A film by Oliver Fournier.
Everything is a copy, a simulated and constructed experience. This is the discovery of a man who has embarked on a labyrinthine journey through European cultural history, obsessively visiting sites of fictional importance in the hope of finding that which ties his thoughts together.
The Olyssey won a Burt Brill and Cardens highly commended award in June 2011 and was shown at Cinécity, the Brighton Film Festival, in November 2011.
The film conveys a passionate search for ways in which all ideas connect together, yet it also expresses the impossibility of presenting such connections and the impossibility of linking all fragments into a coherent totality. Furthermore, it presents an additional problem of such a project, how it can lead to an overly academic interpretation of events, a vision of the world that is entirely in one’s own head and a disassociation from day-to-day, lived experience.
Construction, artifice and simulation are recurring themes in the film, but a more central theme is the impossibility of finding originals and, instead, finding only copies. The phenomenon of fictional tourism embodies much of these ideas and it therefore has a central role in the film. Visiting sites of fictional importance is an exemplary instance of a bizarre obsession and disassociation from reality, but it also reveals an interesting locus of simulation where fiction and reality mimic one another in a dialectical relationship that undermines the possibility of originality.
The Olyssey is very much a product of the filmmaker’s experience of art education, an institution which forces students to justify every move they make and reference the work of as many artists as possible. This project is that process of justification and referencing gone mad, to the point where one desperately seeks connections between things, sometimes forcing connections upon things, and also battling with the contradiction of creating something original whilst using the work of others as a starting point. Inevitably, the result is something that is heavily constructed and unoriginal.
