the JOI filmography — "the theater audience watching itself watch…"

The Joke turns the camera on the audience and makes spectation its entire content: two cameras record the theater's own crowd and project them back onto the screen, so the audience watches itself watching itself, gets the "joke," and curdles into self-consciousness, discomfort, and hostility. It's the anti-Entertainment's purest provocation — a film that gives the viewer nothing but his own watching to watch, exposing the act of spectation as the sole event and making the exposed watcher hostile at being denied anything to consume. Credited with "sounding the death-knell of post-poststructural film in terms of sheer annoyance," it's the boredom/excruciation experiment (cf. Accomplice!) reduced to its skeleton: the spectator confronted with nothing but the fact that he came here to be a spectator.