Fate of Alien Modes

Secession Vienna / 8. 5. - 22. 6. 2003

With works and contributions by Chantal Akerman, Judith Barry, Thomas Bayrle, Noël Burch, Shirley Clarke, Harun Farocki, Morgan Fisher, Penelope Georgiou, Jack Goldstein, Angela Hareiter, Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Rainer Kirberg, Malcolm LeGrice, Mark Lewis, Babette Mangolte, Mark Nash, Nagisa Oshima, Ulrike Ottinger, Karl Sierek, Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet, Elisabeth Subrin, Michael Snow, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, Oscar Zarate.

Curated by Constanze Ruhm

FATE OF ALIEN MODES / Synopsis

FATE OF ALIEN MODES / Trailer

PRODUCTIONS
Judith Barry / Thomas Bayrle / Morgan Fisher / Penelope Georgiou & Angela Hareiter / Jack Goldstein / Angela Hareiter / Isaac Julien / Rainer Kirberg / Mark Lewis / Ulrike Ottinger / Karl Sierek / Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas / Oscar Zarate

JOURNALS
SCREEN (Mark Nash) / FILMKRITIK (Harun Farocki) / CLOSE UP

CINEMA
Chantal Akerman / Thom Andersen / Noël Burch / Shirley Clarke / Ingemo Engström & Harun Farocki / Malcolm LeGrice / Derek Jarman / André S. Labarthe / Babette Mangolte / Nagisa Oshima / Michael Snow / Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet / Elisabeth Subrin

SYNOPSIS

The curatorial approach shifts the subject of an exhibition “on” cinema as a model of contemporary art practices towards an investigation of the cinema apparatus as an economy unfolding within different scripts and into a spatiality of various modes of production. Films and artistic productions are contrasted with contributions and commissions from the realms of set design, script writing, film theory, anthropology, architecture and psychoanalysis. Fate of Alien Modes is opposed to the visual camouflage of exhibition spaces, which override difference in the guise of “black boxes” and “mini cinemas”. The institutional containers (of cinema and art spaces) are rendered as tenuous constructions and diegetic worlds based on “spatial narratives”. Thus, an information architecture between theatrical stage, filmset and exhibition space is shaped by establishing a relation between spatial as well as narrative aspects.

TRAILER

The development and realization of a large exhibition project implies a complex process of evolution, which demands acute reflection on and reaction to contemporary moments of transformation and unforeseen intermissions. Fate of Alien Modes evolved in relation to discourses of limits and boundaries between various genres and fields. It investigates how related theories and practices simultaneously link to worldviews as agencies of subjective identities, as well as to national powers. At a time when these power relations appear in the light of visual representations put forth by the new American war, it becomes evident that the public and “audience” are strategically confused and conflated—who is the “we” constantly targeted in the speeches, as the cameras merge with bombs and computers into ultra precise objects and objectives? The perfect fusion of meaning and spectacle is provided by the now familiar black-and-white images of “precision” and “kinetic” targeting: a placidly rational grid, punctured by a captivating puff of devastation that (apparently) leaves no “collateral damage”.

Wars are not movies, despite the fact that most of us receive all our knowledge about wars in cinematic or televised form. Still, both depend on narratives and the visual. In order to legitimate themselves, movies and wars both require narrative justification (“why” we are doing this) and the promise of satisfying closure(The “happy ending”). The form of visual culture most immediately bound to the unfolding of war is not cinema but television; yet clearly enough, the media “coverage” of the war contains both narrative/expository and “spectacular” elements.

In this new era of televisual and infrared light, shadows are cast that allow for other perspectives on the particular shapes rendered by the exhibition Fate of Alien Modes. The project considers forms of speculative subjectivity informed through various media, and implemented inside of an art space. It discusses theory and practice of these subjectivities, as well as the challenges of authorship set in relation to contemporary narratives inside and outside of the major media networks. Fate of Alien Modes renders a complex scenario to explore the area between “us” and “them,” by registering moments of institutional subjectivity forcibly drawn into an aerial vortex created by cameras/bombs/programs on their way to the end of the paranoid projection. The predilection of American distributors to request a “happy ending” to be specifically constructed for foreign films was intended to heighten the popularity of these films in the U.S. and streamline them to Hollywood’s taste. This strategy is founded on an early twentieth century operating script, which appears to become a manifesto for contemporary societal and cultural time and space: a smiling historical vacuum.

Fate of Alien Modes shapes a speculative spatiality to locate and position an equally speculative viewership, in order to reflect back on the projections of institutional discourse and practice, as it emerges and verges within actualizations of distinct contemporary beginnings and endings.

The exhibition Fate of Alien Modes charts a terrain emerging at the intersection of artistic and cinematic models and discourses. It foregrounds different forms of representation generated by each respective practice, to render visible the mechanisms operating within. The cinematic apparatus is understood as an economy unfolding into a spatiality of different modes of production, thus allowing for a changed perspective on art. The shift from being “on cinema” to drawing on an economy illuminates and recollects the structures, forces, and subjects at work in the relations between society, cinema, and culture. These subjects are developed along the lines corresponding to the framework of art institutions by reflecting on contemporary artistic and curatorial practices.

Fate of Alien Modes spatializes the cinematic field to reveal it as a set of running scripts. Instead of conflating art and cinema within the conventions of projection spaces and mini cinemas only, the exhibition focuses on dynamic scripting processes to oppose the notion of finished and self-contained artworks. Thus it highlights different modes of production versus the concept of the Secession as a mere exhibition hall and repository for art works. The institutional container is rendered as tenuous construction and “spatial narrative.” It represents a diegetic world translated via works and commissions, and in this way attempts to realize and release the economies of cinema through a three-dimensional interplay of projections, sounds capes, scripts, and indexical archives.

The exhibition’s coordinates compose a space containing script-based formats, temporary (set) architecture, films and videos, sound pieces, and open, performative processes including the actual shooting of a scene for a film, as a method of unfolding the “Alien Modes” as a collage of diverse labors and practices comprised and synthesized in the cinematic apparatus. The contributions were devised through a curatorial framework that looks awry at the flat projection of cinema as merely a screen enlarging life. They put into effect the complex economy of a spatiality unfolding through and within distinct modes of production. They deal with ever-different subjects, as well as subjects addressed: the viewers. A number of contributions were generated in dialogues between curator and invited artists/producers, to select and reframe existing works specifically for this context, or to develop commissions and new pieces oriented along suggested plot points.

Fate of Alien Modes reflects on the differences between cinemas and art institutions by suggesting a process of constant discovery. It links a set of fields and methods to register the unique distinctions of production formats pertaining to cinematic and art practices, and draws on the well-established dialogue between modernist as well as avant-garde cinema and art, thus avoiding the re-institutionalization of cinema as an instrument of power within the art context. The project attempts to unravel the history of the interrelations between modernism and cinema, which inside of art spaces often remain safely interred within a “cinema nostalgia.” A different perspective on the subjects of cinema’s history in the art context is revealed, thus highlighting contemporary discourses on the play and conflict of the forces at work between spectator, projection, and screen.

PLOT POINTS

As cinema is understood to be a montage of scenes, and architecture a montage of spatial sequences, the following text is constructed as a montage of distinct points of view on terminologies around which Fate of Alien Modes is oriented. Like the exhibition, this text is structured between remainders and icons expressing institutional desires: the Metro Goldwyn Mayer lion as incorporation of the Hollywood Industry, the ornamental cupola identifying the Secession. What the cover of this publication suggests visually as a set of subjects—cinema, art, architecture, ornament—is understood as a combinative system to be worked through both structurally and spatially.

This essay—like the exhibition—is based on the figure of a line interrupted: a broken circle, a loop on the verge of becoming an ornament. It is a shape that appears as recurring theme, as inscription throughout the building: in the form of the laurel cupola on the roof, as empty area above the entrance to the main exhibition space, to finally leak into the ornamental entanglements of the Secession’s architectural adornments. This figure constitutes an underlying invisible concept, from where the narrative unfolds along the architectural sequence. Many of the contributions bear resemblances to this circular gesture, structurally or textually. The text almost begins where it ends, but not quite: the circle suggests the obsessive repetitions of ornamental configurations, which are, however, interrupted by alien practices. There is no return to the beginning. The figure remains forever open.

ALIEN MODES

The exhibition title refers to a chapter of Noël Burch’s book To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (1979) (1). In this seminal work, the author confronts the major modes of discourse inside Japanese culture with the stylistic development of Japanese cinema, and contrasts the resulting modes of representation with those of Hollywood and the West.

The Fate of Alien Modes is the title of the book’s tenth chapter, which is concerned with a discussion of issues pertaining to adaptation, radicalization, and institutionalization of Western and Hollywood modes of representation in the Japanese cinema of the twenties. The terminology of “Alien Modes” employed by Noël Burch was referring to and defining separate imaginary “cultural wholes” that were connected through and inside of the space of (early) cinematic production in Japan versus Hollywood. It questions the relation of established codes and modes of representation pertaining to different cultures. The concept of “Alien Modes” as an updated theoretical framework adapted for this exhibition, attempts to frame and represent distinct forms of cultural modes of production contained in the complex identity of a cinema shifting from “apparatus” to “operation.” Both cinema and art as montages of “alien” techniques and technologies display their character as languages of separation instead of unity (2). They are not shown as constituting a “natural” homogeneity, but emphasized in their “cultural” separateness: as artificial constructions and collages of a wide range of techniques and economies that are operating within.

Fate of Alien Modes breaks down and divides the languages of cinema into their idiomatic inflections: architecture, performance, script, sound, production, light, new media/special effects. The removal of these languages from cinema’s homogenous cosmology, within which they are otherwise safely embedded, reveals the alien-ness of their condition—like a word one keeps repeating over and over again, in an attempt to disconnect signifier from sign. Their vocabularies are joined and short-circuited by employing the forces at work in the materials of potentially repressed scripts, which in always new reincarnations keep returning into the cultural sphere.

Thus, the cinematic field is also understood as reflecting and refracting psychoanalytical concepts of condensation as a form of compression of repressed experiences returning, and displacement as an (unconscious) method of confusing signifier and signified. The notion of “screen memory” (3) refers to the fictions generated by the unconscious mind to cover up the original traumatic event. In regard to the issue of cinematic forms as references and models for art production, it is important to explore how certain agendas, programs, and modes of production established in cinema throughout the twentieth century are apprehended and decoded in the “alien” environment of New Media and consciousness industries.

The fabrication and simultaneous incorporation of “alien-ness” and/or “otherness” is fundamentally connected to the paranoid construction of information society. A point of access to this cosmology of universal infotainment is opened there where alchemical processes of transgression and/or institutionalization commence: inside the cinematic field as early technology of modernism, as medium pertaining to cultural production, as well as connecting agency between “Other” and “Self,” embodied by the binary condition of viewer and screen.

Cinema as consciousness industry has ceased to dominate the sphere of contemporary cultural production. “[N]ow [that] cinema has replaced theater as the producer of today’s order of power,” it is the “alien modes” of New Media that constitute the mind set and switchboard for institutional and social power structures and cultural identities. These “alien modes” are comprised within certain aspects of cinema—as shadows of the old medium now seen in the light of monitors instead of projection screens. The industry announcing itself in one self-conscious iconic gesture, embodied by the roaring of the MGM lion as signifier and signified collapsed, is now part of Hollywood’s past. Its present is concerned with the metamorphosis of old and new codes and modes instead of iconic gestures. These codes do not belong to a formalist language of film making, but emerge as cinema’s memories based on sets of running scripts, here unpacked and framed in a group project.

It is here, at this intersection of icons and programs, where the circle interrupts to split off into two different routes. While notions of history and identity are still formulated and circulated as production icons, they are also distributed in terms of industry programming codes via the large media networks belonging to today’s new media world.

The relation of cinema and New Media shapes and appears inside of compressed forms of contemporary info- and entertainment strategies, for example the format of what is termed “movie ride” as an eighties direct corporate Hollywood spin-off. A movie ride is understood to be condensation, compression, and foreshortening of a film’s economy in the form of an extended Special Effect. It is a program that translates cinema’s intense subjective experiences into distinct consumer formats. A movie ride is based on the grammar of consumer models of representation. It restages and reruns the visual experience of the original film, but is also grounded on the notion of continuous movement, sound effect, and an intensified sense of artificiality. It operates only through the symbolic, unmediated by language, condensing a dreamlike experience. It foregoes all actors, taking the main film sets and the film’s underlying mechanics to turn them not just into characters, but into stars—the set and the script become the attraction, a characterless psyche belonging to no one but only the cinematic apparatus. Thus, cinema is revealed as an assemblage of agencies and effects, narratives and scripting devices, which is measured in degrees ranging from experience to immersion. The economy of a ride condenses cinema to the essence of postmodern desires. A ride does not convey a sense of fulfillment or release, but a feeling of anticipation. 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. It orientates along a path that separates “writing” from “riding,” illusion from hallucination. Thus, the ride is a passage linking cinematic to psychic apparatus—a machinery consisting of clusters of alien fragments which are condensed and cast into and within the unifying terminology of the cinematic: the “alien modes” surviving inside of cinema.

Traditional Hollywood industry can neither rival nor outbalance the Internet and New Media. It has lost its unifying force as one homogeneous system of acculturation. Thus, the “old” modes of cinematic production (scripting, storyboarding, set/production/identity design, performance, sound, light, etc.) as well as the “new” modes of information society’s consciousness industry are searching for new environments. Contemporary Hollywood distills the old modes of cinematic production to create new kinds of media spaces. By employing textual and spatial scripting economies and techniques, the exhibition tries to open up and investigate the alien modes at work inside of contemporary cultural productions. A sequence of three point of view shots opens different perspectives on the fate of alien modes.

POINT OF VIEW 1: CINEMA/ART/SCRIPT

The original, primeval image at work in the early operating system of modernist cinema linked the camera with the eye, understood motion as life, and developed the then new technique of editing over time into a language that camouflaged the machinery behind the seemingly seamless visual narrative. This “body” of cinema encapsulates the notion of a dynamo founded on the technology of the nineteenth century, a mechanics of governors and gears that ushered in a twentieth-century ideology of modernity. It emerged with and corresponded to the new science of psychoanalysis concerned with developing ways of “governing” the “alien mode” of the (female) psyche. From an early time on, the identity of modernist cinema reflected the (bourgeois) obsessive economies of desire, often expressed within and through the terminology of the mechanical. Cinema is understood as a code-making and code-breaking synthesis engine, which is based on and generates different scripting devices, assemblages of diverse labors, aesthetic practices, technologies, architectural, temporal, and spatial paradigms—all expressed in a tenuous unity set within languages of montage and performance.

Contemporary art production as a code transforming and -interrupting mode is oriented in relation and difference to cinematic forms of production. As a form of “mise-en-abyme,” the “alien mode” of art production is embedded within and transgresses the visual, narrative, and representational codes established by mainstream movies. Art operates as an agency to render cinema as codex and framework for distinct forms of visual imagery and narrative techniques, which have been distilled into the alien modes of contemporary culture and New Media worlds.  Cinema began around the same time that the Secession was founded as one of the first independent artist’s spaces. The exhibition attempts to take up this point as a beginning, to unravel several modernist scripts.

Three time lines as narrative strands come into play.

One begins in 1896 and leads towards modernism. As orientation, a long traveling shot, which records an emerging modernist landscape. This shot frames the sites and settings of early cinema, the beginning of psychoanalysis, the onset of the twentieth-century urban spectacle, and the foundation of independent artist’s spaces such as the Secession. It was then that the alien modes of modernist art production were introduced to the cultural sphere.

The second time line initiates in the years after 1945. All originally separate scripts contained in the cinematic model are woven together into one complex narrative of a postwar modernist world, and linked to as well as translated into the language of psychoanalysis. Cinema turns into just one medium among a wide diversity of new technologies. As only one component of a newly emerging media industry, it transforms into icon and effigy of itself. It registers and develops different languages of representation, which are increasingly investigated and studied. The urban spectacle inside and outside of cinema is charted by the science of urbanism; psychoanalysis disintegrates into numerous sub-categories of therapeutical techniques. All these narratives are interrupted by and based on the experience of war.

The third line commences in the eighties, when a typical gesture took place, which was concerned with the renovation of symbols containing the roots of modernist economies. In this process, the institutions (of psychoanalysis, cinema, urbanism, architecture…) transform from “nouns” into “adjectives”: psychoanalysis becomes the “psychic,” cinema the “cinematic,” urbanism turns into “urbanist,” architecture drifts towards ornamental citations. Modernist practices metamorphose into fields and regions recorded by maps charting modernist territories, which thereupon are to be explored in terms of “cultural studies.” The exhibition attempts to weave those lines into a densely layered narrative expressed through the artworks and contributions. While cinema’s identification patterns reveal symptoms rooted in the scopic regime, its identity can be seen clearly configured through a history of programming languages. Cinema is transformed into an operating system founded on contemporary concepts of programs, codes, and new forms of scripting. Fate of Alien Modes marks the turn from the “script” understood to be a homogenous entity and self-contained work of narration, towards interpreting it as a text that belongs to a wider field of writings, scripts and subscripts outside of one specific production.

POINT OF VIEW 2: SCRIPT/ORNAMENT/ARCHITECTURE

Architecture, cinema, and psychoanalysis are understood to be institutions based on roles, programs, and scripts. They constitute narratives joining distinct concepts of space. The desires contained in these programs are understood as rooted in the repressed materials of the subconscious, in trauma. Thus it can be said that they are based on alien foundations, on screen memories and remainders (4). The exhibition introduces a plot that internalizes and links all scripts passing through the architecture of the building.

A script is an unpredictable play of forces always in development as a performative operating system. It generates sets and characters, spatial identities and psychological subjects. A scripting process not only translates between narrative and visual forms of representation, but creates spatial narratives through and on architectures, characters, and subjects rendered as synthetic constructions. In a fluctuating world of many possible endings, it is always the author’s desire that structures and establishes the script’s cosmic order.
Cinema is understood to be a script-generating as well as -absorbing apparatus. The exhibition reflects on the desires of cinema and art by also generating and absorbing scripts. The real and the stage are collapsed into a new shape, a doppelgaenger of the symbolic belonging to post-cinematic times.

This shape perhaps resembles an ornament.

Lacan states that desire is what remains when one substracts need from demand.

The laurel cupola on the roof of the Secession is what was left of the building after the war. It represents the architecture’s desire as a left-over ornament, and embodies the spectacle of the original structure around which the postwar restoration organized a new space. The renovation, which took place in the eighties, conflates scripts formerly interrupted. It symbolically restores Gustav Klimt’s famous Beethoven Frieze (1902), which had been transferred to another building, back to its origins, yet situates it in a newly created space.

Thus the narrative does not quite revert to the circle’s beginning. An empty area remains literally inscribed in the frieze. This void signifies a spatial absence as well as a historic interruption. The frieze that returned joins the left over cupola: two residual souvenirs. As the ornament is understood to be sign and allegory simultaneously, a question appears: which are the scripts running inside its complex twists, turns and weaves?

The cupola/globe constitues the social imaginary of the Secession—the institutional program reduced to its essential meaning. As a sign, it is suspended between heaven and earth, rooted to the real via the symbolic by passing through the reality of a former ruin. The notion of the postmodern ruin is usually embodied in the façade (Frankfurt’s Portikus for example). Here, the building structures around an ornamental void as its center. It represents architecture as a split mind. In an odd inversion it is a static and solid world based on a floating allegory: an image of a scene from the past. The cupola is a relais station short-circuiting scripts.

The entanglements and loops of the gilded laurel leaves become strands of stories interweaving. An exploded ornament structures as the specific narrative of an exhibition on the relation between ornament and script, worked through in terms of new forms of artistic productions. The building’s architectural elements render a perfect example of the technique of cinematic montage. Its desires are expressed through the elements that are edited together: frieze, container, and the cupola that contains the narrative montaged to the solidity of the building. Together, these elements constitute the floating identity of the space, which recollects and absorbs the scripts of the works and the desires contained within.

Mark Rakatansky writes, “… If you prefer the words of architects to those of psychoanalysts, then here’s Louis Kahn, circa 1968, on the economies of desire and need: ‘Need is so many bananas. Need is a ham sandwich. But desire is insatiable and you cannot ever know what it is.’ Or here, circa 1969: ‘Deep down, man only trusts desire, not need. Need is just so many bananas as far as I’m concerned. Desire is the entire strength of man’s striving to live.’ Or here, circa 1972: ‘Desire is insatiable, and it is the root of dissension. It is opening up the avenues where desire can be felt.’ When Kahn, to use that more famous example, asked Brick—these are his words—‘what it wants’ or asked a railroad station ‘what it wants to be,’ this is because the desire, or the identity, of a brick, or of a railroad station, is not given, is never given. As always, this desire, this identity, must be constructed. In this game of ventriloquism, the responses that Kahn ascribed to the brick or to the train station always expressed some lack or some excess: Brick ‘wants an arch,’ but arches, Kahn replies to Brick, are ‘difficult to make, they cost more money, I think you can use concrete across your opening;’ and while the railroad station seems to tell Kahn that it ‘wants to be a street,’ Kahn says it can only be a ‘meeting of contours englazed.’” (5)

The building, like cinema, always represents a montage between narratives of excess and transgression, and their formal containment through structure and form. It can be seen as a Prozac-oriented, contained space, which nevertheless explodes into the queer crown of the cupola.

POINT OF VIEW 3: ARCHITECTURE/ART/CINEMA

In another essay entitled Spatial Narratives, Mark Rakatansky writes: “There is no mute architecture. All architects, all buildings ‘tell stories’ with varying degrees of consciousness. Architecture is permeated with narratives because it is constituted within a field of discourses and economies (formal, psychological, and ideological), to any one aspect of which it cannot be reduced, from any one of which it cannot be removed.” (6)

Fate of Alien Modes generates a spatial scenario. The project identity is constituted as dialogue between different scripts. One script is embodied by the iconic cupola on the roof of the Secession as leftover post-war ornament. The cupola as remainder represents the symbolic identity of the space, and also signifies the institutional program.

The second script is constituted by the Beethoven Frieze, which resides as a form of architectural subconscious almost hidden away, in a space at the lowest point of the building. This frieze symbolicallyrepresents the signified, “art,” as underlying ornamental transgression. The architecture suspended as showcase and display between these two points of orientation recounts the third spatial narrative—an architectural program meant to contain the sub-scripts of artworks. An invisible structure between Beethoven Frieze as historic foundation and early storyboard form, and the cupola as a TV station’s corporate sign, is being established: it mediates between the subterranean and a publicly visible icon, fundament and utopia, “labyrinth” and “sphere,” between consciousness and subconscious mind. The exhibition space negotiates different materializations of the “real” as measured by standards set by Reality TV. It represents the sphere of the social as well as the realm of communication and exchange. It pertains to the “real” world as the place of experience of social, economic, and political mechanisms—power relations at work in a universe of unfinished processes.

It registers an odd transference of the belief in an omniscient god’s eye (power/surveillance, the bomb and camera fused firmly together) as a now seemingly democratized participatory conceptualization of “us” and “them.” The cupolas’s shape conjures up a set of famous icons: the company logos of the major Hollywood Studios. Thus, the exhibition symbolically links the identity of an art space to the iconography of the Hollywood system. The star corona of Paramount Pictures or the spinning globes of Universal Studios morph from the twenties to the present day, into ever changing forms of visual representations, to communicate a specific economy at work to the audiences worldwide. In the same way, the cupola of the Secession communicates “art” to the urban space unfolding around it. It is not always the films that are recalled, but the Hollywood studios’ logos, which are indelibly engraved in the viewers’ memories. These icons constitute a cosmology of a semi-recognizable doubled universe, whose entrances are populated with and guarded by authority figures: protective goddesses illuminate with their torches both the darkness of film frames and movie theaters, and lions as rulers of terrestrial animal kingdoms announce ever new Coming Attractions. The planet earth remains at the gravitational center of this artificial, mythical cosmos.

What survives is the story (ornament), not the thing (architecture).

Cinematic production and artistic practice are models always floating, fluctuating and suspended between theory and realization. The narratives unfolding within Fate of Alien Modes merge visual, temporal, spatial, and psychic sceneries: still frames, screen memories, circles, projections, cupolas, friezes. The scripts that are introduced create the structural relations; the works and contributions become agents. Thus, the mute architecture starts to “tell a story.”

The exhibition sets into motion a transformative narrative to be constantly actualized anew. It internalizes and interweaves scenarios and projections that pass through the space of the building. It covers several decades and generations of artists and producers, ranging from the sixties until the present day. The building and its ornamental adornments are understood as being equivalent to a film. It becomes the navigator to link, as the main script, all the subscripts of productions that run together. Fate of Alien Modes is not a new story about an old space, but, rather, it unmoors the narratives embedded within.

It deals with architecture, cinema, and art productions as unstable systems of signs and significations, condensed and worked through in the subjective and transgressive readings of artists.

ENDNOTES

(1) Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press 1979.

(2) “…our society takes the greatest pains to conjure away the coding of the narrative situation: there is no counting the number of narrational devices which seek to naturalize the subsequent narrative by feigning to make it the outcome of some natural circumstance and thus, as it were, ‘disinaugurating’ it…The reluctance to declare its codes characterizes bourgeois society and the mass culture issuing from it: both demand signs which do not look like signs.” Roland Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, Image—Music—Text, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, p. 116.

(3) Freud’s “screen memory” (“Deckerinnerung”) is a term describing fictions generated by the unconscious in order to cover up other memories of traumatic nature. The first time, Freud uses this term inside of a footnote of an analysis of one of his own dreams. It seems worth noting that in the description of his dream memory, Freud emphasizes the fact that this dream scene always appears to him in “bright technicolor.”

(4) “Freud’s ‘discovery’ that dreams are languages in which highly condensed associations or prelogical images stand for normal syntactical discourses recalls the restructuring of artificial memory: ‘The latent dream thoughts are symbols, which have become alien to conscious thinking, for representing certain objects and processes…subjecting the material to compression and condensation…’” Dan Graham, Theater, Cinema, Power, in: Rock My Religion. Writing and Art Projects 1965–1990 Cambridge: MIT Press 1993, p. 180.

(5) Mark Rakatansky, Tectonic Acts of Desire and Doubt, 1945–1980: What Kahn Wants to Be, ANY 14 (special issue: Tectonics Unbound, edited by Mitchell Schwarzer): Spring 1996, p. 36–43.

(6) Mark Rakatansky, Spatial Narratives, Internet: www.haussite.net/haus.0/SCRIPT/txt1999/05/TEXT1_D.HTML (6.5.2003).

PRODUCTIONS

Fate of Alien Modes joins a variety of formats and media (drawings, video and installation works, interactive sound pieces, performances, films, and indexical materials) with specifically commissioned contributions. All works in the exhibition relate to aspects of “screen” (as architecture) and “script” (as dynamic text), or investigate, register and record the visual, acoustic, and narrative spaces emerging in a space situated between these concepts.

JUDITH BARRY

Judith Barry’s analog audio/projection piece VOICE Off is set in relation to the digital phenomena of (media) voice archives. It takes place in what the artist calls, a “demonstration room” where the viewers/listeners can shuttle back and forth between two different kinds of aural registrars and scopic spaces. In an attempt to unpack ideas about the production of the (female) voice, aurality, and the primacy of vision, the work focuses on the difficulty to “speak” about the voice, and on its specific status and intangibility inside the body. Judith Barry writes, “…[VOICE Off] is a project that tries to make apparent the desire, complexity, tragic loss and estrangedness of the situation of the voice in the body, as it might be represented cinematically.”

The main characters of the piece are the voices. In a play of reflection, transmission, and seduction, its soundtrack is placed in an equal relation to the visual score. VOICE Off transfers the technique of montage from the visual to the auditive sphere. It edits and joins distinctly gendered and unreconciled narratives, where the viewers are left to (re-)construct the story from only the soundtrack.

Interview with Judith Barry

ULRIKE OTTINGER

Freak Orlando, 1981 / 35 mm, color, sound, 126 min (part of the cinema program)
Original script / 7 set photos, b/w / 7 set photos, color

A further indexical section comprises materials linked to Ulrike Ottinger’s film Freak Orlando (1981), an histoire du monde comprising “errors, incompetence, greed for power, fear, madness, cruelty and the everyday life, which considers as example the history of the freaks from the beginnings until today.” (U.O.) It includes film stills, set photos, as well as the original script for the film, to emphasize the aspect of different script formats and to indicate the scripting processes around which the exhibition is structured. As preliminary materials for her films, Ottinger’s scripts are more than just shooting and dialogue directives. They contain drawings and notes, a variety of different materials collaged together, and in such a way represent montages of different processes taking place and appearing in the course of a film production.

read on…

JACK GOLDSTEIN

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1975 / 16 mm, color, sound, 2 min, loop
The Planets, 1984 / series of 6 records, black vinyl, 25 cm each
A Suite of Nine, 1976 / series of nine singles with sound effects, vinyl, 18 cm each (The Burning Forest, red and white, The Dying Wind, transparent, A Faster Run, orange, Three Felled Trees, green, A German Shepherd, red, The Lost Ocean Liner, black, The Tornado, purple, The Two Wrestling Cats, yellow)

The section dedicated to the work of American artist Jack Goldstein includes a selection of his record productions as well as his 1975 16mm film loop Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer (based on Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s famous company logo). The 6-part record series Planets, from 1984, mixes and newly arranges the sound of atmospheric noises of various science fiction films. In another suite of nine 7-inch records from 1976, Goldstein specifically uses music and pre-fabricated, “canned” sounds from Hollywood film sound archives.

Goldstein’s productions were of crucial significance in the American art scene, by linking the seventies to the eighties, in what critics then termed “post-studio” art. The development of his works clearly shows the shift from the role of artist to the role of “artist as producer.” Accordingly, his body of work is divided into different genres—performances, films, records, and paintings—and constitutes a cosmology of distinct modes of production, media interplay, and technologies, as a reflection of Goldstein’s interest in the apparatus, mechanism, and effects of the Hollywood Spectacle Industry of the late seventies.

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Morgan Fisher

Production Stills, 1970 / 16 mm, b/w, sound, 11 min
Standard Gauge, 1984 / 16 mm, color, sound, 35 min Photogenic Drawings, 2002 / series of 6, 4 and 8 drawings, pencil on parchment, each 32,5 x 24,5 cm, framed /

1. (from U.S. Camera, 1954) encore! / You can do it better with today’s ANSCO COLOR! / For the Professional and Advanced Amateur / If You’re Really Good … / Infinite choice / Haloid Fine Photographic Papers
2. (from U.S. Camera, 1953) the name’s right / No other film gives you the Real-life Look of Ansco Natural Color! / See for Yourself … / Your Negatives Come to Life on HALOID Photographic Papers
3. (from U.S. Camera, 1952) A Frame for Memory / Shortest Route / Monochrome to Flexichrome / Picture of a Happy Man … / Next to Nature … It's Ansco Natural Color / new Argus C-4 / How to Give Your Pictures a Professional Look of Quality / Wherever You Turn …

American artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher’s contributions focus on Hollywood production processes as a framework for discourses on the relation of industry standards and avant-garde film making, and discuss various aspects of the cinematic apparatus and authorial subjectivity. Fisher’s double perspective on the American film industry emerges from a simultaneous position inside and outside of Hollywood’s universe. As independent filmmaker, Fisher is an acute analyst and critic of Hollywood modes of production; in his various engagements as editor, researcher, and actor, he is an active participant in the industry’s labor processes.

The exhibition includes an early 16mm film Production Stills (1970), the autobiographical found footage 16mm film Standard Gauge (1984), as well as a new work, Photogenic Drawings (2002). These contributions examine the technological, economical, and historical principles at work inside of the Hollywood studio world, and negotiate issues of representation by analyzing the codes on which these are founded. The exhibition also includes a selection from the series Photogenic Drawings (2002). These drawings share with Standard Gauge the device of looking back at an institution at a moment in its history when it had faith in itself, from the perspective of a time when faith is more difficult.

Materials for Standard Gauge, Production Stills and The Photogenic Drawings

RAINER KIRBERG

3, 2003
Script pages, series of 15 digital prints
21 story board drawings (by Stefan Albers)
Video, color, sound, 10 min

For Fate of Alien Modes, German director and screenwriter Rainer Kirberg develops a commissioned contribution: an “incomplete” film, a script that translates the narrative of Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven frieze (1902) into a contemporary language of cinema and film genres.

3 continues the unfinished stories and unresolved contradictions inscribed in Klimt’s visual program. The script represents a hybrid form, which consists of three parallel narrative strands, and is organized around a moment of intermission: a blank area interrupting the sequence of the frieze’s imagery and story. Kirberg’s new narrative originates from this empty frame, in order to represent the frieze’s dramatic dilemma and to join it to contemporary subjects and media. The work represents an elliptic narrative and is divided into three parts, each representing one stage of a film production: screenplay, storyboard, and actual film shooting.

Each part consistently contains one distinct segment of the plot, counteracting the hierarchy of conventional film production processes.

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ISAAC JULIEN

Lost Boundaries, 2003 / super-8-film transferred to video, color, silent, 3:27 min
Passion of Remembrance, 1986 / digital print of original film poster
Baadasssss Cinema, 2002 / video, color, sound, 75 min (part of film program)
Looking for Langston, 1989 / 16 mm, b/w, sound, 40 min (part of film program)

The work of British artist, writer, and filmmaker Isaac Julien deals with questions of identities and discourses of sexuality and gender always set in relation to different economies of desire.

For Fate of Alien Modes, Isaac Julien produces a new work entitled Lost Boundaries by utilizing his personal super-8mm film archive. Between 1981 and 1987, the artist made several super-8mm films in diarist’s form. Lost Boundaries portrays a forgotten and lost part of an experimental filmmaking practice which had developed during the early eighties in what became known as the Independent Film Workshop Movement. This new work (a silent film) is comprised of footage shot by Julien in England in the summer of 1985 during the making of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective’s first experimental feature film The Passion of Remembrance (1986). Lost Boundaries recaptures those moments, both deconstructing and foregrounding the means of 16mm film production, as well as sketching a fragile community of black artists and actors forging a new artistic politics of representation.

Lost Boundaries re-opens questions still remaining unanswered, and foregrounds the “alien” experience of filming as a practice belonging to a different space-time continuum.

Materials for Lost Boundaries, Looking for Langston and Baadasssss Cinema

NOMEDA AND GEDIMINAS URBONAS

Ruta Remake, 2002 / Interactive sound installation, sound design: Otto Kränzler / Video of a performance at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2002

The interactive sound installation by Lithuanian artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas focuses on aural forms of representation. Ruta Remake investigates the absence of female voices in the Lithuanian media from the past decades until the present day. The work is founded on the concept of the Thereminvox, an instrument developed by Lev Termin in 1921, which is based on the phenomenon of ether waves (electromagnetic waves).

Ruta Remake updates the original Thereminvox through a “Theramidi” device to turn it into a contemporary digital format. The hands of a user illuminated by bright film lamps cast shadows of various densities to activate the sensors of the Theramidi device and the voice archive which it controls. This archive consists of a collection of audio samples of women’s voices drawn from Lithuanian (mass) media (radio and TV broadcast, pop and folk music, film soundtracks, etc.). The sound is composed and transformed along a common Lithuanian weaving pattern based on a plant called “ruta.” The resulting layers and three-dimensiona worlds of sounds, voices and music reflect social constructions and metaphysical qualities, featuring sets of samples ranging from speech and narratives to chanting and songs.

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ANGELA HAREITER

bulb, 2003 / Installation, aluminum, mirror foil, stroboscopic light, various materials

(Film) architect Angela Hareiter develops an installation situated between object and space. bulb was commissioned for the exhibition as a temporary constellation to evoke the memory of a film set, and to simultaneously represent a “remainder” of the cinematic apparatus.

As if the Secession architecture was understood to be a camera optic zooming in onto one object, the viewer is confronted with an over-sized film lamp reaching from ceiling to floor: an uncanny special-effect generating apparatus, perhaps even an emanation of an (architectural) sub-conscious mind. This spatial configuration creates a theatrical situation for the filmless set of the exhibition-as-film, and links to issues of lighting and special effect, projection, and screen. The cinematic apparatus turns into its architectural elements, to become a projection space without a projection. Hareiter’s object understands cinema not as a device to throw larger-than-life moving images onto a screen, but as a system of different signals and sources: a cosmology of transmissions and emissions.

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PENELOPE GEORGIOU

A film shoot in Secession, 2003

The shooting of Penelope Georgiou’s new film took place publicly in the exhibition space on 5 June 2003. Set design: Angela Hareiter

For the one-time performance of Greek/Austrian artist and filmmaker Penelope Georgiou, Hareiter designed the stage set. The performance was recorded to serve as basic footage material for the making of Georgiou’s new film. Fate of Alien Modes’ conceptual focus on the subject of production led the artist to relocate the film shooting to the exhibition space. The stage as announcement and promise of a “Coming Attraction,” as well as remainder of some mysterious performative transference, is the only visible clue to Georgiou’s new work, which will not be screened during the time of the exhibition.

The artist’s interdisciplinary practice refuses categorizations and operates somewhere between the spaces of theater, performance, and film. The new work that she develops for the framework of this exhibition registers a constant movement between disciplines to avoid adhering to one format only. Georgiou’s works generally leave characters and plots unfinished and without closure. By employing a form of symbolic counter-montage, it is the “making of” which is distributed instead of a finished artwork thus by-passing conventional resolutions to emphasize techniques pertaining to cinematic production processes.

Interview

KARL SIEREK

Aussicht und Einsicht, 2003

Excerpt from: Karl Sierek, Barbara Eppensteiner (eds.), Der Analytiker im Kino. Siegfried Bernfeld, Psychoanalyse, Filmtheorie, Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld2000 / series of 13 digital prints

Aussicht und Einsicht comprises a series of extracts from a book by Vienna-based film theorist Karl Sierek. The book is concerned with re-working and analyzing the Viennese psychoanalyst Siegfried Bernfeld’s 1925 script On a Filmic Representation of Freud’s Psychoanalysis in the Framework of a Feature-length Film (Zu einer filmischen Darstellung der Freudschen Psychoanalyse im Rahmen eines abendfüllenden Spielfilms).

This script can be said to also belong to the group of “impossible films” that the exhibition attempts to reframe. It is a script that was not realized as a film at the time when it was written. Instead, it is now perceived from a contemporary point of view, and “subtitled” with Sierek’s insightful comments and “subtitles.”

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MARK LEWIS

Two Impossible Films, 1995 / 35 mm transfer to video, color, sound, 25 min

Canadian artist Mark Lewis critically explores the hierarchy of filmic disciplines, and focuses on those subjects and roles, which remain largely repressed and/or uncredited in film history. Lewis investigates the margins of cinematic forms, and questions the primacy of vision to place in the foreground not directors or stories, but a wide range of other and different productive forces essentially linked to the process of filmmaking. In the piece Two Impossible Films, Lewis takes as his subject the “silent” history of films never realized. Two important examples of “impossible films” of which still some documentation remains, are Sergei Eisenstein’s plan to adapt Das Kapital by Karl Marx for the screen, and Samuel Goldwyn’s idea to lure Sigmund Freud to Hollywood to have him write a screenplay for a psychoanalytic love story. Two Impossible Films consists of the scripted opening credit sequences for the imaginary full-scale and contemporary productions of these projects. In this work, the eye of the camera, otherwise focused, is closed. The piece links to the institutions of economy and psychoanalysis by reopening an unfinished story, which belongs to the project (and projections) of lost modernist desires.

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THOMAS BAYRLE

Superstars, 1993 / video, color, sound, 10 min (assistant: Kobe Matthys)
series of five posters, dimensions variable

The video Superstars by German artist Thomas Bayrle mediates the spaces of analog and digital forms of representation. In the early nineties, Bayrle experimented with interactive programming languages, 3-D digital worlds and conventional film materials. During this process, he generated an unplanned “special effect” caused by a bug inside of a real time computer program, which resulted in an explosion of always the same image reproducing and mapping itself to each single element of any digital structure. Single frames from Hollywood films (Batman, Star Trek…) were used to cover faces, bodies, and objects. Thus emerged an accidental reflection of Bayrle’s earlier filmic and graphic works from the sixties to the eighties, which had employed tautologies, repetitions, and the conflation of signifier and signified.

Superstars links the notion of sixties pop culture with early forms of New Media works, and ironically refracts the Hollywood mainstream cinema during the nineties through both frameworks at the same time.

OSCAR ZARATE

The Other Cinema (1965-70) / Plots, dimensions variable

Dyn Amo D: Stephen Dwoskin (UK 1972)
The Guns D: Ruy Guerra (Brazil 1964)
Mexico:The Frozen Revolution D: Raymundo Gleyzer (Argentina 1973)
Terra Em Transe D: Glauber Rocha (Brazil 1967)
Barren Lives D: Nelson P. Dos Santos (Brazil 1963)
Even Dwarfs Started Small D: Werner Herzog (Germany 1970)
ICE D: Robert Kramer (USA 1970)
Punishment Park D: Peter Watkins (USA 1971)

JOURNALS

CLOSE UP (1927–1933)

4 issues of the magazine Close Up (Vol. 1–4, 1933), 3 reprints of Close Up (Vol. 1, 1931; Vol. 2, 1932; Vol 3, 1933)

The seminal magazine Close Up was published between 1927 and 1933. The journal was invested in theoretical investigations of the development of film language, committed to the notion of a “pure cinema,” opposed to the Hollywood mainstream, and open to emerging contemporary ideas on politics and psychoanalysis. It comprises contributions from an international group of theorists, filmmakers, and other producers from the cultural field. With Close Up, a new form of theoretical practice emerged, which considered its discourses to be a potential model for new cinematic forms of production.

A New Form of Film Writing (Anne Friedberg)

FILMKRITIK (1957–1984)

18 issues of Filmkritik, 1973–1983

This selection of the German journal Filmkritik was compiled by Harun Farocki (filmmaker, author, and contributor from 1974 to 1984). Both Close Up and Filmkritik comprehend texts as theoretical models for filmmaking. The first issue of Filmkritik was published in 1957, in a post-war Germany still cut off from Modernism, where names like Lang and Pabst, Benjamin and Kracauer had been forgotten. At that time, Filmkritik was the first German journal to deal with film on a theoretical level.

Filmkritik (Harun Farocki)

SCREEN (FOUNDED IN 1959, RELAUNCHED IN 1971)

22 issues of Screen, 1971–1984, collection of materials, film program

The practice of the British magazine Screen focuses on the analysis of cinema as a social institution, “(…which attempted) to locate the various determinants and effects involved and the various levels at which they may operate.” As a film theory journal, it was invested in breaking down the traditional distinction between film viewing and critical discussion to develop a social practice of film reading. Mark Nash (film scholar, Screen contributor and editor from 1978 to 1981) compiles this section, which includes a range of original issues and a selection of seminal articles with a focus on the development of Independent Cinema and the Workshop movement in England during the Seventies. Additionally, Nash gathers a range of indexical materials, film clips, posters, and program notes. Three of the films chosen for the exhibition’s film program were originally compiled by Screen for the National Film Theatre in London in 1978.

The moment of Screen (Mark Nash)

CINEMA

In order to link back to the original consideration of the relation between cinema and art, and of the role of cinema spaces inside exhibition halls, Fate of Alien Modes incorporates a screening room, which is required as a method of laying out indexical as well as historic foundations, and to unfold the cinematic apparatus within. Each contribution deals with some specific aspects belonging to cinematic modes of production— architecture, camera, performance, narration, authorship, identity. The section of the program selected by Mark Nash originally belonged to a season compiled by Screen for the National Film Theatre in London in 1978.

GESCHICHTSUNTERRICHT

JEAN-MARIE STRAUB/DANIÈLE HUILLET *
I/BRD 1972, color, sound, 85 min

The work is based on the unfinished text The Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar by Bertolt Brecht, and tells of the relations between economy, democracy, capitalism, and imperialism. The novel The Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar was an attempt to demystify the cult of the leader, like The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui; in this case, an attack on Caesarism by an exposure of Caesar himself. The novel is a first-person account of an investigation in preparation for an official biography of Caesar, interpolated with extracts from Caesar’s secretary’s diary. Straub/Huillet’s film increases the distance; the investigation is filmed in modern Italy and the interpolations become car journeys through Rome. The film begins on those maps of the growing Roman Empire that Mussolini had put on the wall of the new road he built from the Piazza Venezia to the Coliseum. A cut to the terrace of the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati, where an elderly man dressed in a toga is explaining to a young man in shirt and slacks his version of the rise to fame and fortune of Julius Caesar. Brecht’s version, needless to say, does not at all resemble what you learned at school, for it is an entirely economic (Marxist) view of Roman history, which Brecht sums up as the old struggle between the City and the Senate. Much of the film consists of monologues, first by the banker Mummlius Spicer, and then by other representatives of the period such as a lawyer and a writer. Gradually, the story of Julius Caesar’s irresistible rise is chronicled. But the film is not all monologue; it is broken up in various ways, the most extraordinary being three long tracking shots (the first seven minutes, the last two and ten minutes each). In each of these, the camera is placed in the back seat of a car driven by the young man to whom Spicer has been giving the history lesson—as the car rolls inexorably through the labyrinthine streets of modern Rome. (CR)

BLACKBIRD DESCENDING

MALCOLM LE GRICE *
GB 1977, color, sound, 110 min

 The direction of Le Grice's work has allowed him to include acted and re-enacted action between people, dialogue and a narrative structure. The economy of repetition in classic narrative cinema is an economy of maintenance, towards a definite unity of the spectator as subject; systems of repetition are tightly established but on the line of narrative actions that hold the repetitions as a term of its coherence and advances with them, across them, its sense of difference, of change, of the new. The practice of structural/materialist film is another economy; the spectator is confronted with a repetition that is “in itself,” not subsumed by a narrative and its coherence, that is literal, not caught up in the rimes that habitually serve to figure out the narrative film. The spectator is produced by the film as subject in process, in the process of demonstration of the film, with the repetition of intensification of that process, the production of a certain freedom or randomness of energy.

From: program note for the National Film Theatre (Films and Seminars presented by Screen), 1978.

RAMEAU’S NEPHEW BY DIDEROT

MICHAEL SNOW *
CAN 1974, color, sound, 270 min

Snow’s reworking of Diderot’s “dialectical masterpiece” (Engels), with its dramatizing of the problematic of subjectivity in language, is particularly interesting in its recapitulation of the history of the American avantgarde’s concern with language, humorously re-enacted by many of the filmmakers and theorists themselves.

“The title of my film New York Eye and Ear Control  was my first attempt to deal with what I was starting to see as a practically uncharted artistic area: that of imagesound relationships in the cinema. Almost all of my subsequent films have been developments in this area, although the emphasis has been on visual vocabulary, especially camera movement. For me, Rameau’s Nephew is a true “talking picture.” It delves into the implications of that description and derives its form and the nature of its possible effects from its being built from the inside, as it were, with the actual single units of such a film, i.e. the frame and the recorded syllable. Thus its ‘dramatic’ development derives not only from a representation of what may involve us generally in life—but from considerations of the nature of recorded speech in relation to moving light images of people. Thus it can become an event in life, not just a report of it.—Echoes reverberate to ‘language,’ to ‘representation’ in general, to ‘representation’ in the sound cinema, to ‘culture,’ to ‘civilization.’—Via the eyes and ears it is a composition aimed at exciting the two halves of the brain in recognition.” (MS)

“So, starting to think about what a talking picture could or should be, made me think of what would be the units of that, like instead of it being dramatic dialogue or comic dialogue I started with the units of syllables and frames. So that the thing is built out in a molecular way, in terms of syllables, words, phrases and sentences…The entire film is itself a sentence, see, so that as far as I’m concerned, it’s really a unified speech, film, and its subjects is partly speech and of course, partly language, and that means, partly culture….”

Michael Snow in: The Village Voice, February 3, 1975.

KOSHIKEI (THE HANGING)

NAGISA OSHIMA *
J 1968, b/w, sound, 117 min

The Hanging brings to the fore the character of the fool, in the person of a young Korean, sentenced to death for rape. The theme of rape, and of explosive male sadism in general, is disquietingly recurrent in the cinema of Oshima and his contemporaries, giving ambiguous voice to an age-old phallocratic tradition. The rapist here represents, or assumes, through a long psycho-drama of “consciousness raising,” which is the film’s basic narrative movement, the condition and revolt of Japan’s lumpen proletariat. “R” is hung for his crime, but his body refuses to die. The prison officials revive him, and before attempting to execute him again, they find themselves compelled by the logic of a demented legalism (a narrative logic symbolic of the constraints and hypocrisies of liberal ideology and class guilt) to force “R” to remember and confess his crime—indeed, to recognize his identity as “R.” For after the failed hanging, R’s mind is a blank slate upon which consciousness must be written all over again. Only when they have succeeded in doing so will they feel authorized to hang him. Obsessed by their obligation to the dream-logic of the “law,” the officials begin to play; they re-enact the boy’s past, even “returning to the scene of the crime,” where the educational officer finds himself actually committing the crime himself. Back in the execution chamber, the body of the educational officer’s victim, lying in a coffin, awakes to become… R’s sister, and it is she who leads him, through symbolic intercourse, to the awareness that he is “R,” i.e. to class and ethnic consciousness. Now that he can measure the real balance of power, “R” allows himself to be hung again: but when the trap has been sprung and the rope has jerked…the noose hangs empty…

The Hanging exemplifies the contradiction central to Oshima’s work. It instantiates the encounter of the principle of Marxist analysis which views class struggle as the motor of history with the ideology of the individual or subject which is consubstantial with the bourgeois myth of self-fulfillment and whose libertarian version is the ideal of self-liberation.

From: To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Noël Burch, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, pp. 333–339.

THE LAST OF ENGLAND

DEREK JARMAN
*GB 1987, color, sound, 87 min

A storm of images sweeps past. Landscapes of ruins tumble by, burnt out cement fortresses in which halfnaked men have gained a foothold. Jagged office buildings accumulate into the fortress silhouette of a modern metropolis. Fences barricade desolate fields, windows shatter, houses drowse behind boarded openings. Transient zones of calm form in the whirl of light and shadows. A youth presses himself desirously against a male nude by Caravaggio. An art figure in a pointed hat seeks a path through the darkness of crumbling arches, holding a glaring light in its raised hand: half cutting torch, half flaming torch. (…)

The Last of England is a vision of the last days. And yet Derek Jarman has gleaned the material for his unbounded montage from our present—and our past. A material strand of the film is formed of old Super8 films from the director's childhood. Idyllic scenes for private home cinema: children playing in the garden, the family together around the dinner table, a holiday excursion, an apparently peaceful island of memories. Only apparently, though, because other sounds emerge from the same past: the drone of approaching aircraft, air raid sirens, the voice of Adolf Hitler announcing the invasion of Czechoslovakia. And the war, which belongs to the memory of a past England of childhood, has not ended, neither inside nor outside. Not only images of death scenes from Northern Ireland stand for this, indications of the Falkland War or the street battles in the inner-city slums of Brixton and Toxteeth. Again and again, masked figures with weapons appear, driving frightened people to execution or guarding a group of freezing people cowering together on the banks of the Thames with the docks of London in the background. For Jarman, England is an empire of ruins, where dull fires flicker here and there, and life has been transformed into a bizarre spectacle. Karsten Visarius, first published in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 Sept. 1987.

HÔTEL MONTEREY

CHANTAL AKERMAN
USA 1972, color, silent, 65 min

This early, experimental work by the Belgian director Chantal Akerman draws a complex portrait of a New York hotel, combining structuralist views of spaces with a brittle visual poetry. Empty hallways and rooms become surfaces reflecting the existences of their mostly absent inhabitants. The camera becomes an “actor,” moving through the hotel in long shots and pans. In this way, it simultaneously shows a study of architecture and of a mental space. The camera is not associated with the gaze of a person, but rather only with the present of moving and seeing. No sound interrupts its contemplative gaze. It moves through the lobby, into the elevator with its doors opening and closing along the journey through the floors, showing views of surroundings that only slightly differ and capturing empty corridors and rooms in which there is only rarely anyone present. The faces of the hotel inhabitants appear as transient manifestations, as beings surrounded by impoverished luxury, leading a slow life at the edge of standstill. Following a long journey through a nightly universe of the inner world of an architecture—perhaps the memory of a former resident—a few surrounding roofs are finally recognizable in the early dawn: a foreign and distant world appears.

Akerman describes the development of the film as an “ascension through space and time” which begins in the evening on the ground floor, ending at dawn on the roof of the hotel. “I was startled when I saw this hotel,” she says. “If I had reacted immediately, the film would probably have become a journalistic reportage. But I thought about this hotel for half a year. Through this specific mise en scène and this kind of film language, I achieved ten times as much truth.” Hôtel Monterey tells of the artificiality of the filmic space. The film not only investigates a specific place, but also explores the gaze of the camera in its relation to a spatial, non-narrative configuration. Like all structuralist films, Hôtel Monterey also shifts the process of filmmaking itself into the center. (CR)

THE CAMERA: JE OR LA CAMÉRA: I

BABETTE MANGOLTE
USA 1977, b/w and color, sound, 88 min

In her film The Camera: Je or La Caméra: I, Babette Mangolte, who photographed Chantal Akerman’s Hôtel Monterey and Michael Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot, reflects on her experience as a camerawoman and on the process of image production.

The film deals with the relationship between the gaze and a form of power, which is manifested in the link between camera and subject. In the first part, the viewer sees photo models posing for the camera. Their discomfort and the authority of the off-screen voice giving them instructions (“smile,” “look to the left”…) reflect our role as viewers and simultaneously question photography’s claim to naturalness and spontaneity. It is interesting that the performers, whether male or female, assume “feminine” poses when they present themselves to the gaze of the camera—as though femininity were synonymous with “pose.” The second part of the film consists of a hypnotic steadycam movement through the streets of New York, thus presenting the city as a stage, but also as an actor. Babette Mangolte calls her film, which alternates between observation and emotion or imagination, a self-portrait from the years 1976–1977. “The film is based on two experiences: that of a photographer/ camerawoman, and that of someone living in between two languages (French and English). This duality is also evident in the title The Camera/La Caméra with the additional play on words I=Je/I=eye. Making the film I felt that photography could be imagined as a translation from one phase (call it the real, the present, the physical world) into a next phase (the photo, an image, a reflection). In addition to the film title, I also allude to the literalness of the photographic image and the film about it. The film is literally the film camera.” (BM, 1996)

SHULIE

ELISABETH SUBRIN
USA 1997, b/w and color, sound, 36 min

Shulie uses conventions of ’60’s direct cinema to explore the residual impact of the 1960’s, and to challenge the parameters of historical evidence or document. The project was initiated upon seeing an obscure 16mm documentary portrait of a young Chicago art student, shot in 1967 by four male graduate film students. Their subject was a young Shulamith Firestone (1), months before she moved to New York and tried to start a revolution. Other than a few screenings in 1968, the film has sat on a shelf for thirty years. My Shulie (let’s call it #2) is a scene-by-scene recreation of the original Shulie (#1), reproduced with actors in many of the original Chicago locations. In it, a 22 year old woman, looking strangely contemporary, argues confidently and cynically for a life on the margins.

I was two years old when the original film was shot. Resurrecting it thirty years later triggered complex questions about how one generation inherits and processes the residual representations of its predecessors, particularly of a generation whose legacy is so critical and mythic. The process of re-making the work in 1997 became a act of conceptual time travel. In both its production and dissemination, I hoped to compel viewers to scrutinize, shot by shot, what constitutes the historical present versus the securely located past, across cultural, economic, racial, sexual, generational and formal terms. While we can understand the film as a “fake,” a copy of an original, each scene resonates today. Watching the “fake,” recognized as performed from an “original,” creates the effect of viewing two films and two time periods at once: a doubling, a haunting, a generational negotiation. Had I simply screened the original, Firestone’s experience would be simply understood as the antiquated past, with all its romance, flaws and faded logic. As a fake that blurs its location in time, Shulie may also speak to the present. The amateur, sexist and self-aggrandizing strategies of the original four male filmmakers and their positioning of her in the documentary: these moments represent critical and problematic evidence of a time that hasn’t necessarily passed. (ES)

(1) Shulamith Firestone is well known for her book, The Dialectic of Sex, 1970.

ERZÄHLEN

INGEMO ENGSTRÖM/HARUN FAROCKI
BRD 1975, color, sound, 58 min

Summer 1975 in Berlin. For our joint film Erzählen (Storytelling), HaF staged the scene with the headset monitor with me. In front of the rushing waters of the Kreuzberg stream, I speak into the microphone of the tape recorder, which simultaneously plays back my voice over the headset monitor: I speak in the present, but what I hear is the past. While I repeat the sentence, my voice, which I hear speaking, becomes increasingly slow and hesitant. As HaF later commented on this scene: “you explain that with the headset and then comes the fade-out and you repeat what was presented in relation to the writing. since the fade-out separates presentation and metaphor, it intensifies the relationship between the two language levels and makes it very naïve” (HaF to IE, Oct. 22, 1978). (…)

Interdisciplinarity as a praxis is one level where HaF’s interest and mine meet. Ideas came up very early about fictional research projects in film or with film as a research instrument, where people from different disciplines come together to discover something, pursue a track, or even just to end up in an adventure. These ideas coincide with an inclination we both have to accumulate insights from different sciences, for example bringing exact sciences like medicine together with fields that are not aimed directly at practical application, such as religious studies or ethnology. Around 1975 HaF is still searching at the Free University, trying to find out where the lines could converge. I am following that track myself in my feature films. We are thinking about combinations that could emerge spontaneously and undogmatically. It should be possible to include everything, like in the Nature Theater in Oklahoma. What is theoretical and disparate should combine with research into a reality that involves life and survival, Winnicott’s primitive agony. In addition to this and inside it, the world of sensations of our little daughters, his (Anna and Lara), mine (Muriel). Childhood? Here it is, we never left it. Erzählen is a sketch of this situation.

Excerpt from: Ingemo Engström, Doppelskizze, in: Rolf Aurich, Ulrich Kriest (Ed.), Der Ärger mit den Bildern. Die Filme von Harun Farocki, Konstanz: UVK Medien, 1998.

WHAT DO THOSE OLD FILMS MEAN?

NOËL BURCH
GB 1984/85, color, sound, 3 of 6 parts / each 25 min

What Do Those Old Films Mean?  was originally a sixpart series that aired on England’s Channel Four Television. The series was conceived by Noël Burch. It explores the early days of film in six different countries—Great Britain, the US, Denmark, France, the USSR and Germany—from a historical, social, political and cinematic perspective. (…)

What is it that one should know about a set of old films? The economic conditions under which they were made; the social origins of those who made them; the cultural environment in which they were first seen, and by whom; the important social and political themes that are refracted through them, consciously or unconsciously. It is crucial to know how the films of one country differ from those of another within a given time-frame, so as to pinpoint factors which, appearances notwithstanding, were more local than they were “universal.” This last point is especially important in dealing with the Primitive Era (1895–c. 1914), since it has for so long been assumed, even among specialists, that during this “heroic age” filmmakers the world over were engaged in a common “battle for technical know-how” and that national differences were peripheral to the vital matter of each film’s contribution (if any) to the Progress of Film Language, or else to its Primitive Charm (if any). (NB)

RED HOLLYWOOD

NOËL BURCH/THOM ANDERSEN
USA 1995, color, sound, 130 min

The documentary Red Hollywood deals with the McCarthy era and the subject of filmmakers victimized by the so-called “witch hunt.” Andersen and Burch describe their re-evaluation of these directors in the following terms: “At best, innocent—but untalented—victims of the ‘excesses’ of the Cold War, at worst, naive—but untalented—martyrs of an illusory cause, the Hollywood communists never had good press in the USA. In France, where numerous victims of the black list—Dalton Trumbo, Michael Wilson, John Berry and Jules Dassin—took refuge in the fifties, they were the object of genuine sympathy, but the work they did in America, as left-wing artists, remains little-known among film buffs. Red Hollywood examines these films to show the extent to which the Hollywood communists were sometimes able to express their ideas in the films they wrote and directed.”

Red Hollywood is a thesis documentary whose form and content are informed by the exactitude and argumentation of scholarly research. Moreover, it uses as supporting evidence clips from other films, films often underrated, even scorned, arrogantly dismissed as they are by critics and film buffs. The film’s purpose is twofold: rehabilitation and re-evaluation. First, to show how the blacklisted writers and directors were not only victims of a sort of reactionary, anti-communist harassment, but also that their films were not devoid of talent and interest, even if they were (and still are) met with a certain indifference. Secondly, to emphasize the fact that the means of subversion were not reduced to pacifist or anti-nazi political rhetoric, but could also transpire more subtly in more social registers, be it in a critique of the American Dream or in a predisposition for ordinary people and daily life. In this perspective, Red Hollywood demonstrates how communist writers and directors helped break numerous dominant taboos of Hollywood ideology.

ROME IS BURNING (PORTRAIT OF SHIRLEY CLARKE)

NOËL BURCH/ANDRÉ S. LABARTHE
F 1996, b/w, sound, 55 min

January 1968. In a room that could be made for dreaming or lovers, the New York-based experimental film maker Shirley Clarke responds to questions posed by an audience assembled around her—one recognizes Noël Burch, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Jacques Lebel. The film is shot in black and white, and the camera passes from hand to hand in this “salon” which offers a pan, or tracking shot of the American Cinema of the Sixties. The world is at a point of transformation. Witnesses to that change are those filmmakers who have regrouped in New York during the Sixties, a place of conflicting scenarios. The documentary form reveals a complex scenery, a form of mise-en-abîme of the cinema, even of Shirley Clarke. If that be the case in The Connection (1960), The Cool World (1965) or Portrait of Jason (1967), one always finds the same principle and structure of distancing. But, contrary to Jason, the main character of the last film cited, Shirley Clarke, is a cineaste: she can surpass the documentaries’ very structure by herself filming those who film her, to continue further structure and form.

THE COOL WORLD

SHIRLEY CLARKE
USA 1963, color, sound, 105 min

The Cool World symptomatically stands for Shirley Clarke’s commitment to social justice and social criticism. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Warren Miller and tells the story of a group of teenagers from Harlem. The collaboration between Clarke and the Afro-American actor Carl Lee, her partner at the time, is considered one of the most important works of the New American Cinema. At the same time, however, it is also indebted to the European Cinéma Vérité, the discourse of which poses a counterpoint to the Vertovian strategy of a documentary film about Harlem.

The rough black and white realism of the film is created in part by the original locations in Harlem and the use of amateur actors, who were instructed by Lee to speak street slang in improvised street scenes. This is contrasted by the type of montage, a voice off narrating from a subjective perspective and in the first person, and the non-diegetic jazz soundtrack—all filmic devices that do not necessarily belong to the documentary film genre. The visuality of the film and the accompanying soundtrack are manifested as emotional, kinetic energies originating in the restless state of the main characters. The offer of an identification with an Afro-American leading actor accommodates an expression of Black subjectivity.

From an Afro-American perspective, The Cool World celebrates this subjectivity as “Black Experience.” However, critics remarked on the fact that the film represents cultural oppression without giving the victims an opportunity to successfully resist it. In this sense, the film does take recourse, in a way, to a politique des auteurs in the same way as this is manifested in European avant-garde cinema. Clarke’s own position as a Jewish woman director in a man’s world also serves as a measure of her identification with the most diverse forms of discrimination. In this respect, it is interesting that the rhetoric of the civil rights movement conveyed in the film offers no solution with regard to the oppression that the women experience in The Cool World—a form of oppression that is linked to both skin color and gender. (CR)

* Film selection by Mark Nash, based on a SCREEN program for the National Film Theatre London 1978

WHAT DO THOSE OLD FILMS MEAN / RED HOLLYWOOD / THE LAST OF ENGLAND / KOSHIKEI / FREAK ORLANDO / STANDARD GAUGE / THE COOL WORLD und BAADASSSSS CINEMA were screened at the Vienna Filmmuseum. In that framework, moderated audience discussions with Noel Burch, Isaac Julien, Mark Nash and Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas took place.

All installation shots of Fate of Alien Modes by Matthias Herrmann.