Shup
Jordan Baseman (1998)
Shup is a screenplay for a film that will never be made; it represents a radical departure and a remarkable achievement from an artist who usually deals in the currency of objects, of visual manifestations and juxtapositions.
Cinematic in scope and highly readable, Shup is a true story that recounts events that took place on Saturday March 13, 1976 in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. Shup is an investigation into the cruelties and powerlessness of youth, a study of mutual oppression. Jordan Baseman, who grew up in America and would have turned sixteen in 1976, narrates the story.
Witty and cruel in turns and consisting only of dialogue and directions, Shup is extraordinarily vivid in its allusions to the visual. It exists as a story in our mind’s eye: a film we feel we may have seen many times. Acting as an exorcism of a nefarious past, Shup perhaps begs the question of what we would admit to if asked to confess all on film.
