"The camera has unbound daemonic Western imagination. Cinema is sexual showing, a pagan flaunting. Plot and dialogue are obsolete word-baggage. Cinema, the most eye-intense of genres, has restored pagan antiquity's cultic exhibitionism. Spectacle is a pagan cult of the eye." —Camille PagliaDan Zukovic (c. 19??) is a North American writer/director, actor, and musician who exists within a rarefied lineage of American actor/auteurs that take on a wide variety of film & television roles in order to fund their own uncompromising & visionary films; projects that fall outside the bounds of the conventional marketplace, typified by themes, elements, and/or subject matter that often call into question the motivations and machinations of said marketplace, as well as the culture at large.Much like the groundbreaking 20th century composer Edgard Varèse, Zukovic's own films are few in number, but stand apart as richly complex worlds unto themselves, often containing a shocking degree of prescience and cultural/psychological insight into the time periods from which they emerge and what's likely coming down the pike—time capsules beyond time. His films are characterized by a Hitchcock-like employment of fetishized visual symbols & imagery, mercilessly sardonic humor, and a devilish use of dialogue that borders on the Shakespearean.Zukovic himself emerged from the Vancouver punk scene of the late 1970s as a member of The Gargoyles. He wrote and directed three incendiary short films, Now Renting (1993), Conjurer of Monikers (1994), and Vertman (1994) in addition to several works for the stage, before releasing his debut feature The Last Big Thing (1996) which is probably the most explosively scathing and hilarious cinematic indictment of nascent hypermodernity, with its increasingly cathexis-like obsession with pop culture and what Zukovic's character Simon Geist describes in the film as the "LA fame need". The film is something of a gnostic millenarian followup to Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. The movie tagline is: "The culture is going down on itself... go ahead, Scream!". Following a limited theatrical release, The Last Big Thing sporadically aired on the Showtime channel for a number of years, allowing the film to experience something approximating the phenomenon of a "cult" following, although it still remains something of an obscurity (as of this posting is still unavailable to stream or purchase on DVD). Bob Sagat and Norm Macdonald likely drew elements from the movie for their 1998 black comedy Dirty Work.As the 1990s independent cinema era came to an inexorable close and the technocratic internet age rose towards unprecedented prominence and power, Zukovic managed to release his second independent feature, Dark Arc in 2004. Zukovic playing one of the three leads—his character Viscount Laris is reminiscent of the eccentric recluse and dandyish aesthete Jean des Esseintes from Huysmans' novel Against Nature—becomes enmeshed in a "sicky eccentric" love triangle. Like des Esseintes, Laris attempts to escape his own time which he views as an aesthetic wasteland in which the [decadent] culture has become inundated and deluged by an inescapable and seemingly endless glut of mediated images, both ephemeral and meaningless in their consumerist design & intent.His form of escapism consists primarily of carrying around a personal "image horde" with him at all times—a carefully curated retinal museum containing only the most enduringly charged and powerful images collected over his lifetime, used to counteract the daily visual morass. Laris selects an image or series of images from his horde, sometimes framing certain aspects of them, and then gazes upon them with full intensity for extended periods (often under the influence of his favored substance, tincture of opium) before blotting out his vision...