Jordan Biren and Lewis DeSoto in Person
DeSoto's Show Car on Display at the Theater!

Before Chrysler's DeSoto auto line was put to rest in the early sixties, a prototype was created called the DeSoto Conquest. The brand was already a spurious tribute to Hernando de Soto, the sixteenth-century conquistador who “discovered” the Mississippi River, but to Native American artist Lewis DeSoto it was a bit of perverse poetry. After all, the Spanish explorer was infamous for his abuse of the native people he encountered. Appropriating details from the prototype, DeSoto tricked out a like-looking 1965 Chrysler and the Conquest was ready for the road. Jordan Biren's hard-driving DeSoto Conquest (2005, 21 mins, Color, DVCAM) is the story of DeSoto's postcolonial ride. Also on the program, classic auto films by artists: in Rhythm (1957, 5 mins, B&W, 16mm), commissioned by Chrysler, Len Lye uses stock footage of an assembly line to create a car in no time. Dig in with Hokey Stoke (Bill Daniel, 1988, 7:30 mins, B&W, 16mm), a sand dragging short from East Texas. To the strains of "Dream Lover," a beleathered man polishes his roadster with a powder puff in Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965, 3:30 mins, Color, 16mm). The World's Fastest Hippie (John Knoop, 1975, 12 mins, Color, 16mm) is a gut-wrenching look at local funny-car driver Mark Mitchell tearing up the quarter mile. In Hot Leatherette (Robert Nelson, 1967, 5:30 mins, B&W, 16mm), a car races along the palisades, then plummets in perpetual ecstasy.