Featuring mighty Mario and Jacky in a slapstick Wonderland!.
Super Cop World
2005 | Video | DV PAL | Color | 5′
Super Cop World is just an innocent play with a fictional action movie and imaginary classical video game. Jacky Chan’s fictional action collage is a coincidental match with Super Mario’s runs and jumps.
MONTAGE in a film tries to evoke unique perception of time. The creative decision of montage gives illusion of virtual time, creates tension, triggers emotion and tells a story. What if the decision to montage is totally based on a rule driven structure? What if the continuity of images is not just based on shot-by-shot but also motion-to-motion?
Every game has a rule and a goal. For instance, Super Mario World requires players to keep going forward to save the Princess. Risk factors are inevitable and you have to interact with the space and the creatures to design when you would run or jump. In other words, you’re bringing live a narration of Mario while playing, which the story goes by chance, by how players perform. In Super Cop World, I tried to tell the story of Super Mario World by assembling Jacky Chan’s Action on to Mario’s Action. Jacky Chan therefore is running in a Super Mario Wonderland and sub-spaced in his fictional movie world.
What really transformed the montage decision is how I treat the footages while editing, I treat the footages just as a branch of motion. Besides depicting the meanings of the images, I make use of the character’s motion in them. I connect the motion of different shots which shadow Mario’s each and every movement. It is a type of montage-like animation: trying to make continuous movement by sequencing connectable motion.
Mario-driven Jacky runs in unexpected motion continuity, and the interaction of sub-movie-space and Mario Wonderland give complete new meanings to both Jacky and Mario (the movie and the game).
The other video Super Cop World by Eric Siu is like Bo Zheng’s work also about deconstructing film or in that case Video games and feature movies. Eric Siu has replaced Super Mario with different film scenes of Hong Kong film and action star Jackie Chan. We see how the action hero, accompanied by the simple and annoying but iconic Super Mario music is fighting from scene to scene. But instead of one movie plot, which is constructed in almost the same way by following Chan from fight to fight with a very simple plot in between, the video plot is predetermined by the game and the scenes are cut together out of the different Jackie Chan movies – making the video something like a “best of” collection of the star. This work is a truly multi media work bringing together feature film, video game as well as art video. - Tobias Berger, join curator of exhibition – “Move On Asia”, Gallery Loop, Korea