The Dent, 2014, super 16mm film transferred to full HD video, 19 minutes, 2 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.
With a background as a painter, Basim Magdy was born in Upper Egypt and has been based between Cairo and Basel, Switzerland, for many years. Since around 2010, Magdy has created several imaginative 16mm films presenting dreamlike meditations on a detached and floating world where causality and consequence hover in a suspended state and shed their meanings. Especially in the disappointing years following the 2011 Arab Spring, Magdy’s films seemed to acquire a heightened emotion and wisdom–a particular urgency in their need to dissociate and carve out a space for reflection and dreaming, to ask what forms of wonder or poetry might begin again from the stillness and solitude of sunken places.
The 2014 short film essay The Dent, like all his films, is completely shot, edited, written, and lushly soundscaped by Magdy himself. The film tells the story of a small town’s aspirations for greatness before realizing its folly and descending deeper and deeper into the depths of its delusions and desires. At moments it even feels like an exhaustive survey of the subtle violence of small isolated communities, whose distorted fantasies, fear and gullibility towards the outside, corroborated lies and self-deception, and seething antinomies offer no means of escape. The people of the town descend finally into the ultimate expression of vanity and solipsism by taxonomizing the bones of their dead ancestors according to their social status. As Magdy describes it:
An anonymous little town struggles for international recognition as it becomes obvious that failure is a monster too big to slaughter. Their mayor resorts to hypnosis in the shape of a circus. An ambiguous dream that defies interpretation leaves the circus owner baffled. He wakes up to put his clowns and their wives to work. The consequences of this series of events hit the elephant where it hurts. Fate becomes its enemy.
