Untitled (Potential Terrorist), 2002

In November 2001, a casting notice for (Untitled) Potential Terrorist ran in Backstage West, an L.A-based movie industry trade magazine and actors’ resource, requesting submissions for an untitled, silent, experimental film. The part description read, “Potential Terrorist: any age, gender, ethnicity. Must look like a terrorist.” Each of the 32 actors who responded was invited to participate, three people were unavailable, so in the end 29 people (28 men and one woman) appear in Tribe’s 16mm black and white silent film, which is structured as a series of one minute screen tests. Throughout the course of the 29 screen tests, a range of physiognomic “types” appear and disappear, each doing little more than looking at the camera, not unlike the screen tests produced by Andy Warhol in the mid 1960s. The last screen test Warhol made was of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, radical and left-wing publisher who died in 1972 in what Italian officials refer to as a thwarted urban terrorist attack: he was found dead under an electricity pylon alongside a quantity of dynamite.