Peter the Wolf

Overview

Perhaps the spiritual prequel to Live the Life You LOVE, Peter the Wolf is one of the earliest extant video works by Iandovka & Tsyrlina. Featuring footage shot during a spontaneous trip to the first Detroit Electronic Music Festival in 2000, the filmmakers’ voyeuristic camerawork drinks in the scene, alternating between close-ups and wide shots of unaware partygoers and police monitoring the proceedings. Besides the obvious differences between the two works — the Y2K-era ravewear and the absence of phones — Peter the Wolf utilizes music to similarly displace the visuals from mere reportage. In this case, the video’s 8-bit soundtrack was recorded from a group jam session on hacked Nintendos. The gaiety and nostalgia in our contemporary viewing of this dawn-of-the-millennium happening is tempered by the suggestion of surveillance in the camera’s perspective, induced more explicitly by the brief shot of satellite dishes and radio aerials in the film’s final seconds.