Coming Attraction: Between Synopsis and Trailer

Coming Attraction: A Memory Between Synopsis and Trailer

A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight charts the space between synopsis and trailer. It scripts the desires embodied within the format of a trailer arranged versus the analytical logic of a synopsis. The project is shaped by the force of emotions and passions contained in the anatomy of narrative structures. These structures are translated into a different story to express a contemporary moment of articulation and syntax which is constructed through the agency of a film as specific template and framework.

The work evolves around the 1978 production Eyes of Laura Mars, a film that represents a characteristic late-70s trope. Laura Mars is turned into a framework for an investigation on the relation of narrative, architecture and character construction through a technique of re-framing, condensing and processing its materials. It is reengineered into a new script situated between a text and a space, thus becoming a system to speak through, not about. The film's fictitious construction is inserted into a different fiction format (a written narrative, a Voice Over from an Off space, a script). It is not an investigation of the real, but an attempt to explore the imaginary embedded in mainstream modes of narrative production, as these represent antagonistic configurations and reflective reservoirs of reality: condensed, distorted but accurate diegetic versions of a contemporary world that is being re-scripted over and over again.

Sub-Scripts, Sub-Lauras

The movement between the relations of film, representation, narration and character creates a network of sub-scripts and lines of a story told in a different manner. This movement originates as mere transference, a slight displacement still at the margin of motionlessness inside of Eyes of Laura Mars, or better, inside of the dream with which the film begins. It elvolves further through A Memory of the Players ... and in Coming Attraction as sequel, divides into a number of threads, plots and personas, Sub-Lauras, Sub-Scripts which reactivate voices, outlines and creatures belonging to the world's cinematic twin apparatus. Subjects and characters are distorted in a further reflection, re-rendered and then returned in altered, modified states: with a changed contour perhaps, based on a different past, or displaying a tenuous distinction of texture and text. Sub-Scripts move parallel to the plots and narrations and address that which the story maybe represses. A Memory of the Players ... and Coming Attraction thus become script of and sub-script to existing spatial and narrative formulations: a machinery slowly unfolding over time, opening up like a book. Laura Mars is situated at the center of this virtual apparatus , a nucleus that originates the initial movement and gradually turns into a gravitational force, into an unstable identity always to be explored anew, as reflection of and on the production of vision.

I recall watching the film for the first time on TV. This was maybe in 1979, or a year later.

I do not particularly remember myself from these times, or whoever I thought I was then, a shared experience maybe of a whole generation of teens growing up in the Seventies. I watch this person from afar as if she were a stranger driven by forces now beyond my comprehension. And it is images that are conjured up from this underworld of a past colored like outdated film stock: everything I have seen, forms and impressions spinning like planets and stars that have passed through me and over the years settled down slowly like dust in the sunlight. Hallucinations, dreams and recollections are still returning today: frail projections in the back of my mind, multi-hued clusters of visual organisms vibrating with an uncanny energy. Sparkling agglomerates of still frames that do not radiate life but its shadows, characters in reverse or fast forward, their bodies and actions accelerated like in the early days of the movies. Shots from soaps, films and ads, electrically charged residues of past media debris caught in a mysterious loop of transmutation and metamorphosis, and who knows into which final form or possible ending.

It was a strange attraction that I had found in Laura Mars. Over time, I turned this appeal into the subject of an investigation, a kind of erratic research process in order to find again what I did not know about myself anymore. Something had been unsettled and released then, and I was curious to find out if there was something maybe that could be reclaimed, that had once belonged to me: a genetic code of a past that I had to decipher again to introduce another version of myself, or a different way of perception.

The film generated a movement which in my mind continued until today, a still frame of its origin contained in a memory nucleus, a delicate primordial insect frozen forever in some piece of shining amber. An activity, a chemical reaction had emerged from the space between Laura Mars' hands forming a mysterious gesture: they seem to outline a visual order, to trace a possible path through unstable terrain - a transitory and oblivious motion that perhaps indicates a potential passage through media spaces, a line of transformation glowing faintly like a chain of streetlights on a dark road at night.

I am watching a moment dispersing, intersecting, evolving ... narrative particles separate only to fuse again in a different order, to interweave and grow into single threads pulsing with the energy of subterranean life forms ... sub-characters, absentminded Sub-Lauras, products of a bizarre strategy of reverse engineering ...

Characters

Stills from Il deserto Rosso, Persona, Vivre sa vie

A Memory of the Players ... is layed out like a trip, a ride through a virtual model based on sets and architectures from Eyes of Laura Mars. It is a journey through an uninterrupted succession of virtual spaces, it rewrites the original story thus creating a different spatial and syntactical logic. This movement is accompanied by a script, an interior monologue based on the voices of several characters pertaining to specific forms of female representation in modernist cinema. The initial strategy of architectural reconstruction shifts towards a form of character re-engineering, an experimental research on actual and fictional identities. These forms of representation are not only understood to be projections within the specific diegetic configuration of a film, but through a transfer from architecture to character "reconstruction", are re-projected through a number of sub-scripts in order to be re-openend again as representational forms of modernist standards and type cast conventions. The process focuses on the relation between the characters and an environment which does not offer stable coordinates any longer, and is thus always in a state of transformation and flux. They are figures inside a modernist universe defined by internal discord, psychological conflicts and the breakdown of communication, founded on anxieties and distress.

The process of re-scripting and re-inscribing these characters' voices declines the notion of "woman-as-symptom" to render accessible a potential reservoir of stories beyond these manifestations and their traditional frameworks (that is to say, films based on established visual and narrative conventions of dominant cinema). The characters are drawn from a number of classical sources of cinema history. They are extracted from scripts and films belonging to, and set in, different time periods. Each of them embodies a specific moment in modernist film history, an archetypical anti-narrative gesture that is always concerned with the notion of vision and the function of communication, or silence. This gesture's origin and trans-formation in the course of the history of visual media is the subject.

The story, again, begins with Laura Mars, it leads from vision to words, from architecture to language. It is her vision that is affected: she is subjected to someone else's perceptions that block out her sight. Other characters are suspended between silence and words. Anna Karina as Nana in Vivre Sa Vie, who reflects on the relation between words and thoughts; Nancy Allen as Sally in Blow Out, whose scream of mortal agony is recorded on tape and, in an elliptical act of failed exorcism becomes soundtrack to the porn movie with which the film begins. In Persona, Liv Ullman is the actress Elisabeth who, in the middle of a performance, decides to draw back into permanent silence. Rachael/Sean Young in Blade Runner recalls a past that is based on forged photos and stories of a fake childhood, of a life that never took place. In Il Deserto Rosso, the world around Monica Vitti/Giuliana turns into a reflection of her psychological condition, mirroring a sphere of almost entirely collapsed communication. The sub-ride of Coming Attraction travels through a characters' psyche and memories, through the architecture of an identity.

Films

Vivre Sa Vie Film en douze tableaux (F 1962), Jean-Luc Godard
Anna Karina is a salesgirl in a record shop who can't pay her rent, is evicted by her landlady and becomes a prostitute.

Il Deserto Rosso (I 1964), Michelangelo Antonioni
Cold, rain, and fog surround a plant in Ravenna. Factory waste pollutes local lakes; hulking anonymous ships pass or dock and raise quarantine flags. Guiliana, a housewife married to the plant manager, Ugo, is mentally ill, hiding it from her husband as best she can.

Persona (Sweden 1966), Ingmar Bergman
The actress Elizabeth stops speaking in the middle of Electra, and will not speak again. A psychiatrist thinks it might help if Elizabeth and Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) spend the summer at her isolated house. Held in the same box of space and time, the two women's personalities somehow merge.

Eyes of Laura Mars (USA 1978), Irving Kershner
The fashion photographer Laura Mars starts seeing through the eyes of a serial killer as he commits his murders. She re-stages these visions in her photos (done by Helmut Newton), and is contacted by a police officer who find that the pictures match actual crime scenes.

Blow Out (USA 1981), Brian De Palma
While outdoors recording sound effects for a movie, audio technician Jack Terri hears a tire blowout and a car crash. Before the car sinks into the river, he manages to save the female passenger from drowning, and in the course of events starts to uncover a political conspiracy.

Blade Runner (USA1982), Ridley Scott
Deckard is a Blade Runner, a police man in a bleak future city who hunts down and terminates replicants, artificially created humans. During one of his jobs, he falls in love with the beautiful Rachael, who might be a replicant herself.

(All these synopses have been randomly selected from the web)

Rides

Eyes of Laura Mars has been rescripted as spatial interpretation. The relation between the digital structures based on filmic spaces and the virtual camera's movement through them orients along a narrative script, an interior monologue based on the voices of fictitious characters (as discussed earlier). The script attempts to critically frame and reformulate a distinctive experience reflected in the concept of the characteristic form of a "movie ride".

In main stream cinema, a movie ride is understood to be condensation, compression and foreshortening of the film's economy in form of an extended Special Effect, a program that translates intense subjective experiences into distinct consumer formats. A movie ride produces a special kind of visual and acoustic architecture, and is based on the grammar of consumer models of representation. It restages and reruns the experience of the original film not only on a visual level, but also through the notion of continuous movement, sound effect and score, and an emphasis on artificiality. The economy of a ride comprises and condenses the essence of postmodern desires. It is a trip that structures along a temporal as well as spatial iconography of media fiction: as a last form of contemporary longing, it speaks of an oddly inverted passion for the real. The ride as spatial and temporal phenomenon maps out a matrix, a coordinate system located somewhere between synopsis and trailer. It belongs to both concepts, and represents that what connects them as well. It embodies the notion of maximum presence, a supreme idea of the NOW untied from any form of historical past.

A ride reopens the architecture of a film to new readings and interpretations, and through structuring the built relations as reflective surfaces of internal conditions in a different manner, rewrites its syntax.The spaces transform into passages linking synopsis to trailer and cinematic to psychic apparatus. Here, the ride is realized as two dimensional insert that processes and re-scripts internal movements of characters and personae in relation to their environment: a guide through a reference network of spatial and narrative concepts drawn from all kinds of fictitious sources.

A ride embodies the subliminal of a film. It conjures up desires and longings, and operates only through the symbolic, unmediated by language. It consists of its own representation and is based on a correspondence of form and content. It does not convey a sense of release or fulfillment, but a feeling of anticipation of something that has yet to occurr. A presentational form of a film's diegesis, it condenses an oneiric sense of encounter in which the subject is overwhelmed by vision, and not in control. The distance between subjective and objective experience, between interior and exterior worlds is abolished within a journey that takes place outside of special effects' conventions, a travelling movement along the shape and outline of a character's psyche. The characters have escaped from the script and to reappear inside of different plots, relations and dialogues.

Scripting

The experience of contemporary reality is shaped by interruption, simultaneity, omission, incom-pleteness. It is mediated through compressed media formats: these could be said to resemble a structure linked more to the form of an essay versus the wider context of a novel.

A script as it is understood here corresponds to this type of experience, and represents a narrative form that is mainly concerned with materials found in the reality of present-day culture.

These materials are edited into a larger syntax that contains a number of different and parallel strands, aimed against the concept of an ongoing story, and instead focused on rendering depth to the moment. A script, as understood here, is a formulation that incorporates a number of brief parallel narratives forming an open syntactical system. It is not concerned with a standardized plot but with sub-plots, sub-characters, sub-rides. It does not reflect the experience of endings and beginnings, but is unearthing the materials in between. Scripting the contemporary means to avoid closure and resolution in order to keep the representational form open. A scripting process not only translates between narrative and visual forms of representation, it is concerned with architectures, characters and personae which are either fictitious or derived from the realm of actual culture, and within that mirror their time and their environment. To script means to stage sets and characters, spatial identities and psychological subjects which are rooted in subconscious or repressed constructions, as well as it renders visible the forces that are at play within these personae (architecture here understood as "persona" as well). A strategical movement between formats, media, categories, plots thus creates a space for a different kind of construction between synopsis and trailer.

A synopsis is understood to be condensation of a plot, usually given in form of a textual account. "Condensation" in its psychoanalytical meaning describes the process of fusion of two or more ideas into one symbol, something that is said to be occurring especially in dreams. A synopsis recounts the narration behind a film's staging and its visual surface. It is a form of compression that tells a story in its continuity, an abstract statement or outline of a narrative treatment.

A trailer is based on a visual concept consisting of a series of short extracts from a film used to advertise it in cinema or on TV. It is composed of scenes and clips from a movie and does not tell a story necessarily in its logical order. It deals with the look and the looking, with style and the pure pleasure of visual language. It is not concerned with the mechanisms of a story, but with the desires and passions operating within its construction, and with the internal as well as external movements that define the film's dynamics. A trailer does not describe, but instead discloses the passions.

Whereas a synopsis condenses the past and attempts to give a complete account of the story in a most economical form, a trailer hints to a future that cannot yet be foreseen. A trailer operates in relation to gaps and omissions, a lack that arises desires in a spectator to experience more than only some fragments.

Thus, the ride as the bridge between synopsis and trailer is a scripted (e)motion through temporary passages, a discursive movement towards potential, unstable character templates.

It orientates along a path that separates "writing" from "riding", setting apart synopsis from trailer, illusion from hallucination. It is an insert between points that do not demarcate endings and/or beginnings but that represent coordinates of a spatial discourse without closure or finishing point. It deals with the slippages and omissions within a hermetic narrative construction more than with the causal linearity of the plot, with the unsaid more than with what is explicit. It is a ride leading back to the future (of cinema, of a film, a narrative), understood as projection through time of a version of cinema that is not its future but a present tense condensing desires as they are inscribed in narratives belonging to the realm of contemporary media formats.

A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight (2000)
24 min. Color, Sound. Beta PAL / Photographs, Walldrawings / Map Display Table
Entwistle Gallery London
Kerstin Engholm Galerie Wien
Art Film Basel, all in 2001
Uncommon Denominator at MassMOCA 2002

In its extended version "Coming Attraction: Between Synopsis and Trailer" was included in Future Cinema / ZKM Karlsruhe (2002)
Limits of Perception / Fondación Miró Mir√≥, Barcelona (2002)

Thanks for help and support to Kerstin Engholm Galerie Vienna, Entwistle Gallery London, FA.