, musical performances and kitsch painting, Just provides us with images that refract and refine traditional ideas about male sorrow, sentimentality and social intercourse.

Originally conceived as an immersive architectural installation featuring eight synchronized nine-minute films on a loop, Servitudes Film #7 investigates how we comprehend agency as well as the conventional understanding of the “able” or “disabled.” This seventh installment introduces three characters: a woman, who embodies the media-created ideal of youth and female beauty and seems incapable of acting upon her desires; a child afflicted by a neurological disorder that affects the motor and sensory nerves, and a mediator between the two humans, namely the iconic One World Trade Center in New York, a phantom limb occupying the void left by the traumatic loss of the Twin Towers. The three protagonists of the piece appear as hybrids of machines and organisms, and their existence blurs the boundaries between fiction and experience. The work brims with a restrained yet intense kineticism, as its two mobility-limited protagonists internalize the skyscraper’s haunted architecture.

Shot in downtown Detroit, the work follows four Afro-American women in a car as they drive through deserted city streets in total silence. The palpable tension in the Chrysler reflects the disturbing atmosphere outside. When they arrive on the roof of an old theater, now a parking lot, another woman appears in the picture. Here begins a strange and spellbinding confrontation. As curator Jennifer Frias writes, “Just’s works are often emotionally charged with ambiguous narratives that never reach a moment of conclusion. Gender, relationships, and identity are recurring themes in his work. […] Sirens of Chrome similarly takes on the complexity of the human condition, but shifts its focus on the representation and interpretation of African-American women and women in general.”

An elderly subject appears as though caught in the midst of a larger narrative. As the figure exhales onto the mirror of a public restroom, a mist gradually fills the space, revealing visions of a forest. In this shifting environment, the individual begins to float, their features slowly morphing from masculine to feminine. Corporeal, social, and environmental forms are all transmuted in the enveloping, chimeric fog. Defying linear storytelling, and other filmic tropes, Just’s work disrupts conventional codes of gender, age, and identity, invoking themes of representation, self-fashioning, and agency.