This project revolves around seven films: Beau Travaille, The Red Desert, Where the
green ants live, Still life, Memento, The Turin horse and High life.
The
photographs are made up of multiple perspectives of place and also contain
partial lines from the actual films referenced above or, as in the case of
Hertzog's film, a short text extract from an article commenting the film and
referring to its production and the difficulties raised by it.
The
images of the series will be arranged on the walls in a small room. Dust will be placed
on the floor in front of each image in one color for each: white, dark pink,
green, red, blue, white again and black. The resulting shapes around the images
will occupy a large enough area of the room so that the visitors will leave
their traces and mix the colors with their steps. There by entropy comes in the
picture as well.
Most of
the photographs used are shot in Romania (a chemical plant, a mining site, a
waste disposal site and other formal industrial sites and natural environment).
The first one in the series is from a flight over Siberia. The photo-montage
produced interrogates the imagining of communities as seen at various times in
history and the accompanying production of common values and goals for its
members but also the difficulties of reconciling these different ideals,
temporalities and places in our present time.
There are common themes that run through
these films: the desert is one association, space, communities and energy
production are others. They also talk about modernization and the tensions it
generates, history, values, heroic narratives, degradation of the environment
and human society more generally with different approaches taken to represent
all these.
‘The Red Desert’ discusses the societal
transitions in Italy in the 60's considering issues of industrialization and
the future of modern man as well as questions of adaptation to changes in
ambivalent terms. The image is of an abandoned chemical plant in Romania, one
of the many such legacies we have of the forced industrialization under the
communist regime. Although the wasteland was privatized the new owners failed
to clean up the toxic residues at the time the pictures were taken.
‘High life’, the last film from the series
is focused on the project of extracting energy for reproduction. The film
executes the project on two tracks, through the government mission to the black
hole and through Dr Dibs’s obsession.
Ostensibly, the purpose of both these
extractions is the maintenance and reproduction of human life, either back on
Earth, or there, on the ship. The film creates an atmosphere of absolute
indifference to human life. In the case of Dibs, her project is not for the
sake of human beings, it is, as she says, an “obsession”, a drive, a compulsion
without any proper stopping point. The state’s objectives remain opaque: all we
know is that we are in a space race for precious resources to no end.
There are two machines of extraction, and the human beings – disposable from Earth’s perspectives – are neither overseers nor laborers; they are components, bits of the mechanism.
The crew members sleep, eat, exercise on
command, while the spaceship barrels toward near certain destruction. The
actors deliver their lines as if spontaneous thought and feeling were wholly
unfamiliar, all inner life lost. The only exception is Tcherny and he comments
on the action and on the film itself. Not fully absorbed into the filmic world
allows him this dimension of humanity. But for the rest of the characters,
locked within the strictures of this mission, there is no space for psychology
or relationships, agency or hope.
Lifelessness, drift, function as the organizing theme: obsessive extraction and reproduction, driven to the point where human life is made to serve the needs of the mechanism, rather than the other way around.
Outer space is isolating and disorienting
and so the human characters in space movies become exemplary, a vision of us, of what we are or could be.
High Life is a movie about prisoner workers, the West’s last men and it explores what the crew knows all along: that their life is irrelevant and they will almost certainly die. That their bodies are used, invaded and plumbed for the government’s own ends. There is no scandal of discovery. If there is no alternative there can be no posture of opposition, no hope of escape.
There is only an elaborate grinding machine
that must deal with the occasional spasms of dysfunction, of bodies momentarily
exploding in resistance before being subdued, wrapped up, and expelled.
The violence explodes within a zone of indifference with nothing holding it down, nothing knitting it into a proper, hence comfortable narrative place. It is, on the other hand, absolutely predictable. Such crises are internal to this kind of system.
The cinema is also a reproductive machine.
An apparatus that harvests the sights and sounds of the pre-existing, sensorial
worlds, dissembles and rearranges them. It then projects these images out of
itself and onto a screen. The images in turn live on in us, becoming part of
who we are, and something we share with others. We are the “conscious organs”
in an elaborate system of transitions and exchanges between life and machine:
world to cinema, cinema to subject, and subject back out to the world.
The short presentation of ‘High Life’ above consists of fragments from the article Francey Russell wrote on the subject.
The quotes from the films are added to another important component of the project which is the actual existing landscapes.
Although there is diversity depending on where
one is situated when speaking about landscape there are some general patterns
concerning the popular conceptions of designed (and not-designed) landscape. Those patterns
reflect sets of values that are at times in conflict, but refer in general to
the common narrative of the USA as an immigrant nation (landscape as a
presumably virgin land that needs to be conquered) and are thus distinctively
different from the European cultural heritage – where landscape is most commonly
read as a homeland inherited from the ancestors, demanding stewardship.
Once
the industry was restructured by powerful economic forces, it was also possible
to see industry not as the destroyer of landscape, but as a harmonious part of
it. The idealization of industry is now a common phenomenon, as it is visible
in Germany for instance, with the transformation of these former industrial
areas into ‘cultural landscape for the future’.
Structurally,
however, it appears that the cultural interpretation of post-industrial sites
is primarily linked to a heritage formed by aspects that shaped also the
traditional cultural landscape – idealization of human activity in response to
natural resources, a celebration of evolved systems of ‘land and people’.
The American
discussion is less focused on the cultural meaning of these sites, but more on
their
potential
economic use and the engineering challenges that come with them.
American
cultural interpretation of landscape regards it as a resource for industrial
society and not as an idealized counterweight to it.
This project is an inquiry into the tension
between utopian or abstract ideals and their materialization into life both in
the Eastern and Western Europe but also other parts of the world, with their
differences and similarities. Although the developed economies conjure up the
dematerialization of transactions and industry is moving in other areas of the
world that are maybe less visible it is still part of the global present.
I am also adding passages from Thomas Elsaesser’s book “European Cinema Face to Face With Hollywood” that refer to the mind game films such as ‘Memento’ but also some general considerations about cinema and contemporary phenomena.
The
second part of this reading material is
a discussion on industrial landscapes and the biosphere as Saskia Sassen
presents it in a chapter named “Dead
Land, Dead Water” from her book.
Following
Saskia, I do not believe that the aspects discussed in these texts describe a
complete picture of reality but I do think they highlight important trends
about our present time that can be no longer ignored.
For a discussion of some of the other films
the viewer can search though some of the articles/videos referenced at the end
of this presentation.
passages from thomas elsaesser
passages from thomas elsaesser
References
Thomas Elsaesser – “European Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood”
Thomas Elsaesser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa49U6RRUa4
"Whose Dreaming? Intercultural appropriation, representations of
Aboriginality, and the process of film-making in Werner Herzog’s Where
the Green Ants Dream (1983)" Dr Andrew W. Hurley
Saskia Sassen-“Expulsions Brutality and Complexity in the Global
Economy”
