The Grand Bizarre

USA, 2018. Director Jodie Mack. 60min.

Watching this film is like opening an extraordinary box of candy: colourful and visually enticing, it surprises with layers of intricate and unexpected delights. Jodie Mack's most ambitious work to date, at feature length, The Grand Bizarre is a collage fashioned from some 85,000 meticulously crafted frames captured across six continents. In them, Mack unfolds a unique cosmology centred on textiles as entities that are alert to the ceaseless motion of their surroundings. Rhythmically pulsating in ways reminiscent of Len Lye’s colour studies, textiles seize our attention in myriad squares and rectangles, fabric pieces and swatches, shreds torn, and new lengths being made. Throughout, Mack presents textiles not only as decorative images and objects but also as texts of sorts -carriers of tradition and knowledge. She draws frequent visual correspondences between the geometric grids of fabrics and various human and non-human communication and structural systems: alphabets, musical notation, binary code, pixels, cells, and even the formations of migrating birds. Omnipresent yet often exquisitely beautiful, The Grand Bizarre’s textiles vehemently assert their presence - perhaps especially as ‘silent witnesses’ to their changing environments. They emerge as perhaps the ultimate interface between nature and culture. 

Past screenings

Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature – UK Tour
Friday 3 October 2025, 20:45 | Glasgow Film Theatre
TBC | Eden Court, Inverness