The Family Starship Troopers
dvd-video projection - 2004
.
The text is from a prediction of how the world will end and how God will return (in a space city!) by a Christian cult organisation in called The Family. They were set up in America in the 60's and were originally called "The Children of God" and worked among the hippies and the youth of the country. They were accused of brainwashing and kidnapping, and a number of their followers were found mysteriously dead at the bottom of cliffs in the south of France, so they changed their name. The Family has branches all over Europe and America and Asia and has many thousands of followers world-wide.
The text is accompanied by snatches and samples from a soundtrack of Starship Troopers, a Paul Verhoeven movie where clean cut kids join the army to fight invading space bugs who represent a knowing re-articulation of the faceless 'other'. A selfconscious presentation of fifties and sixties expressions of analogues of communism.
The two systems of representation: film/sci-fi and religious/supernatural flow into each other, generating strange links, co-incidences and exchanges. The movies and their culture have shaped how an entire belief system and world view is conceived - and bear in mind that these are not entirely minority, the beliefs running past our eyes are not a million miles away from that of many in the Whitehouse and current Republican party and the fundamentalists who support them. An aesthetic that shapes how actuality is seen. In turn many of the attitudes, images and concerns of film culture have been shaped by iconographies and expressions from the past both mythic, religious and supernatural.