Black and White Trypps Number Four

“Jesus Christ, look at the white people, rushing back. White people don’t care, Jack...” - Richard Pryor

Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible film gauges into a punchline involving historically incompatible racial stereotypes.

"Like the previous Trypp, Number Four is a concert film but it is also a return to the “historicized” black and white palate of the first two films. Because the concert footage is from Richard Pryor’s standup act, the Black and White in the title also refers to race. But, almost as a rebuttal to Trypps Number Two, much of the footage here is presented in a Rorschach blot of negative and mirrored imagery so Pryor is portrayed as “white” as often as he is “black.” And through the afterimage resulting from the aggressive flickering, colors emerge leading to, as Russell says, “black and white becoming a fiction – not only in terms of race, but with regard to the material itself.”
–Chris Stults, Viennale Catalogue Essay (2009)