Detroit-based painter Scott Reeder’s new Moon Dust is a sci-fi feature film with a one-and-a-half-hour running time. Moon Dust is about the denizens of a run-down tourist resort on the moon (called Moon World) who struggle to maintain enthusiasm at a time when the hip, wealthier travelers have all gone to Mars.
With its deadpan tone, frequently improvised dialogue from non-professional actors (including Reeder, himself) and eccentric production design featuring color-saturated, patterned or monochromatic sets and oddball costumes and hairstyles, it very much is the work of a visual artist. The New York Observer called it a “Space Age Day-Glo Feature Film.” (There is a credited screenwriter, John Hime.)
There is, for instance, the pink spider named Stella that runs amok through Moon World’s infrastructure, a massage parlor where a woman pushes her feet through floor slots to be rubbed by truculent employees a floor below, and a greeter (played by luxuriant-haired Punk rocker Ian Svenonius) who sits behind a curvilinear opening in a lavender wall and makes strange pronouncements to new arrivals.
This is only the finished film’s second presentation — it had two New York screenings in November. Reeder spent some 10 years making Moon Dust off and on, working in Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit and finally Los Angeles, amassing some 80 hours of total footage that eventually was edited with collaborators. Throughout it all, he diligently used his Panasonic DVX-100 camera.
2 p.m. Sunday. Free. Cincinnati Art Museum’s Mary R. Schiff Library & Archives, 953 Eden Park Drive, Mount Adams, cincinnatiartmuseum.org.
This article appears in Mar 18-24, 2015.