Steve Fagin

The Machine That Killed Bad People is about the cultural and political history of the Philippines leading up to the overthrow of President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. It also addresses the role of electronic media in the struggle for power, and more broadly, American intervention in the Third World. Using a structure that emulates the way television news programs construct meaning through fragmentation, the tape interweaves clips of Filipino activists and reporters, a fictional television anchorwoman and correspondent, commentary by independent filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, Fagin's off-camera voice and script, and anonymous excerpts from commercial television.

Steve Fagin’s La Cura (2024) is comprised of episodes – of tableaux. These jewel-like pieces do not add up to a plot. Even when something recurs – like the studio set that stands in for a nightclub, proudly stripped bare under the final credits – or a performer reappears in a different situation, it is not for the purposes of narrative linkage. The connections between tableaux come about in a different way: through an accumulated interweaving, threaded on music.

This is an imaginary voyage taken by the two writers Roussel and Flaubert. Fagin has collected memories from diaries, postcards and their novels and woven them together, creating an exotic collage of classical myth and historical fact.