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A homage to thousands of ambitious YouTube users and video bloggers on the internet. No less than George Bizet's Habanera from Carmen has been re-interpreted for MeTube and enhanced with electronic sounds.
A YouTube anachronism as the overture of a clever opera-remix spectacle: A man’s surrounded by the most conservative ´70s interior furnishings imaginable. Beige patterned wallpaper is dominated by a portrait of Maria Callas, and a cassette recorder plays “Habanera” from Bizet´s opera Carmen. While streaks move across the static picture of what seems to be a webcam, the protagonist and actual performer, tenor August Schram, reservedly plays the singer while his mother hands him a glass of milk and a sandwich. Adolescent exhibitionists on the Internet don’t look like this, nor do their bedrooms.
Then an old pianist, tied-up and in a wheelchair, adds a visual disturbance to the bourgeois setting, which apparently has been arranged with painstaking care. In an increasingly unbridled manner — similar to love in Bizet´s work – the protagonists and setting continue to push the limits of reality. Who´s in control – mother, son or medium — remains consistently ambiguous. Like varying layers of Schram’s personality, camera filters are superimposed over the picture, now in high resolution and in motion: Schram dressed as Carmen, surrounded by men in latex outfits. Schram as a bleached-blond Adonis standing in between young women in cat suits. On the Internet at least, identities and body images are diverse and genuinely fluid. As a result MeTube turns into a fetish machine, and the homemade production becomes a professional music video.
In a combination of dance club and SM dungeon the director, Daniel Moshel, stages a minutely choreographed trip into the subconscious: While “Habanera” booms in Schram’s magnificent techno remix, genders and realities collide and overlap, and suppressed emotions noisily forge ahead. MeTube is more than a music video: It´s an homage, critique and pointed love letter to the Web and its users in a whirl of exhibition(ism). I create a world the way I like it. Ephemeral but still for eternity. (Sebastian Höglinger)
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MeTube, a hommage to thousands of ambitious YouTube users and video bloggers, gifted and less gifted self-promotors on the internet, has attracted international attention. No less than George Bizet´s Habanera from "Carmen" has been reinterpreted for MeTube and enhanced with electronic sounds. Behind the cross-over of musical styles are director Daniel Moshel as well as opera and oratorio tenor August Schram.
