A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight

Introduction

A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight is a project drawing on a number of sources, from modernist literature to mainstream film. It employs different media ranging from computer animation to script and performance, and explores contemporary forms of visual and narrative architectures related to mass media. Situated at the center of the work is the 1978 film Eyes of Laura Mars (D: Irving Kershner). By making use of architectural rendering software, spatial sequences of this 1970s thriller have been digitally recreated. Through a process of spatial “editing,” these are arranged into a new architectural sequence accompanied by a female voice-over.

The title quotes a poem by James Joyce, which refers to the cinematographic apparatus as a fantasmatic projection screen for modernist fantasies. The poem itself suggests the notions of “actor” and “character” as absent figures and remainders. Here, cinema is represented as a system of mirrors reflecting each other. “Film was frequently on Joyce’s mind, and especially so in 1917, when ‘A Memory... ‘ was composed.”   The poem tells of characters and images which have long since become figures and signs in collective subconsciousness: “screen memories,” leading towards Freud’s concept of “Deckerinnerung” (“screen memory”). A screen memory is understood to be a fiction produced by the unconscious in order to cover up real memories of traumatic origin. Freud mentions the concept of “screen memory” for the first time in an analysis of an own dream. Interestingly, his description emphasizes the fact that the relevant scene always appeared to him in “glaring Technicolor.”

In Eyes of Laura Mars, Faye Dunaway’s character is Laura Mars, a fashion photographer known for her violent explicit sexual photographs (which for the occasion of this film production were taken by Helmut Newton). Mars becomes haunted with visions of murders she witnesses from the eyes of a mysterious killer. She soon realizes the homicides of her vicarious visions are in fact occurring quite near her in New York City. The scenes become obsessive and closer to home, until the film culminates with her projecting her own fate. Thus, Laura Mars transforms from professional voyeur into a medium forced to watch events in real-time that happen elsewhere. Her subjective perspective is identical with the murderer’s view on the actual crime site, thus her gaze is replaced with the gaze of a stranger. Later on, the images she sees become blue prints and templates to be translated into staged scenes for her own work as photographer.

A computer animation joins the spaces and sets from Laura Mars’ real-time hallucinations in the form of digital architectures into a new sequence of virtual spaces. Thus, a “spatial narrative” is created, its plot points anchored in an architectural sequence, its textual dimensions stretching past the original plot. A camera leads through those spaces, accompanied by a voice-over of an invisible female narrator – possibly a multiple character who tells her “story.” This character is made up of a set of “screen memories” of a number of female movie characters: although it is always Laura who speaks, some memories belong to Rachael from Blade Runner, some lines to Nana from Vivre sa vie, some perceptions to Giuliana from Il Deserto Rosso, or to Alma from Persona. These characters, scripted by their authors / directors as “women as symptoms” are released from the original script in order to begin narrating a different story through their own voices.

Cinema here is understood as system rather than as projection apparatus for a larger-than-life-nostalgia for films. Located outside of cinema as modernist paradigm, but still inside of cinematographic discourses, “A Memory…” suggests a continuing narrative of fictitious as well as actual spaces. It attempts to frame a system for rendering and mapping gazes, architectures and texts. The work focuses on the transformation of “gaze” through different media formats in relation to the spectator and the seemingly “objective” perspective of the camera. The story’s development is shifted to architectural sequences. Architecture and narrative become stage sets for the unfolding of that which cannot be told.

SCRIPT Voice Over / A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight (Constanze Ruhm 2001)

A Memory of the Players / MASS MOCA Version 2002

(Exhibition Catalogue Text)

This elaborate twofold installation consists of a system of wall drawings, digital photographs, blueprints, video and text, and explores contemporary forms of visual and narrative architectures related to mass media. Situated at the center of the work is the 1978 film Eyes of Laura Mars (directed by Irvin Kershner, script by John Carpenter). Using architectural rendering software, Ruhm has re-created some spaces from this 1970s thriller. Through a process of spatial ”editing”, these spaces were rearranged into a new architectural sequence, a ”spatial narrative”.

THE FILM

In Eyes of Laura Mars, Faye Dunaway’s character is Laura Mars, a fashion photographer known for her violent explicit sexual photographs (which for the occasion of this film production, were taken by Helmut Newton). Mars becomes haunted with visions of murders she witnesses from the eyes of a mysterious killer. She soon realizes the homicides of her vicarious visions are in fact occurring quite near her in New York City. Her visions become obsessive and closer to home, until the film culminates with her envisioning her own fate.

THE COLUMN

For the MASS MoCA version of the installation, the artist has developed two distinct areas, each focusing on a different aspect, but both centered around one of the dominant architectural features of MASS MoCA’s architecture: the column. These columns are not only support structures, but display historical strata as well. Since the original colors are still visible, layers of paints on top of each other date far back in time, therefore the columns also provide a visual representation of the architectural history of the built environment. Both installations are arranged ”around” the notion of the column: one in a more literal manner, the other as conceptual translation. One space displays the column at its very center, whereas the second area deals with the process of conceptually unraveling and ”unwinding” the column’s structure and shape in order to transform it into a sign system, into a structural code . As columns represent support structures, they can be interpreted as metaphors for belief systems as well. This version of A Memory … is concerned with the process of ”unraveling the support” of a specific contemporary visual and discoursive production in order to create a dialogue between characters, and a negotiation of communication processes.

THE TWO AREAS

The installation thus displays two distinct typologies of space and architecture, which are remote from one another, and cannot be perceived at the same time. One area focuses on reading, relating and mapping the subject matter which is the underlying construction of visual and discursive production of media architectures, while the other one is concerned more with the experience of subjective perspective and character.

In the first section, Ruhm has constructed a sign system that structures and creates information, combining various media from magazine articles to video to architectural blueprints all of which investigate forms of visual and narrative production as read through the framework of The Eyes of Laura Mars.

The brown color field on the wall’s lower section correlates to the old paint on the lower half of the original column (that is located in the installation’s second area). The lighter color field on top maps precisely the second half of the column starting at a height of 150 cm, amounting to a total height of 315 cm. The green color represents the ”oldest” layer of paint peeling from the post: that is the section where the display table is located, an emanation from the past, coated with the same green as the wall and the column. The blueprint renders a drawing consisting of the various sets, or narratives, that Ruhm has pieced together from the film. A monitor hovering over the desk shows a digitally recreated journey, a ride through this virtual architectural space. Using a range of contemporary media, Ruhm is able to both investigate her subject as well as to highlight the structural elements in each media (whether this is space or narrative).

The second section of the installation is literally evolving around the actual column, thus establishing a direct relationship between the architectural drawings and stills, the existing architecture of MASS MoCA. and the viewer as subjective center as well. Through this strategy, this area investigates the supporting structures of film and architecture.

The large format C-prints on the walls represent architectural sets in the film, frames opening up on the institutional walls,  while the ink drawings suggest something left out, untold, or unfinished that ”bleeds” or ”leaks” into the real world of the actual space. At the same time, they conjure up the subjective notion of an artist’s traditional ”gesture”: the hand drawn line.  

Ruhm has removed what is generally considered to be the essential elements of a film including the narrative and characters, leaving only traces of an architecture that transform the notion of narrative into a different tale. She is interested in how contemporary media (mainstream film, in this case) influence our everyday understandings of actuality, of the ”real”.

Eyes of Laura Mars, as early and quite mannerist Seventie’s trope, became Ruhm’s subject because of its emphasis on architecture and its obvious relationship to vision. Since Laura Mars is a photographer who has trouble deciding whether or not her visions are inspiring her photographs or her photographs are inspiring her visions, the same could be assumed for the conceptual production of this installation and its relation to contemporary media. This confusion in causality is therefore linked closely to Ruhm’s own approach. By emptying the film of its narrative structure and by digitally recreating its sets and spaces, Ruhm investigates the background elements, the support structures.  Ruhm focuses on the areas the dominant modes of representation are basically trying to cover up and to naturalize. How does film create memory? How does a film pan or a focus change produce emotion? Like Laura Mars, we witness the encroachment of the world of contemporary media onto our own.