hd video / 12:52 / language: english
The footage in the stills above is 100% taken from the 2006 film "Art School Confidential". I didn't shoot any of it.
All Cops Are Artists is a video essay in the style of a variant of film analysis popularized on YouTube in which a narrator, often indistinguishable from the author of the video itself, describes and interprets the film in a strictly and purposefully subjective manner, their reading of the source material intimately tied to their personal experiences.
ACAA, in a similar fashion, dissects major scenes from the relatively obscure 2006 movie "Art School Confidential" with a focus on personal myth-making, identity, and finding oneself in unusual and unexpected ways - the hitch being that "Art School Confidential" is not about and does not explore any of these themes, and does not exist in the form it is described as.
The character Jonah, who is presented as the film's protagonist, originally is a comparatively minor character with relatively little screen time, while the person who, throughout the entire essay, is only ever referred to as "the creepy kid", is the real film's POV and main character.
ACAA offers an alternative reading of the material, a kinder, less cynical perspective on the events taking place during its runtime, in which Jonah, an undercover cop, is presented as a sympathetic figure in the midst of a severe identity crisis, struggling with the idea that he might not simply be impersonating an art student in order to catch a murderer, but that instead he might really be an artist, and his life as a policeman is just his public persona. The narrator even makes an attempt to identify with this struggle by linking it with his own: He as well works for a system that potentially does more harm than good, and, unlike Jonah, doesn't cling to his safe identity as a cop, but instead to his safe identity as an artist.