Bliss and Heaven

Bliss and Heaven

Melodramatic but never campy or over the top, and with Hollywood-quality production values, Just’s films probe vulnerable, ordinarily well-armored zones of the masculine psyche like grief, same-sex love, Oedipal conflict, and spiritual desire. In Bliss and Heaven, a young man dressed in jeans and a vest walks determinedly through a wheat field under the hot, midday summer sun in an eerily quiet landscape. This scene is interrupted several times by a view of the field shot from within a noisy truck moving on a road parallel to the field. When the vehicle approaches and passes him by, the young protagonist hides in the field and watches the truck driver—an older man resembling him and dressed similarly—disappear inside the boot of the vehicle that is now parked in a parking lot of what looks like a deserted power station… A film made shortly after his graduation from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen already encapsulates the key themes and concerns he will unfold later in his work.
Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.

Direction: Jesper Just
Script: Jesper Just
Cinematography: Kasper Tuxen
Editing: Jesper Just
Sound: Jakob Garfield
Music: Martin Bartsch
Actors: Johannes Lilleøre, HC Pedersen
Format: HD
Color: Color
Production Country: Denmark
Production Year: 2004
Duration: 9'
Contact: Perrotin Gallery France

Jesper Just

Jesper Just is a Danish artist who lives and works in New York. From 1997 to 2003, he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been presented in several solo exhibitions, in venues such as the Galerie Perrotin in Tokyo, Japan (2021) the Galerie Perrotin in New York, USA (2020), the MAAT in Lisbon, Portugal (2019), and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France (2015), whereas he has work in museums including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2013, Jesper Just represented Denmark at the 55th Venice Biennale. Jesper Just uses the language of cinema to confront and divert the stereotypical Hollywood constructs of masculinity and femininity, as well as the biased representation of minorities and people with disabilities in mainstream culture. His short films and multi-projection video installations question the mechanisms of cinematic identification and break viewers’ expectations of narrative closure by unfolding surrealist, emotionally ambiguous, open-ended, and often silent situations or encounters. Interested in how public and private spaces define and shape human interactions, Just further plays with the notion of architecture as a performer, to echo and expand his characters’ enigmatic journeys.

Filmography

2002 No Man Is an Island (short)
2003 This Love is Silent (short)
2004 Bliss and Heaven (short)
2005 Something to Love (short)
2006 It Will All End In Tears (short)
2007 A Vicious Undertow (short)
2007 Some Draughty Window (short)
2008 A Voyage in Dwelling (short)
2010 Sirens of Chrome (short)
2011 This Nameless Spectacle (short)
2015 Servitudes Film #7 (short)
2017 Continuous Monuments (short)
2018 Circuits (Interpassivities) (short)
2023 Interfears (short)