Grand Mal

Tony Oursler

1981, 22:36 min, color, sound

Grand Mal is a hallucinatory, discordant drama, an extravagant and sinister fable of postmodern cultural malaise. Oursler's obsessional themes and morbid visions of religion, sex and death unravel in a fragmented narrative of fear, horror, delirium — and humor. His fantastic theater of the absurd is propelled by a series of thematic dialectics — heaven and hell, good and evil, life and death — that are rendered with remarkable inventiveness and originality. The narrative's expressionistic visual dreamspace is permeated with an eerie sense of displacement and disorientation, which is echoed in Oursler's layered sound collage and somnambulant narration.