Foolproof Illusion

An almost romantic comedy on the edge: Holocaust researcher Toto is having a major life crisis. Just when things at home and work could not get worse, he unwantedly gets a new assistent assigned to himself. Zazie is french, jewish, slightly germanophobe and supposed to help Toto to prepare a major congress. As the star of the congress suddenly wants to pull out, the problems are piling up and the two have to fix it.

Gravity & Grace may be writer and critic Chris Kraus’ final and exuberant attempt at an artists’ career. Kraus is best known for her novels, (I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor and most recently Summer of Hate), her art criticism (Video Green, Where Art Belongs), and her work in publishing subjective narratives through Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents Series, which she founded. Prior to writing, Kraus was an artist, actress and filmmaker. She made short, experimental, low-budget films, and one feature, Gravity & Grace; its failure on the market is chronicled in detail in her book Aliens & Anorexia.

In How to Shoot a Crime, Chris Kraus constructs a quasi-documentary with police crime footage, interviews with two dominitrices, and an ersatz mystery sub-plot. Sadomasochism finds its analog in a “plot” where gentrification and crime documentation are two versions of aestheticized death.

Woman reads a manifesto to a small crowd in a bar.

Following the erection of the Berlin wall, special agent Carl Halman is assigned by East German intelligence to move to New York where he’ll “sleep” as a writer until he is called. Using the code-name “April 23,” Carl successfully infiltrates the uptown-downtown literary world in 1950s New York. He edits a magazine, follows the Knicks, and marries Melinda, the socialite wife of best-selling jock novelist Hubert Cleaver, Ayden’s hilarious Norman Mailer pastiche. Through Carl’s eyes, we see New York City change from an outpost of Europe to the new capital of an anarchistic, post-ideological world. But then, when Carl least expects it, he’s called.

A study of the underground railroad filtered through a children's field trip to caves that once sheltered slaves.

A film by Chris Kraus.