The ‘Wilhelm Scream’ is a recording of a man screaming in great agony. The Wilhelm Scream was first used in the 1951 film ‘Distant Drums’. However it takes its name from a film made shortly after - ‘The Charge at Feather River’ (1953); in which a character named Wilhelm is given this sound as his death cry in the post-production sound-tracking process. This recording has subsequently been used in over a 130 films right up to the present day. This sound effect has become iconic for the frequency of its use – as opposed to its singularity. The power of a scream lies in it being primal and pre-verbal, herein lays its universality. When one considers iconic screams or wails in visual media (Eve in Masaccio’s The Expulsion, Munch’s The Scream, the screaming nurse from the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, Francis Bacon’s Popes, Janet Leigh in Psycho, Rod Steiger in the Pawnbroker) it is the particularity of the situation that makes them memorable, while we recognize the anguish of that particular instant through the sound made. The Wilhelm Scream is perversely interesting because of it being divorced from its original context and author and repeatedly applied in different situations.
The Wilhelm Scream’s separation from its source, of course happened when it was first recorded on tape in 1953. Fittingly there is no conclusive evidence as to the originator of this sound. The disturbing aspect of the Wilhelm Scream is the dislocation of the individual’s signature: by effectively presenting a multitude of deaths with one anonymous wail, humanity is being constructed in representation as a mechanistic system, made of interchangeable parts, to be reassembled and dismantled as seen fit. This is horrifying enough to earn a scream itself (although not a Wilhelm one).
At the moment of being recorded it moved beyond being a live experience between the maker of the scream and the sound recordist, and became a unit of information in its own right. It might be useful to think of the Wilhelm Scream as a meme. [one website definition of a meme being: ‘an idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve. A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to mutation, crossover and adaptation. A cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behaviour) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); memes are the cultural counterpart of genes’, this term was constructed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)].
This meme has been particularly successful and propagated by various ‘carriers’ which in this model are the sound engineers. One film historian described the use of the sound effect ‘in-joke’ between engineers as “a sort of way of communicating between ourselves and saying hello to each other”. This also points to the idea of a film itself being a communicative system in which minority or marginal discussions can occur that might be completely different (or even opposite) to the primary message(s) intended by the film’s central contributors (film studio, director, producer, screenwriter) – aimed at the cinema going public. Here is exciting example and potential model for the marginal operating within any communicative system to establish their own discourses ‘piggybacking’ / or encoded within a dominant message.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio
(a compilation of film clips which feature the Wilhelm Scream)
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
Monday, 13 October 2008
Notes on Whitechapel Gallery artist’s talk between Jens Haaning & Nicholas Bourriaud / 11 Sep 08
Artists and Institutions and the changing nature of Institutional Critique
Bourriaud suggested that the kind of institutional critique that emerged in the 1960s has come to an end. He felt that art galleries were no longer considered as representative of an authoritarian political system as they once were, therefore, making them the subject of work has becomes less relevant for artists. He suggested that the art gallery was seen as ‘one more thing among many things’.
Also, such is the fluidity of galleries now in modes of presentation and engagement (e.g. smaller but no less institutions such as Gasworks, ICA (as seen in their recent Nought to 60 program and Whitechapel itself) means they often think with the contingency and lightness that would classically be the domain of the artist. In the past there has been more of a tension between the dense, heavy (both architectural and ideologically) institution and the nimble, protean artist. However as more and more gallerists, curators and creative producers adopt the mobility of thinking more commonly associated with the artist the innate antagonism between the two has lessened.
Working in/out an institution, working with(out) an institution
Asked how he dealt with the initial invitation to be part of Whitechapel Gallery’s project The Street:
(“Seven artists/artist collectives have been commissioned to take part in The Street, a year-long project by Whitechapel Gallery launched on 30 March 2008. Each were asked to develop seven week-long projects focusing on a disused shop space on Toynbee Street just off Wentworth Street, as well as to develop projects relating to the place on and around Wentworth Street, E1. Projects will usually have some manifestation throughout the rest of the year so that The Street will have an accumulative presence up until March 2009. Writers Lars Bang Larsen and Clare Cumberlidge from General Public Agency have been invited to contextualize The Street throughout the year. A publication will follow in 2009.” Curator, Marijke Steedman)
Haaning confessed to finding it quite difficult. The reason being that it was important to him that the decision to work beyond the walls of an institution is his artistic choice. Whereas with ‘The Street’ the work being external to Whitechapel Gallery itself was part of the structure of the project. From his perspective he felt the gallery had made inroads into the nature of the work, before he had even contributed anything. This stance became clearer in mind of his suspicion of artists who claim to work ‘outside of the institution’ he felt this was naïvely revolutionary, or at worst, a faux-stance of independence, he admitted the importance of, and attraction to, galleries for him, lay in the power of their networks, both in communicating the project to the public, media and others in the professional arts community.
‘Baghdad Time’ (2008) was the produce of Jens Haaning’s commission for The Street…A clock set to Baghdad time has been mounted to the side of a Brick Lane restaurant; “thus acting as a reminder of a situation occurring in another time zone – a situation that society has the power to influence despite its geographic distance… it highlights economic and diplomatic relations between the UK and Iraq - with British participation in the Iraq conflict acting as the main connection” (as described on the Danish Embassy website). This description and commentary complements what Haaning disclosed of his strategies on the evening of the talk.
Other works
Other works which Haaning presented included: “Afghanistan 5012 km” (at Leidsche Rijn, in Utrecht, The Netherlands). A piece commissioned for a new housing estate. The work takes the form of a road sign placed by the motorway, with the lettering ‘Afghanistan 5012km’. This functions as a joke while remaining factually true. Haaning talked about wanting people to consider why this road sign had been sited over any other, as a means of opening up broader considerations. He went on to explain that he saw the work as a response to expansive housing developments occurring in the Netherlands at the time, that were economically related to Holland’s military engagement in Afghanistan.
Another striking work was ‘Arabic Joke’ (2006); this work took the form of numerous posters disturbed throughout New York in October and November 2006: “interspersed among the movie and club posters, the typical joke offers a laugh to those who can read it, and may evoke feelings of dislocation and confusion among those who cannot”. (Who Cares? website). Bourriard talked about other contexts in which he’d seen this work and variations of it, in which the jokes are broadcast, for example. He talked about how ‘Arabic Joke’ created a micro-community for the duration of the joke’s presence in the cityscape – around which those who ‘were in the know’ could enjoy the work. By presenting the ‘insider’s joke’ with the insider being the ethnic minority or marginal community, subversions of the relationship between access to knowledge and authoritarian power were put to work. Finally in Redistribution (London-Karachi), 2003, all the chairs from the ICA, London were shipped to Karachi, Pakistan. They were then left on the street for passers-by to use or take as they wished. Haaning recounted how there had been great excitement at the Karachi end in the lead up to the project, at the prospect of ‘designer chairs from London’, however when the chairs actually arrived there was great disappointment with their aesthetic. He found it humorously revelatory about the expectations of one culture and its produce of another – and the notion of taste and fashion – how in this particular case it definitely did not translate.
One lens through which to view the works mentioned here is through their spatial-temporal-displacement strategies. Baghdad Time, suggest a mini-time zone in the midst of Brick Lane. This asynchronicity could be seen to mirror the culture of population demographic of the Brick Lane area in relation to London’s population at large. Likewise to make the link between the Dutch housing estate and Afghanistan may have had a real-time relevance at the time of its execution – but as Haaning himself said, he is equally interested in a motorist 50 years from now passing the sign and being curious enough to investigate a connection that has become historical, that is not ‘live’. Issues of displacement are explicit in Arabic Joke and Redistribution, in the former the artwork i.e. the poster activates and engages with those communities which have been displaced – alienating those who do not know the language, in the latter it is the objects which have been displaced: two simultaneous situations of the same logic – but not identical events had been created. Here the displacement is not loaded in one community’s favour, or to the exclusion of another. I was made particularly curious about the act of swapping, specifically the moment mid- swap when both parties have nothing and are awaiting the arrival of something.
Bourriaud suggested that the kind of institutional critique that emerged in the 1960s has come to an end. He felt that art galleries were no longer considered as representative of an authoritarian political system as they once were, therefore, making them the subject of work has becomes less relevant for artists. He suggested that the art gallery was seen as ‘one more thing among many things’.
Also, such is the fluidity of galleries now in modes of presentation and engagement (e.g. smaller but no less institutions such as Gasworks, ICA (as seen in their recent Nought to 60 program and Whitechapel itself) means they often think with the contingency and lightness that would classically be the domain of the artist. In the past there has been more of a tension between the dense, heavy (both architectural and ideologically) institution and the nimble, protean artist. However as more and more gallerists, curators and creative producers adopt the mobility of thinking more commonly associated with the artist the innate antagonism between the two has lessened.
Working in/out an institution, working with(out) an institution
Asked how he dealt with the initial invitation to be part of Whitechapel Gallery’s project The Street:
(“Seven artists/artist collectives have been commissioned to take part in The Street, a year-long project by Whitechapel Gallery launched on 30 March 2008. Each were asked to develop seven week-long projects focusing on a disused shop space on Toynbee Street just off Wentworth Street, as well as to develop projects relating to the place on and around Wentworth Street, E1. Projects will usually have some manifestation throughout the rest of the year so that The Street will have an accumulative presence up until March 2009. Writers Lars Bang Larsen and Clare Cumberlidge from General Public Agency have been invited to contextualize The Street throughout the year. A publication will follow in 2009.” Curator, Marijke Steedman)
Haaning confessed to finding it quite difficult. The reason being that it was important to him that the decision to work beyond the walls of an institution is his artistic choice. Whereas with ‘The Street’ the work being external to Whitechapel Gallery itself was part of the structure of the project. From his perspective he felt the gallery had made inroads into the nature of the work, before he had even contributed anything. This stance became clearer in mind of his suspicion of artists who claim to work ‘outside of the institution’ he felt this was naïvely revolutionary, or at worst, a faux-stance of independence, he admitted the importance of, and attraction to, galleries for him, lay in the power of their networks, both in communicating the project to the public, media and others in the professional arts community.
‘Baghdad Time’ (2008) was the produce of Jens Haaning’s commission for The Street…A clock set to Baghdad time has been mounted to the side of a Brick Lane restaurant; “thus acting as a reminder of a situation occurring in another time zone – a situation that society has the power to influence despite its geographic distance… it highlights economic and diplomatic relations between the UK and Iraq - with British participation in the Iraq conflict acting as the main connection” (as described on the Danish Embassy website). This description and commentary complements what Haaning disclosed of his strategies on the evening of the talk.
Other works
Other works which Haaning presented included: “Afghanistan 5012 km” (at Leidsche Rijn, in Utrecht, The Netherlands). A piece commissioned for a new housing estate. The work takes the form of a road sign placed by the motorway, with the lettering ‘Afghanistan 5012km’. This functions as a joke while remaining factually true. Haaning talked about wanting people to consider why this road sign had been sited over any other, as a means of opening up broader considerations. He went on to explain that he saw the work as a response to expansive housing developments occurring in the Netherlands at the time, that were economically related to Holland’s military engagement in Afghanistan.
Another striking work was ‘Arabic Joke’ (2006); this work took the form of numerous posters disturbed throughout New York in October and November 2006: “interspersed among the movie and club posters, the typical joke offers a laugh to those who can read it, and may evoke feelings of dislocation and confusion among those who cannot”. (Who Cares? website). Bourriard talked about other contexts in which he’d seen this work and variations of it, in which the jokes are broadcast, for example. He talked about how ‘Arabic Joke’ created a micro-community for the duration of the joke’s presence in the cityscape – around which those who ‘were in the know’ could enjoy the work. By presenting the ‘insider’s joke’ with the insider being the ethnic minority or marginal community, subversions of the relationship between access to knowledge and authoritarian power were put to work. Finally in Redistribution (London-Karachi), 2003, all the chairs from the ICA, London were shipped to Karachi, Pakistan. They were then left on the street for passers-by to use or take as they wished. Haaning recounted how there had been great excitement at the Karachi end in the lead up to the project, at the prospect of ‘designer chairs from London’, however when the chairs actually arrived there was great disappointment with their aesthetic. He found it humorously revelatory about the expectations of one culture and its produce of another – and the notion of taste and fashion – how in this particular case it definitely did not translate.
One lens through which to view the works mentioned here is through their spatial-temporal-displacement strategies. Baghdad Time, suggest a mini-time zone in the midst of Brick Lane. This asynchronicity could be seen to mirror the culture of population demographic of the Brick Lane area in relation to London’s population at large. Likewise to make the link between the Dutch housing estate and Afghanistan may have had a real-time relevance at the time of its execution – but as Haaning himself said, he is equally interested in a motorist 50 years from now passing the sign and being curious enough to investigate a connection that has become historical, that is not ‘live’. Issues of displacement are explicit in Arabic Joke and Redistribution, in the former the artwork i.e. the poster activates and engages with those communities which have been displaced – alienating those who do not know the language, in the latter it is the objects which have been displaced: two simultaneous situations of the same logic – but not identical events had been created. Here the displacement is not loaded in one community’s favour, or to the exclusion of another. I was made particularly curious about the act of swapping, specifically the moment mid- swap when both parties have nothing and are awaiting the arrival of something.
Friday, 10 October 2008
Notes on a talk at the Science Museum: Perverting Technologies / 6 October / 2008
On Monday 6th October I attended a talk titled Perverting Technologies: A science. It was organized by the DANA Centre (part of the Science Museum) a cluster of spaces, inviting debate and thought about science in relation to culture. The speakers on the panel were artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Blast Theory producer Julianne Pierce and Andrew Shoeben, founder and lead artist in the collective Greyworld. The audience were in the larger space downstairs. The speakers and compeer were on a small stage not much higher off the ground than the audience they were addressing. The space is rectangular with two plasma screens at each end with the bar running across the longer side, opposite the stage. Each speaker was allocated 10mins to introduce their respective practices:
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer:
Lozano-Hemmer spoke articulately about a range of ideas and influences. Notably a forthcoming project in November in Trafalgar square called, Under Scan… “a large-scale video art installation for public space. In the piece, passers-by are detected by a computer tracking system that activates video-portraits projected within their shadow on the ground. The piece is intended as a public takeover of their city, linking high technology with strategies of self-representation, connective engagement and urban entitlement. Over one thousand video portraits were shot in Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Northampton and Nottingham by a team of local film-makers. Participants were free to represent themselves in the video portraits in whatever way they desired and a wide range of emotions and attitudes were recorded.” (Under Scan website). The projected image is scaled to fit the outline of your shadow. The projectors are extraordinarily powerful among the strongest in the world, 10 000 lumens. He spoke excitedly of one’s own shadow becoming a mobile interface, something we intuitively have learnt how to deal with and manipulate. Every seven minutes, in what he called a 'Brechtian moment', the intricate Orwellian surveillance system reveals itself: luminous green tracking grids are made visible, the scanning systems and spot lights disclose themselves - like red-laser dot gun targets. Observing people’s reaction to his work Lozano-Hammer found himself surprised by ‘what makes people uncomfortable’. In conception he thought this moment of displaying the hidden mechanism would be horrifying - the sudden foregrounding of the technology that increasingly surrounds us - on the contrary, he has discovered the public often like this moment and break into smiles - ’because it looks like a disco’, he says. On the otherhand he finds more were unsettled engaging with the projected portraits. (Filmed in such a way as to stare up at you from the ground.) Such is the number of portraits, and the randomisation of their projection Lozano-Hemmer with an unintentional poetry said: “Participants come back to find themselves, it is very hard to find yourself.”
The artist felt it key that the public activate the work, that the work does not slide into a solely technological spectacle. He sited his work within the Western Classical Painting tradition of portraiture, showing examples of inspirations which included Velasquez’s Las Meninas and work by Van Eyck. The examples portrayed the sitters aware they are being looked at, rather than simply objectified obliviously.
Lorenzo-Hemmer also sited contemporary artists such as Gary Hill (b.1951, “for his earliest video installation, Hole in the Wall (1974), he broke a hole through a wall of the Woodstock Artists' Association, placing on the other side a monitor that replayed his destructive action” (Slought Foundation)). Paul Sermon (b.1966, http://www.paulsermon.org/) and Daniel Conogar (b.1964, Madrid, www.danielcanogar.com). These artists engage with telematic systems, live relay and projection.
He also expressed an interest in exploring the ephemerality of public art. The temporary nature of his installations, the fleeting apparitions of the portraits themselves are means of achieving this. He also referenced ‘the anti-monument’ and in particular the work of Jochen Gerz:
[ “Since the 1960s, forms of monuments were invented that not only explored new types of expression but challenged the very tradition of marking historical events with monuments in order to commemorate the past in the present. Crucial to this development were the works of American and German artists, Edward Kienholz and Jochen Gerz. Kienholz’s ‘anti-monument’, The Portable War Memorial of 1968, comprises a blackboard and chalk with which spectators are invited to record the names and victims of future wars, while Gerz’s much debated ‘counter-monument’ of the 1980s and 1990s is based on the principle that monuments which renounce symbolism draw spectators into an active questioning of their relation to the past and its representations. The inscription on the plaque marking the site of Gerz‘s invisible ‘Monument against Fascism’ in Harburg near Hamburg reads, "For nothing can with duration rise against fascism in our place"
Peter Carrier, Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989]
Despite his positive and utopian rhetoric my unease about Under Scan and other works that employ or re-work surveillance technology was not dispelled. In making such technologies ‘fun’ and ‘playful’ it is often argued they have been ‘hijacked’ in the name of progressive socially engaged interactivity, as opposed to being utilized as policing aides. On the other hand I fear such works can unwittingly become PR-exercises for a surveillance state, accustomizing us to their presence, to the point we lose all critically of them or attach undeservedly positive connotations to mention and thought of surveillance systems. John McGrath, the former artistic director of Contact Theatre and now inaugural artistic director of the National Theatre of Wales, author of "Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space" , talked earlier this year at the LIFT festival in Stratford, during which he called for a more open recognition of an innate human pleasure from watching and surveying, that oft’ forewarned ‘surveillance society’ is already upon us and our emphasis should be engagement, subversion or creative play with these technologies.
Julianne Pierce, spoke about Blast Theory’s recent and ongoing project, Rider Spoke:
“The audience can take part either on their own bike or borrow one supplied by Blast Theory. Following a short introduction and a safety briefing you head out into the streets with a handheld computer (Nokia N800) mounted on the handlebars. You are given a question and invited to look for an appropriate hiding place where you will record your answer. The screen of the device acts primarily as a positioning system, showing where you are and whether there are any hiding places nearby. The interface employs imagery drawn from Mexican votive painting, sailor tattoos and heraldry: swallows flutter across the screen to show available hiding places, prefab houses indicate places where others have hidden. Once you find a hiding place - a spot previously undiscovered by any other player – the device flashes an alert and the question. The question is one of a selection authored by Blast Theory that asks you – alone, in an out of the way spot – to reflect on your life. You then record your answer onto the device. Each hiding place combines two properties: the physical location and the electronic location as reported by the device and, for this reason, position itself is slippery and changeable.”
Julianne played samples of various participants confessions in recording devices, (notably one in which a 40 year old woman, talks of all pervading fear which affects her. “I’m constantly in fear, of what might be fear of what might not, fear of myself”). An interesting idea was put forward that people generally found it easier to interact with machines in a public-performative situation than a person, ‘it’s a lot less intimidating‘, one attendant said, ‘to engage with an answer machine device than to be invited on stage and interact with a human performer‘. I think this is a valuable point to consider and disrupts the binary oppositions that come into discussions around this theme, which will often site technology on one hand and intimacy on the other.
I was more excited by mention of an earlier Blast Theory project with which they achieved their first wave of critical acclaim and mention in the press. It was a project titled Kidnap:
“In 1998 Blast Theory launched a lottery in which the winners had the chance to be kidnapped. Ten finalists around England and Wales were chosen at random and put under surveillance. Two winners were then snatched in broad daylight and taken to a secret location where they were held for 48 hours. The two winners were Debra Burgess, a 27 year old Australian working as a temp and Russell Ward, a 19 year old from Southend working in a 24 hour convenience store. The whole process was broadcast live onto the internet. Online visitors were able to control the video camera inside the safehouse and communicate live with the kidnappers. During the run up to Kidnap, a 45 second video - the Kidnap Blipvert - was shown at cinemas around the UK. The Blipvert carried a freephone number, allowing people to register their interest.” (Blast Theory, website)
I am curious as to how this project would be received now in 2008, when footage of captives held by terrorists is such a mainstay of our tele-visual media. The idea of 'lottery winners' and the project’s initial advertisement in cinemas, switches an extreme, aggressive, torturous, (often politicised) act , into an artwork and perverse leisure activity - both for the hostage and those who become part of the project online through the manipulation of cameras tracking the hostages. How many of the negative aspects of kidnapping remain in the game version of it? Is kidnapping trivialised? and is their anything necessarily wrong with such trivialisation?). Have the primary connotations of ‘kidnapping’ itself shifted in the last decade in this country? In 1998 I suspect kidnapping would have evoked more personal acts of abuse: a lone dysfunctional sadist, a desperate individual trying to raise money, cinematically depicted as ploy in the criminal underworld, an act that takes place within our cities , or at least a domestic place - now one is more likely to think of aid workers, or soldiers in Iraq, frenzied political rants, recitations of religious commentary - we possibly think of kidnapping as an act by ‘a community of the other’ visited upon someone we recognize - a social event and political act. In that respect Blast Theory can be said to have been curiously prescient about the mediarization of anti-social activity and the complicity of the voyeurs.
Andrew Shoeben, the director of Greyworld, talked of his primary audience being the passer-by and how this affected how he presented his work. His challenge becomes getting people’s attention in an instant, this is not an audience who have come to see the work, but who in the act of passing through the space, activate it and on discovery imay then spend time with it. He saw many of his projects as antidotal to the reduction of public space to nothing more than traffic lanes, from which to get to and from work - or shop. A notable work simply titled 'Railings', involved the tuning of the bars which made up a stretch of railing: running a stick along the railings created a melody. Shoeben felt this was especially representative of what he strived to achieve because a cyclist could still chain their bike to the railing a though it was a purely functional object. Equally exciting was a work called World Bench: “Each installation is situated in a school and consists of a bench placed next to a wall onto which is projected the mirror image of the bench. However, whilst one side of the bench may be in the grey playground of a primary school in Newcastle the other is in the sun-baked play - ground of a school in Cape Town. The people sitting on the bench can have an idle conversation, discussing their lunch or perhaps indulging in a little light flirtation, which they would have were they sitting on the same bench and not separated by thousands of miles.”
Other projects included carpeting a bridge: when walking over the bridge sensors are triggered which create various soundscapes such as crunching snow, or dry leaves. Shoeben talked about it being ironic that Greyworld’s most recognised work to date was the least accessible by the general public: The Source, an installation at the London Stock Exchange…
“The Source is formed from a grid of cables arranged in a square, 162 cables in all, reaching eight stories to the glass roof. Nine spheres are mounted on each cable and are free to move independently up and down its length. In essence the spheres act like animated pixels, able to model any shape in three dimensions a fluid, dynamic, three dimensional television. Visitors to the atrium are greeted by this motion: its particles rising and falling, generating an infinite range of figurative and abstract shapes that rise, dissolve and reform at different heights in the atrium. The shape of the sun rising on a new day of trade, the names and positions of currently traded stocks, the DNA helix at the centre of life formed by the work, and floating in the 32m void of the atrium. This complex and sophisticated installation is a microcosm of activity, a living reflection of market forces.”
He went on to joke it exists for the public in the televised world. It can be glimpsed most mornings on news features and seen on the internet. This is interesting territory: a notion of public space within broadcast systems, non-physical public space, what is the potential for public art which only exists in transmitted mediarized, representational space?
I find this work exciting for its treatment of the stock-market as a ‘real-time system’ much the same way the likes of Hans Haacke did so in the late 60s. This spotlight on the stock market is a particularly relevant one in the current economic climate, works which try and depict such data in a visual way is especially illuminating and necessary at this time.
Shoeben’s repeated insistence that the work should communicate itself without extraneous contextualization in the form of a press release or wall panel, definitely alters the dialogue between audience and artwork. He really valued the immediacy of contact between the two. To achieve this it appears the works need a level of directness which operates in a very similar way to a lot of advertising campaigns which continually seek ways of ‘grabbing your attention’, is there a danger of work which uses the same strategies designed to sell you something? Desptie the twist being nothing is bought? That you can be given something, all be it an experience without having to hand over cash, or sign up to something… that isn’t a marketing plug for a personal commodity, unfortunately, is an ever-decreasing occurrence in our public spaces.
After the introductory talks the audience of about 60 were separated into three groups in three separate spaces. Each group included one of the invited talkers. These discussions were designed to encourage a more intimate dialogue about the themes which had emerged. The artist/producer with each group chaired and orchestrated the discussion. Questions judged particularly relevant were noted and shared with everyone in the last ten minutes - when the three groups reassembled. Two points that especially struck me were 1) the politics of access to the technology: the highly technical projects that Blast Theory and Under Scan engage with demand huge financial resources and specialist equipment, how do the artists avoid replicating the dynamic of the privileged few with high access (like military, secret services, big business and police) making subjects of those without this access? do the audience ever become more than glorified end-users? 2) Do artists using such state-of-the-art technologies presume with too much certainty the continuous presence of hi-tech systems in their work? could we not be facing a future where we are reduced to very little, can technology prepare us for its own potential absence?
When the group had re-assembled there was talk about the primacy of the technology, with general consensus among the panel that the application of technology was not an end-point in itself, in various ways they claimed to avoid showcasing in the work itself, this led to the compeer wrapping up with what was for me, perhaps the most revelatory statement of the evening: “Technology is most visible when it fails.”
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer:
Lozano-Hemmer spoke articulately about a range of ideas and influences. Notably a forthcoming project in November in Trafalgar square called, Under Scan… “a large-scale video art installation for public space. In the piece, passers-by are detected by a computer tracking system that activates video-portraits projected within their shadow on the ground. The piece is intended as a public takeover of their city, linking high technology with strategies of self-representation, connective engagement and urban entitlement. Over one thousand video portraits were shot in Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Northampton and Nottingham by a team of local film-makers. Participants were free to represent themselves in the video portraits in whatever way they desired and a wide range of emotions and attitudes were recorded.” (Under Scan website). The projected image is scaled to fit the outline of your shadow. The projectors are extraordinarily powerful among the strongest in the world, 10 000 lumens. He spoke excitedly of one’s own shadow becoming a mobile interface, something we intuitively have learnt how to deal with and manipulate. Every seven minutes, in what he called a 'Brechtian moment', the intricate Orwellian surveillance system reveals itself: luminous green tracking grids are made visible, the scanning systems and spot lights disclose themselves - like red-laser dot gun targets. Observing people’s reaction to his work Lozano-Hammer found himself surprised by ‘what makes people uncomfortable’. In conception he thought this moment of displaying the hidden mechanism would be horrifying - the sudden foregrounding of the technology that increasingly surrounds us - on the contrary, he has discovered the public often like this moment and break into smiles - ’because it looks like a disco’, he says. On the otherhand he finds more were unsettled engaging with the projected portraits. (Filmed in such a way as to stare up at you from the ground.) Such is the number of portraits, and the randomisation of their projection Lozano-Hemmer with an unintentional poetry said: “Participants come back to find themselves, it is very hard to find yourself.”
The artist felt it key that the public activate the work, that the work does not slide into a solely technological spectacle. He sited his work within the Western Classical Painting tradition of portraiture, showing examples of inspirations which included Velasquez’s Las Meninas and work by Van Eyck. The examples portrayed the sitters aware they are being looked at, rather than simply objectified obliviously.
Lorenzo-Hemmer also sited contemporary artists such as Gary Hill (b.1951, “for his earliest video installation, Hole in the Wall (1974), he broke a hole through a wall of the Woodstock Artists' Association, placing on the other side a monitor that replayed his destructive action” (Slought Foundation)). Paul Sermon (b.1966, http://www.paulsermon.org/) and Daniel Conogar (b.1964, Madrid, www.danielcanogar.com). These artists engage with telematic systems, live relay and projection.
He also expressed an interest in exploring the ephemerality of public art. The temporary nature of his installations, the fleeting apparitions of the portraits themselves are means of achieving this. He also referenced ‘the anti-monument’ and in particular the work of Jochen Gerz:
[ “Since the 1960s, forms of monuments were invented that not only explored new types of expression but challenged the very tradition of marking historical events with monuments in order to commemorate the past in the present. Crucial to this development were the works of American and German artists, Edward Kienholz and Jochen Gerz. Kienholz’s ‘anti-monument’, The Portable War Memorial of 1968, comprises a blackboard and chalk with which spectators are invited to record the names and victims of future wars, while Gerz’s much debated ‘counter-monument’ of the 1980s and 1990s is based on the principle that monuments which renounce symbolism draw spectators into an active questioning of their relation to the past and its representations. The inscription on the plaque marking the site of Gerz‘s invisible ‘Monument against Fascism’ in Harburg near Hamburg reads, "For nothing can with duration rise against fascism in our place"
Peter Carrier, Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989]
Despite his positive and utopian rhetoric my unease about Under Scan and other works that employ or re-work surveillance technology was not dispelled. In making such technologies ‘fun’ and ‘playful’ it is often argued they have been ‘hijacked’ in the name of progressive socially engaged interactivity, as opposed to being utilized as policing aides. On the other hand I fear such works can unwittingly become PR-exercises for a surveillance state, accustomizing us to their presence, to the point we lose all critically of them or attach undeservedly positive connotations to mention and thought of surveillance systems. John McGrath, the former artistic director of Contact Theatre and now inaugural artistic director of the National Theatre of Wales, author of "Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space" , talked earlier this year at the LIFT festival in Stratford, during which he called for a more open recognition of an innate human pleasure from watching and surveying, that oft’ forewarned ‘surveillance society’ is already upon us and our emphasis should be engagement, subversion or creative play with these technologies.
Julianne Pierce, spoke about Blast Theory’s recent and ongoing project, Rider Spoke:
“The audience can take part either on their own bike or borrow one supplied by Blast Theory. Following a short introduction and a safety briefing you head out into the streets with a handheld computer (Nokia N800) mounted on the handlebars. You are given a question and invited to look for an appropriate hiding place where you will record your answer. The screen of the device acts primarily as a positioning system, showing where you are and whether there are any hiding places nearby. The interface employs imagery drawn from Mexican votive painting, sailor tattoos and heraldry: swallows flutter across the screen to show available hiding places, prefab houses indicate places where others have hidden. Once you find a hiding place - a spot previously undiscovered by any other player – the device flashes an alert and the question. The question is one of a selection authored by Blast Theory that asks you – alone, in an out of the way spot – to reflect on your life. You then record your answer onto the device. Each hiding place combines two properties: the physical location and the electronic location as reported by the device and, for this reason, position itself is slippery and changeable.”
Julianne played samples of various participants confessions in recording devices, (notably one in which a 40 year old woman, talks of all pervading fear which affects her. “I’m constantly in fear, of what might be fear of what might not, fear of myself”). An interesting idea was put forward that people generally found it easier to interact with machines in a public-performative situation than a person, ‘it’s a lot less intimidating‘, one attendant said, ‘to engage with an answer machine device than to be invited on stage and interact with a human performer‘. I think this is a valuable point to consider and disrupts the binary oppositions that come into discussions around this theme, which will often site technology on one hand and intimacy on the other.
I was more excited by mention of an earlier Blast Theory project with which they achieved their first wave of critical acclaim and mention in the press. It was a project titled Kidnap:
“In 1998 Blast Theory launched a lottery in which the winners had the chance to be kidnapped. Ten finalists around England and Wales were chosen at random and put under surveillance. Two winners were then snatched in broad daylight and taken to a secret location where they were held for 48 hours. The two winners were Debra Burgess, a 27 year old Australian working as a temp and Russell Ward, a 19 year old from Southend working in a 24 hour convenience store. The whole process was broadcast live onto the internet. Online visitors were able to control the video camera inside the safehouse and communicate live with the kidnappers. During the run up to Kidnap, a 45 second video - the Kidnap Blipvert - was shown at cinemas around the UK. The Blipvert carried a freephone number, allowing people to register their interest.” (Blast Theory, website)
I am curious as to how this project would be received now in 2008, when footage of captives held by terrorists is such a mainstay of our tele-visual media. The idea of 'lottery winners' and the project’s initial advertisement in cinemas, switches an extreme, aggressive, torturous, (often politicised) act , into an artwork and perverse leisure activity - both for the hostage and those who become part of the project online through the manipulation of cameras tracking the hostages. How many of the negative aspects of kidnapping remain in the game version of it? Is kidnapping trivialised? and is their anything necessarily wrong with such trivialisation?). Have the primary connotations of ‘kidnapping’ itself shifted in the last decade in this country? In 1998 I suspect kidnapping would have evoked more personal acts of abuse: a lone dysfunctional sadist, a desperate individual trying to raise money, cinematically depicted as ploy in the criminal underworld, an act that takes place within our cities , or at least a domestic place - now one is more likely to think of aid workers, or soldiers in Iraq, frenzied political rants, recitations of religious commentary - we possibly think of kidnapping as an act by ‘a community of the other’ visited upon someone we recognize - a social event and political act. In that respect Blast Theory can be said to have been curiously prescient about the mediarization of anti-social activity and the complicity of the voyeurs.
Andrew Shoeben, the director of Greyworld, talked of his primary audience being the passer-by and how this affected how he presented his work. His challenge becomes getting people’s attention in an instant, this is not an audience who have come to see the work, but who in the act of passing through the space, activate it and on discovery imay then spend time with it. He saw many of his projects as antidotal to the reduction of public space to nothing more than traffic lanes, from which to get to and from work - or shop. A notable work simply titled 'Railings', involved the tuning of the bars which made up a stretch of railing: running a stick along the railings created a melody. Shoeben felt this was especially representative of what he strived to achieve because a cyclist could still chain their bike to the railing a though it was a purely functional object. Equally exciting was a work called World Bench: “Each installation is situated in a school and consists of a bench placed next to a wall onto which is projected the mirror image of the bench. However, whilst one side of the bench may be in the grey playground of a primary school in Newcastle the other is in the sun-baked play - ground of a school in Cape Town. The people sitting on the bench can have an idle conversation, discussing their lunch or perhaps indulging in a little light flirtation, which they would have were they sitting on the same bench and not separated by thousands of miles.”
Other projects included carpeting a bridge: when walking over the bridge sensors are triggered which create various soundscapes such as crunching snow, or dry leaves. Shoeben talked about it being ironic that Greyworld’s most recognised work to date was the least accessible by the general public: The Source, an installation at the London Stock Exchange…
“The Source is formed from a grid of cables arranged in a square, 162 cables in all, reaching eight stories to the glass roof. Nine spheres are mounted on each cable and are free to move independently up and down its length. In essence the spheres act like animated pixels, able to model any shape in three dimensions a fluid, dynamic, three dimensional television. Visitors to the atrium are greeted by this motion: its particles rising and falling, generating an infinite range of figurative and abstract shapes that rise, dissolve and reform at different heights in the atrium. The shape of the sun rising on a new day of trade, the names and positions of currently traded stocks, the DNA helix at the centre of life formed by the work, and floating in the 32m void of the atrium. This complex and sophisticated installation is a microcosm of activity, a living reflection of market forces.”
He went on to joke it exists for the public in the televised world. It can be glimpsed most mornings on news features and seen on the internet. This is interesting territory: a notion of public space within broadcast systems, non-physical public space, what is the potential for public art which only exists in transmitted mediarized, representational space?
I find this work exciting for its treatment of the stock-market as a ‘real-time system’ much the same way the likes of Hans Haacke did so in the late 60s. This spotlight on the stock market is a particularly relevant one in the current economic climate, works which try and depict such data in a visual way is especially illuminating and necessary at this time.
Shoeben’s repeated insistence that the work should communicate itself without extraneous contextualization in the form of a press release or wall panel, definitely alters the dialogue between audience and artwork. He really valued the immediacy of contact between the two. To achieve this it appears the works need a level of directness which operates in a very similar way to a lot of advertising campaigns which continually seek ways of ‘grabbing your attention’, is there a danger of work which uses the same strategies designed to sell you something? Desptie the twist being nothing is bought? That you can be given something, all be it an experience without having to hand over cash, or sign up to something… that isn’t a marketing plug for a personal commodity, unfortunately, is an ever-decreasing occurrence in our public spaces.
After the introductory talks the audience of about 60 were separated into three groups in three separate spaces. Each group included one of the invited talkers. These discussions were designed to encourage a more intimate dialogue about the themes which had emerged. The artist/producer with each group chaired and orchestrated the discussion. Questions judged particularly relevant were noted and shared with everyone in the last ten minutes - when the three groups reassembled. Two points that especially struck me were 1) the politics of access to the technology: the highly technical projects that Blast Theory and Under Scan engage with demand huge financial resources and specialist equipment, how do the artists avoid replicating the dynamic of the privileged few with high access (like military, secret services, big business and police) making subjects of those without this access? do the audience ever become more than glorified end-users? 2) Do artists using such state-of-the-art technologies presume with too much certainty the continuous presence of hi-tech systems in their work? could we not be facing a future where we are reduced to very little, can technology prepare us for its own potential absence?
When the group had re-assembled there was talk about the primacy of the technology, with general consensus among the panel that the application of technology was not an end-point in itself, in various ways they claimed to avoid showcasing in the work itself, this led to the compeer wrapping up with what was for me, perhaps the most revelatory statement of the evening: “Technology is most visible when it fails.”
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
That Mitchell and Webb Situation/ Episode 4 /BBC 2 Broadcast on 6th October 2008 1.05am
Episode four of this comedy series featured a short sketch featuring a character called Terry, played by Robert Webb. Terry is seen in close up from the perspective of a TV crew who have taken up residency in his home. The inarticulate character recounts to camera how the crew, i.e. them, just turned up and promised him a mere £75 quid (as an aside he mentions that he still hasn’t received the money yet) and tentatively and passively vents his frustrations. In contrast the measured voice of the director of the crew (heard but not seen) is trying to elicit emotive responses, frequently asking, ‘And how does that make you feel, Terry?’. The voice is reminiscent of Hal’s in 2001, pathologically self-controlled, always seeking to say the right thing to extend the situation at its subject’s expense. To great comic effect, when Terry bemoans the make-up he’s forced to wear, they coolly offer to remove it. In the next cut the consequences of being on TV without make-up are made all too visible, great globules of sweat adorn Terry, his features mercilessly illuminated by the surrounding lights. The viewer is put in the position of scrutinizing him like a show-pig at a country fete; his unease is chilling and cruelly funny. Humour is found in this tension through restraint. While eating food, the controlled voice enquires if he is enjoying his meal, if he’s feeling better now, to which Terry responds saying he’ll be fine, as long the crew don’t block the TV. One can’t help but wander what Terry might be so desperate to see on TV, someone else in an identical scenario to himself?… In fact, Terry goes on to say he doesn’t want to miss an episode of Deep Space Nine (a TV spin off of Star Trek: Next Generation 1993 - 99). As he eats, the boom gently bobs in and out of the frame, a mild irritant putting him off his food. Terry doesn’t know the name for the boom; he is not au fait with the equipment surrounding him and its function. This ongoing interview is in no sense takes place on equal ground (despite ironically being in Terry’s living room). Yet Terry reveals himself to be complicit in its continuance. Terry is clearly uncomfortable and perplexed, put-out but powerless, when he does finally threaten to kick them out, a hand appears within the frame as if from nowhere with a wodge of cash. It Is dangled before Terry’s nose. The money is handed to him, he cautiously ferrets the notes away. His anger abates, but he visibly remains as uncomfortable as before.
Our immediate points of reference might be parodies of the television reality show Big Brother and others of its ilk. It brings to mind the controversy surrounding the contestant Shahbaz Choudhary, who potentially had mental health problems exacerbated by the producers’ strategies, who prioritised spectacular ‘TV moments’ over the participants’ states of mind. Equally, the idea that an uninvited film crew might appear at your doorstep and gradually invade your life has something of the mythic modern horror we see in Pinter’s early work, especially The Birthday Party (in which Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player in his 30s, who lives in a rundown boarding house, run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an English seaside town. Is confronted by two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who arrive purportedly on his birthday and who appear to have come looking for him, turning Stanley's apparently-innocuous birthday party organized by Meg into a nightmare) and Kafka’s The Trial. Both examples like. Mitchell and Webb, draw a bleak, black humour from the confrontation of the weak with the powerful - who gently taunt or confuse as prelude to something more extreme.
The most significant difference between this sketch and the literary antecedents that have been mentioned is how that power is depicted. Both Stanley Webber and Jospeh K. are physically intimidated by men doing the bidding of a system, one the criminal underworld, the other a totalitarian state: power is depicted in the form of latent or potential physical violence. Mitchell and Webb depict power here as the capacity to (mis)represent you, to destroy your ‘media image’. This has become more fearful, and therefore funnier, than death itself.
Our immediate points of reference might be parodies of the television reality show Big Brother and others of its ilk. It brings to mind the controversy surrounding the contestant Shahbaz Choudhary, who potentially had mental health problems exacerbated by the producers’ strategies, who prioritised spectacular ‘TV moments’ over the participants’ states of mind. Equally, the idea that an uninvited film crew might appear at your doorstep and gradually invade your life has something of the mythic modern horror we see in Pinter’s early work, especially The Birthday Party (in which Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player in his 30s, who lives in a rundown boarding house, run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an English seaside town. Is confronted by two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who arrive purportedly on his birthday and who appear to have come looking for him, turning Stanley's apparently-innocuous birthday party organized by Meg into a nightmare) and Kafka’s The Trial. Both examples like. Mitchell and Webb, draw a bleak, black humour from the confrontation of the weak with the powerful - who gently taunt or confuse as prelude to something more extreme.
The most significant difference between this sketch and the literary antecedents that have been mentioned is how that power is depicted. Both Stanley Webber and Jospeh K. are physically intimidated by men doing the bidding of a system, one the criminal underworld, the other a totalitarian state: power is depicted in the form of latent or potential physical violence. Mitchell and Webb depict power here as the capacity to (mis)represent you, to destroy your ‘media image’. This has become more fearful, and therefore funnier, than death itself.
Banks Violette/ Maureen Paley, London / September 2008
Entering the gallery one is struck by the overwhelming sound, a thunderous groan; it is not immediately possible to discern its origin. Pulling back a black curtain on the ground floor of Maureen Paley Gallery (London), one is confronted not only by the source of this sound - but by an image of a galloping horse. The image is projected onto water vapour channelled by a number of vents. This is the source of the sound. The ghostly image of the horse, shimmering like a mirage, continually threatens to disappear despite the constancy of the technical apparatus that ensure its presence. The image is about a third of life size, it hovers in the air. To choose water-vapour as ‘the screen’ on which to project, cannot help to undermine the ’notion of screen’: the surface on which the image appears, destabilizing our casual sense of constancy in the things we see. This is reinforced by the looping of the image, edited in such a way, that it is bluntly noticeable when the galloping sequence ends and restarts. This self-conscious ‘skip’, acts like a Brechtian device drawing our attention to the artifice, which otherwise would lie much closer to Victorian magic stage devices, or David Copperfield technological trickery. So while undeniably spectacular, unlike say fireworks, it is a spectacle aware of its impact, and upsets it. Does this make it less of a spectacle?
In the press release we are told the image itself is sourced from TriStar Pictures opening animation “in which a white horse gallops across a black background and then, like Pegasus, grows wings and flies away”. So in Violette’s cropping we are denied the more phantastical stage of the image, it perpetually runs because it has been denied wings.
The artist, Banks Violette, (Born 1973, New York, USA) in his own words says: “I have used the image of the horse repeatedly, it’s an image that falls into that category of images that are void-exhausted and over-determined and drained of life through overuse. This idea of a void image is a constant throughout my work; the idea of an image seemingly unable to exceed the weight of its own overuse, yet somehow, once in a while, capable of reanimation.”
Along these lines of thought the work can be seen in the tradition of Pop Art’s appropriation of the visual culture of populist entertainment. Like Roy Liechtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’ (1963) the image has not been simply enlarged in scale, the composition has been altered not to mention its re-representation in a different media - that of acrylic and oil. The cultural conations of these media make claim for the work within a lineage of Western Classical art history it might otherwise have been denied. By drawing the horse animation from the cinema to the art gallery, again re-presenting the image in a different media - that of projected video on vapour - a new lineage (or path) is found for the animated clip. This transfusion of imagery offers a cultural gravitas that the works did not have previously. They are endowed with an aura of uniqueness and so become prized. However whereas the disposable comic has been transformed into the much more endurable medium of oil. The horse has been removed from the mechanized constancy of celluloid to a digitised image on ephemeral droplets of water… an ephemeral monumentalisation.
In the press release we are told the image itself is sourced from TriStar Pictures opening animation “in which a white horse gallops across a black background and then, like Pegasus, grows wings and flies away”. So in Violette’s cropping we are denied the more phantastical stage of the image, it perpetually runs because it has been denied wings.
The artist, Banks Violette, (Born 1973, New York, USA) in his own words says: “I have used the image of the horse repeatedly, it’s an image that falls into that category of images that are void-exhausted and over-determined and drained of life through overuse. This idea of a void image is a constant throughout my work; the idea of an image seemingly unable to exceed the weight of its own overuse, yet somehow, once in a while, capable of reanimation.”
Along these lines of thought the work can be seen in the tradition of Pop Art’s appropriation of the visual culture of populist entertainment. Like Roy Liechtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’ (1963) the image has not been simply enlarged in scale, the composition has been altered not to mention its re-representation in a different media - that of acrylic and oil. The cultural conations of these media make claim for the work within a lineage of Western Classical art history it might otherwise have been denied. By drawing the horse animation from the cinema to the art gallery, again re-presenting the image in a different media - that of projected video on vapour - a new lineage (or path) is found for the animated clip. This transfusion of imagery offers a cultural gravitas that the works did not have previously. They are endowed with an aura of uniqueness and so become prized. However whereas the disposable comic has been transformed into the much more endurable medium of oil. The horse has been removed from the mechanized constancy of celluloid to a digitised image on ephemeral droplets of water… an ephemeral monumentalisation.
Tris Vonna-Michell, 11/08/2008, ICA, Nought to Sixty Programme
We were taken into the ICA cinema auditorium in groups of three. It is small cinema space, maybe seating about 150. There is another group of three already in the auditorium. The rest of the seats are empty. On the screen are a series of stills. There is no extraneous information explaining what we are looking, at. Nadine - who is German, recognised the streets of Berlin. More specifically there were shots of the performers from Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire. The shots were black and white, there was no obvious narrative or clear guide as to what connected the images. After a while, the group of three already in the space when we entered, were led out by another doorway different from the one we entered. The film continued. Eventually another group of three came into the space and we were led to the same exit as the previous group of three. This exit turned out to be an entrance. We were now in the cinema’s projection room. Perched on a stool, next to the projector sat Tris Vonna-Michell. The three of us stood opposite. A rapid-gunfire patter began, too fast to comprehend in its entirety; it was peppered with negotiation about how long the encounter itself should last, two, three minutes, three and a half? He brandished an egg timer. His speech was intense and compact, his verbal dexterity became spectacle - a style of delivery often wrestling with the facts. But what are the facts? This is what seemed to elude Vonna-Michell's troubled motor-mouth persona. What was communicated to me was the overwhelming anxiety of not being able to communicate. Within this scenario a projectionist delivering an apologia for the cryptic nature of the film he is projecting, using words to bridge gaps of comprehension, but aware of not fulfilling this aim. It was a powerful effect to draw us from the endpoint of a system, the projected image on a screen in the dark… to its source, the machine and man operating it. In doing so rich connections are made between what we perceive and the origins of those perceptions. The spiel served to prevent a reflective distanced relationship to the experience, which was only allowed in hindsight, having left the space, when we were no longer in an intimate spatial relationship to the artist. There is something quietly terrifying about the notion of a ranting projectionist, trapped in a booth, forever trying to explain something inexplicable, failing and trying again.
(Photograph of Nadine and ML by Benedict Johnson)
Monday, 6 October 2008
Histoire(s) du Cinema, screened at Rio Cinema on 28th September 2008
This is the second time this text was begun, the first time it was lost by some computer malfunction. I have tried to recall it as best I can, but know as I write it is something slightly different. This became the case the moment I began this text with: ‘This is the second time this text was begun, the first time it was lost by some computer malfunction.’ Anyway, the text was (and is) or is (and was) a response to seeing (or even, experiencing or better still, enduring (but not enduring as if to suggest a negative)) Jean Luc Goddard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema. ML and I saw a 315 minute screening with two intervals presented by the Rio Cinema on Kingsland Rd on 28th September. It was on this day the newspapers announced the death of Paul Newman and featured multi-page tributes to him. Tonight, the 29th September, the night I began writing this text, the BBC screened The Color of Money, directed by Martin Scorsese, starring (and in tribute to) Paul Newman, a very young Tom Cruise and Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The film is notable for Paul Newman reprising his role as ‘Fast Eddie’ from the 1961 film The Hustler, based on the book with the same name. This interconnection of the two films released 23 years apart, reveals what movies are, but rarely stress and often hide: a network of relations which extend beyond the duration of the movie itself, encompassing the narratives of their performers’ careers (both previous film roles and those yet to come), the politics of studios and their distributors, the aesthetic not just of the director but her or his production team, the practice of studios buying novels for exclusive rights to their material and the ever shifting role of technology in the aesthetic of the films themselves and so on and so on.
Early on in his ‘Histoire’ Goddard traces the genealogy of American cinema making special mention of one its biggest studio bosses Irving Thalberg, he narrates the various films that Thalberg produced, stressing how different they are from one another (Greed, Ben Hur, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Foolish Wives, The Big Parade, Mutiny on the Bounty) while observing they come from the same source. This is a dispassionate but incisive way of drawing our attention to the connection between films born out of the same stable and financial system, suggesting a tightly orchestrated economic web not superficially apparent in the films themselves. We are left to ask for ourselves what impact this might have on the content of the films - as to what questions they might (not) ask of their society and the context of their manufacture. This strategy becomes a form of institutional critique of cinema itself, the scale of movie production is such that it is intimately involved and complicit with the machinations of big-end business from whose perspective it is a product like any other.
Histoire(s) du Cinema is distributed by Gaumont, a French film production company (and the oldest still running company of its kind in the world). Therefore the distributor and holder of rights to this film is itself a vital part of film history, the market place disseminator of the ‘Histoire(s)’ is also a contributant to that same history and its future, not dissimilar to Goddard himself. These associations serve to emphasize the ‘constructed nature’ of what is casually referred to as ‘history’ and can be identified as one of the film’s ongoing concerns and be read as purposeful.
Gaumont’s animated ident crops up intermittently throughout the presentation of the parts of Historie(s) du Cinema, that of a small boy initiating a celestial arrangement of stars in a midnight blue sky. Not with the intention of being part of the film itself but as an end credit to its various sections. Nonetheless such is the structure of the film, that this animated logo can be read as part of the flux of imagery of which the film is composed. It says something of the film’s free range sourcing and harvesting of other films to make its content that even unintended filmic material can slip into its stream without disturbing its flow.
My recollections of the imagery is indicative of the intertextual strategies at play, this is a tiny fraction of what was included:
Jean-Paul Belmondo driving through the night cigarette in mouth, detail of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve in a state of despair being exiled from the garden of Eden, a photograph of a pensive Marilyn Monroe, a contorted figure in white shirt and dark trousers by Francis Bacon, detail of an ominous Vincent Van Gogh cornfield, Cary Grant in North by Northwest, scenes from Rome Open City, clips from the work of Visconti, Pasolini and Rossellini, a still from The Battleship Potemkin, footage from Marnie, a black and white headshot of Sergei Eisenstein, a head shot of Bert Brecht, Jean Harlow, Brigitte Bardot, footage from Greed, works by Howard Hawks, Un Chien Andalou, Rear Window, Broken Blossoms, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Nanook of the North, detail of a head by Piero della Francesca…
It is not uncommon for the UK broadcasters, Film 4 or BBC to announce a forthcoming series of televised films, with a series of film clips, often with an ending title like ‘The best of cinema this Winter’ or ‘Bringing you the best from the big screen to the small one’… and so on. It is interesting that the parade of images Goddard presents doesn’t create a similarly entrancing reverie. He presents the flurry of images in such a way that they are evocative without being emotive.
The avoidance of trance is achieved by numerous means: the length of the clips is long enough to be recognizable and no more, Goddard disallows us the opportunity to delve into what’s happening in the clip itself, often we are offered a half a physical gesture of a character – the action not allowed to reach completion - before moving on to something else - Goddard is not interested in granting us a readable unit of information, the assembly of clips is the information; we are also continuously wrong footed in unraveling (or searching for) the logic of the sequence of images they are never simple contrasts of content or form, perhaps they are tangential in relationship, nor can we underestimate how much is demanded of us, our personal knowledge of cinema is called upon to find the sense in the editing. There is a moment where a photographic portrait of Thalberg looms large - only to dissolve into the roaring lion of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Thalberg reappears and dissolves again: not only is visual connection made the between the individual as subset of an institution, but it is also an biographical reference of sorts, Thalberg moved from Universal Studios to MGM in 1924. This particular dissolve is formally similar to the many that occur. The heaviness of the dissolve draws attention to its dissolving, it does not happen in a smooth singular direction: the oscillation of the imagery is a manifestation of larger argument: that no image is alone, as no film stands alone, so each image, is constantly invaded by another image, sometimes a fade, other times a contrasting images pulses from behind the image or spreads over it, we have a sense that behind one image is many others, as though all the films ever made were a microscopically thin gauze - each laid over the other, with the potential to elucidate each other, once we allow their simultaneous presence.
The spectre of Brecht hovers over this aesthetic; this can be seen in the refutation of sensory pleasure at the expense of argument, the jarring and varying modes of communication and the typographical games which become an equivalent of the ‘scene titles’ used in Brecht’s self-directed versions of his work. These jarring typographic intrusions, often overlay the image, tattoo it or bump it off the screen altogether. These methods reinforce the flatness of the screen (an equivalent of Brecht forever drawing our attention to our being in the theatre) the use of the titles sees cinema asserting itself as a platform for ideas without being woven into (or disguised by) ‘entertainment’: this is achieved by using the screen like a protester’s placard, the delivery of bold statements in sans serif font and primary school colours. In the jostle of voices and ideas - we are asked to regard the medium like a political rally.
A section of the Histoire(s) du Cinema, sees the date 1944 expand across the screen over the image of a boy, or young man, perhaps Goddard (b.1930, therefore aged 14) himself. At the same bells ring ominously, during which his voiceover begins (translated): “I was alone that night, with my dreams. Fifty years later we celebrate the Liberation. Television, because power has become spectacle, is organizing a huge show. No decoration for Guy Debord. French cinema never shook off the Germans or the Americans…”
[Goddard transposes French political history, its militaristic defeat by Germany and liberation by allied forces, to the narrative of cinema itself, suggesting that although both these parties physically retreated; intellectually French cinema had been colonized.]
He continues: “…Why is it from ‘40 to ‘45 there was no resistance cinema? There were resistance films, left and right, here and there, but the only film, in the true sense, to resist America’s occupation of cinema and uniform way of making films was an Italian film. It is not by chance. Italy fought the least. It suffered greatly but having betrayed twice, it suffered to have lost its identity, it found it again with ‘Rome, Open City’, because the film was made by men without uniform, it was the only time…”
What follows this voiceover is an extended, sumptuous, luxuriant montage sequence of Italian cinema with a stirring musical accomplishment. Here we are enveloped by the devices that had been assiduously avoided to this point. The entire arc of a shot is allowed to run to completion: a hug, the wiping of a tear, a woman stumbling down a street - this is very different from the ‘fragments of fragments’ approach to source material used elsewhere. This change of style is a jolt because by this stage the durational and immersive quality of the film so far had temporarily reversed the normative language of movie editing, the shard and half-clips have become our standard – so that one becomes hyper-aware of the purposely persuasive editing that is so common.
One of the few identifiable categorizations of film Goddard makes is that of nationality… The current dominance of American cinema, the absence of German cinema post war, the emphasis of martyrdom in Russian cinema in the early 50s and his salutation and celebration of Italian film, all point to a discussion of film that follows the modes of 19th and early 20th century thinking about painting and literature: identifying the ‘schools’ and recurring motifs of different countries’ traditions. This categorization complements Goddard’s comment in an interview, when he disagrees with the simplicity of the statement ‘cinema is a 20th century artform’, he corrects saying, ‘no, cinema is a 19th century artform that came to life in the 20th century’.
The instance of this exchange between Goddard and interviewer looks like something done for radio which was also filmed. The insertion of footage portraying Goddard offsets any stylistic depersonalization of other passages in the work. At the core of the film is Goddard himself - even if this presence is not necessarily direct and instantly readable - he takes many guises: we meet him sat at his desk, cigarette extending from mouth, tapping at a typewriter as though in the process of scripting the ‘history’ we watch, it chimes with the image of the detective-writer (so beloved of American film noir) making his notes for the case, casting himself as a private eye of sorts, which suggest he is uncovering something hidden or not immediately on the surface - he is not a police officer - so he becomes the unofficial bringer of truth, it reminds and reinforces that history is a constructed affair, not an organic unrolling of one thing after the other. Another guise of Goddard’s is his voice without image, his voice as signature, it wafts in and out of the film over the hours, alternately, bitter, accusatory, professorial, laconic - another thread on which the footage can hang. However other voices are often heard, passages of Hitchcock theorizing, a recurrent woman’s voice - I can’t identify, questions from others, much of it multi-lingual. This polyphonic assemblage destabilizes the singularity of Goddard’s presence without completely refuting him. The sound of Goddard at the typewriter becomes a soundtrack of sorts, the hammering of keys becomes a kind of percussive music, or military tattoo - in the process underscoring that all the choices of clips are Goddard’s: this is his journey. The diaristic elements of the work complicate any reduction of the film to polemical essay; it is as much poem as call to arms.
The dense interiority of the film is its most consistent feature, we are given no help in unpicking the logic behind the sequence of film clips, if indeed there is one… it is like an old fashion swimming lesson, you’re just chucked in the water and it is hoped that in your thrashing you might swim. As Chris Marker puts it, some filmmakers deliver sermons, but "the greats leave us with our freedom." Strangely the interiority is born not out of self-referentialism but by looking beyond its own borders, so much so it could be described as a film without borders with out a limit, its chains of associations extending multi-directionally. The time the film took to make (part one completed in 1988, the final part in 1998) bespeaks a high seriousness of purpose, a willful desire to communicate on the part of its maker, and yet what we are given is gnomic and cryptic. This is partly the consequence of Goddard’s refusal to relate to us in a popular and recognized mode of the sort we are accustomed to find on adverts and the mainstream cinema. This refusal is one of the foundations of his critique. That is not to suggest we engaged with an unemotional, cerebral exercise; Chris Petit, the filmmaker and critic who introduced the work suggests it has a penitent tone, that Goddard who in his youth was rejective of cinema’s history, now acknowledges that previously undisclosed debt by honoring it. Within the Histoire(s) an interviewer comments that Goddard was fortunately positioned as a chronicler of the art form: coming of age midway through the century, a mid point concurrent with that of cinema itself, uniquely placed like Janus to look forward and back simultaneously. Perhaps Goddard could be considered an incarnation of Benjamin’s Angel of History, through the prism of film’s history… “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” - I suggest this with the anachronistic presentation of his selected images in mind and his identification, diagnosis and articulation of the destruction of a school of cinema (French) while finding himself unable to act against (in this case socio-political) forces larger than himself.
However that’s not to say Goddard takes up a defeatist stance, I’d like to think of Histoire(s) du Cinema as a trailer. It may seem strange to think of a 5hr magnus opus as trailer, but in its assault on the representation of a linear history it becomes propositional as to how we might represent the past. A representation acknowledged as individualistic. Goddard could be said to be arguing there is no such thing as a communal history. The ‘history’ as taught via many a text book in schools, presents a seemingly ‘communal history’: this was experienced by them as a result of that - but like everything else, although others may be present and integral to what happens and how - we process what happens individually, despite it often being usually communicated otherwise. The presentation of history by the eye-witness, i.e. Goddard, is necessarily different from those who were not there. Therefore he becomes ‘the witness who sways’ - who openly recognizes his agenda and position in his recounting of events.
Having lost my first version of the text I am more anxious than I was previously to ‘save’ what I have written at regular intervals. The fear of loss and the urge to preserve, (it is almost too banal to write) go hand in hand. It is significant that Histoire(s) du Cinema, is a film constructed towards the end of Goddard’s life. It bears the hallmarks of the late works of many artists in disciplines ranging beyond film… The straining for the masterwork - that both contains and delimits all previous work, ths summation and networking of the previous films makes the project comparable to Velasquez’s Las Meninas, or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, in its scope and ambition. It is a filmic and literary cliché to depict your life flashing before your eyes at the approach of death but none the less a comparable experience to watching Histoire(s) du Cinema. It can be considered a re-enactment of the Louvre scene in Bande à part, the difference being we the audience replace Odile, Arthur and Franz - and rather than hurtling past paintings it is the corridors of Goddard’s mind we are dragged through, a death wail, a cascading fountain of footage.. the last efforts of firing synapses.
Early on in his ‘Histoire’ Goddard traces the genealogy of American cinema making special mention of one its biggest studio bosses Irving Thalberg, he narrates the various films that Thalberg produced, stressing how different they are from one another (Greed, Ben Hur, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Foolish Wives, The Big Parade, Mutiny on the Bounty) while observing they come from the same source. This is a dispassionate but incisive way of drawing our attention to the connection between films born out of the same stable and financial system, suggesting a tightly orchestrated economic web not superficially apparent in the films themselves. We are left to ask for ourselves what impact this might have on the content of the films - as to what questions they might (not) ask of their society and the context of their manufacture. This strategy becomes a form of institutional critique of cinema itself, the scale of movie production is such that it is intimately involved and complicit with the machinations of big-end business from whose perspective it is a product like any other.
Histoire(s) du Cinema is distributed by Gaumont, a French film production company (and the oldest still running company of its kind in the world). Therefore the distributor and holder of rights to this film is itself a vital part of film history, the market place disseminator of the ‘Histoire(s)’ is also a contributant to that same history and its future, not dissimilar to Goddard himself. These associations serve to emphasize the ‘constructed nature’ of what is casually referred to as ‘history’ and can be identified as one of the film’s ongoing concerns and be read as purposeful.
Gaumont’s animated ident crops up intermittently throughout the presentation of the parts of Historie(s) du Cinema, that of a small boy initiating a celestial arrangement of stars in a midnight blue sky. Not with the intention of being part of the film itself but as an end credit to its various sections. Nonetheless such is the structure of the film, that this animated logo can be read as part of the flux of imagery of which the film is composed. It says something of the film’s free range sourcing and harvesting of other films to make its content that even unintended filmic material can slip into its stream without disturbing its flow.
My recollections of the imagery is indicative of the intertextual strategies at play, this is a tiny fraction of what was included:
Jean-Paul Belmondo driving through the night cigarette in mouth, detail of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve in a state of despair being exiled from the garden of Eden, a photograph of a pensive Marilyn Monroe, a contorted figure in white shirt and dark trousers by Francis Bacon, detail of an ominous Vincent Van Gogh cornfield, Cary Grant in North by Northwest, scenes from Rome Open City, clips from the work of Visconti, Pasolini and Rossellini, a still from The Battleship Potemkin, footage from Marnie, a black and white headshot of Sergei Eisenstein, a head shot of Bert Brecht, Jean Harlow, Brigitte Bardot, footage from Greed, works by Howard Hawks, Un Chien Andalou, Rear Window, Broken Blossoms, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Nanook of the North, detail of a head by Piero della Francesca…
It is not uncommon for the UK broadcasters, Film 4 or BBC to announce a forthcoming series of televised films, with a series of film clips, often with an ending title like ‘The best of cinema this Winter’ or ‘Bringing you the best from the big screen to the small one’… and so on. It is interesting that the parade of images Goddard presents doesn’t create a similarly entrancing reverie. He presents the flurry of images in such a way that they are evocative without being emotive.
The avoidance of trance is achieved by numerous means: the length of the clips is long enough to be recognizable and no more, Goddard disallows us the opportunity to delve into what’s happening in the clip itself, often we are offered a half a physical gesture of a character – the action not allowed to reach completion - before moving on to something else - Goddard is not interested in granting us a readable unit of information, the assembly of clips is the information; we are also continuously wrong footed in unraveling (or searching for) the logic of the sequence of images they are never simple contrasts of content or form, perhaps they are tangential in relationship, nor can we underestimate how much is demanded of us, our personal knowledge of cinema is called upon to find the sense in the editing. There is a moment where a photographic portrait of Thalberg looms large - only to dissolve into the roaring lion of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Thalberg reappears and dissolves again: not only is visual connection made the between the individual as subset of an institution, but it is also an biographical reference of sorts, Thalberg moved from Universal Studios to MGM in 1924. This particular dissolve is formally similar to the many that occur. The heaviness of the dissolve draws attention to its dissolving, it does not happen in a smooth singular direction: the oscillation of the imagery is a manifestation of larger argument: that no image is alone, as no film stands alone, so each image, is constantly invaded by another image, sometimes a fade, other times a contrasting images pulses from behind the image or spreads over it, we have a sense that behind one image is many others, as though all the films ever made were a microscopically thin gauze - each laid over the other, with the potential to elucidate each other, once we allow their simultaneous presence.
The spectre of Brecht hovers over this aesthetic; this can be seen in the refutation of sensory pleasure at the expense of argument, the jarring and varying modes of communication and the typographical games which become an equivalent of the ‘scene titles’ used in Brecht’s self-directed versions of his work. These jarring typographic intrusions, often overlay the image, tattoo it or bump it off the screen altogether. These methods reinforce the flatness of the screen (an equivalent of Brecht forever drawing our attention to our being in the theatre) the use of the titles sees cinema asserting itself as a platform for ideas without being woven into (or disguised by) ‘entertainment’: this is achieved by using the screen like a protester’s placard, the delivery of bold statements in sans serif font and primary school colours. In the jostle of voices and ideas - we are asked to regard the medium like a political rally.
A section of the Histoire(s) du Cinema, sees the date 1944 expand across the screen over the image of a boy, or young man, perhaps Goddard (b.1930, therefore aged 14) himself. At the same bells ring ominously, during which his voiceover begins (translated): “I was alone that night, with my dreams. Fifty years later we celebrate the Liberation. Television, because power has become spectacle, is organizing a huge show. No decoration for Guy Debord. French cinema never shook off the Germans or the Americans…”
[Goddard transposes French political history, its militaristic defeat by Germany and liberation by allied forces, to the narrative of cinema itself, suggesting that although both these parties physically retreated; intellectually French cinema had been colonized.]
He continues: “…Why is it from ‘40 to ‘45 there was no resistance cinema? There were resistance films, left and right, here and there, but the only film, in the true sense, to resist America’s occupation of cinema and uniform way of making films was an Italian film. It is not by chance. Italy fought the least. It suffered greatly but having betrayed twice, it suffered to have lost its identity, it found it again with ‘Rome, Open City’, because the film was made by men without uniform, it was the only time…”
What follows this voiceover is an extended, sumptuous, luxuriant montage sequence of Italian cinema with a stirring musical accomplishment. Here we are enveloped by the devices that had been assiduously avoided to this point. The entire arc of a shot is allowed to run to completion: a hug, the wiping of a tear, a woman stumbling down a street - this is very different from the ‘fragments of fragments’ approach to source material used elsewhere. This change of style is a jolt because by this stage the durational and immersive quality of the film so far had temporarily reversed the normative language of movie editing, the shard and half-clips have become our standard – so that one becomes hyper-aware of the purposely persuasive editing that is so common.
One of the few identifiable categorizations of film Goddard makes is that of nationality… The current dominance of American cinema, the absence of German cinema post war, the emphasis of martyrdom in Russian cinema in the early 50s and his salutation and celebration of Italian film, all point to a discussion of film that follows the modes of 19th and early 20th century thinking about painting and literature: identifying the ‘schools’ and recurring motifs of different countries’ traditions. This categorization complements Goddard’s comment in an interview, when he disagrees with the simplicity of the statement ‘cinema is a 20th century artform’, he corrects saying, ‘no, cinema is a 19th century artform that came to life in the 20th century’.
The instance of this exchange between Goddard and interviewer looks like something done for radio which was also filmed. The insertion of footage portraying Goddard offsets any stylistic depersonalization of other passages in the work. At the core of the film is Goddard himself - even if this presence is not necessarily direct and instantly readable - he takes many guises: we meet him sat at his desk, cigarette extending from mouth, tapping at a typewriter as though in the process of scripting the ‘history’ we watch, it chimes with the image of the detective-writer (so beloved of American film noir) making his notes for the case, casting himself as a private eye of sorts, which suggest he is uncovering something hidden or not immediately on the surface - he is not a police officer - so he becomes the unofficial bringer of truth, it reminds and reinforces that history is a constructed affair, not an organic unrolling of one thing after the other. Another guise of Goddard’s is his voice without image, his voice as signature, it wafts in and out of the film over the hours, alternately, bitter, accusatory, professorial, laconic - another thread on which the footage can hang. However other voices are often heard, passages of Hitchcock theorizing, a recurrent woman’s voice - I can’t identify, questions from others, much of it multi-lingual. This polyphonic assemblage destabilizes the singularity of Goddard’s presence without completely refuting him. The sound of Goddard at the typewriter becomes a soundtrack of sorts, the hammering of keys becomes a kind of percussive music, or military tattoo - in the process underscoring that all the choices of clips are Goddard’s: this is his journey. The diaristic elements of the work complicate any reduction of the film to polemical essay; it is as much poem as call to arms.
The dense interiority of the film is its most consistent feature, we are given no help in unpicking the logic behind the sequence of film clips, if indeed there is one… it is like an old fashion swimming lesson, you’re just chucked in the water and it is hoped that in your thrashing you might swim. As Chris Marker puts it, some filmmakers deliver sermons, but "the greats leave us with our freedom." Strangely the interiority is born not out of self-referentialism but by looking beyond its own borders, so much so it could be described as a film without borders with out a limit, its chains of associations extending multi-directionally. The time the film took to make (part one completed in 1988, the final part in 1998) bespeaks a high seriousness of purpose, a willful desire to communicate on the part of its maker, and yet what we are given is gnomic and cryptic. This is partly the consequence of Goddard’s refusal to relate to us in a popular and recognized mode of the sort we are accustomed to find on adverts and the mainstream cinema. This refusal is one of the foundations of his critique. That is not to suggest we engaged with an unemotional, cerebral exercise; Chris Petit, the filmmaker and critic who introduced the work suggests it has a penitent tone, that Goddard who in his youth was rejective of cinema’s history, now acknowledges that previously undisclosed debt by honoring it. Within the Histoire(s) an interviewer comments that Goddard was fortunately positioned as a chronicler of the art form: coming of age midway through the century, a mid point concurrent with that of cinema itself, uniquely placed like Janus to look forward and back simultaneously. Perhaps Goddard could be considered an incarnation of Benjamin’s Angel of History, through the prism of film’s history… “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” - I suggest this with the anachronistic presentation of his selected images in mind and his identification, diagnosis and articulation of the destruction of a school of cinema (French) while finding himself unable to act against (in this case socio-political) forces larger than himself.
However that’s not to say Goddard takes up a defeatist stance, I’d like to think of Histoire(s) du Cinema as a trailer. It may seem strange to think of a 5hr magnus opus as trailer, but in its assault on the representation of a linear history it becomes propositional as to how we might represent the past. A representation acknowledged as individualistic. Goddard could be said to be arguing there is no such thing as a communal history. The ‘history’ as taught via many a text book in schools, presents a seemingly ‘communal history’: this was experienced by them as a result of that - but like everything else, although others may be present and integral to what happens and how - we process what happens individually, despite it often being usually communicated otherwise. The presentation of history by the eye-witness, i.e. Goddard, is necessarily different from those who were not there. Therefore he becomes ‘the witness who sways’ - who openly recognizes his agenda and position in his recounting of events.
Having lost my first version of the text I am more anxious than I was previously to ‘save’ what I have written at regular intervals. The fear of loss and the urge to preserve, (it is almost too banal to write) go hand in hand. It is significant that Histoire(s) du Cinema, is a film constructed towards the end of Goddard’s life. It bears the hallmarks of the late works of many artists in disciplines ranging beyond film… The straining for the masterwork - that both contains and delimits all previous work, ths summation and networking of the previous films makes the project comparable to Velasquez’s Las Meninas, or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, in its scope and ambition. It is a filmic and literary cliché to depict your life flashing before your eyes at the approach of death but none the less a comparable experience to watching Histoire(s) du Cinema. It can be considered a re-enactment of the Louvre scene in Bande à part, the difference being we the audience replace Odile, Arthur and Franz - and rather than hurtling past paintings it is the corridors of Goddard’s mind we are dragged through, a death wail, a cascading fountain of footage.. the last efforts of firing synapses.
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