Video, 69 min., color, sound
My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot
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| Foto: Matthias Herrmann |
EXPLOSION OF A MEMORY IN (UN)DEAD DRAMATIC STRUCTURES
Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot is the sixth episode in the serial-based project X Characters, which revolves around the attempt to update the identities of iconic female film characters from modern cinema to produce contemporary versions of them.
The project is based on two coordinates. It is based on the character of Hari in Andrej Tarkovsky's film Solaris, who is now the central figure (after Nana from Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa Vie in X NaNa / Subroutine, and Giuliana from Il Deserto Rosso in X Love Scenes); at the same time Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot represents an attempt to close the cycle of X Characters by putting a symbolic end to the lives (more accurately, the afterlife) of the film characters concerned. Whether or not this attempt is successful remains, for the time being, an open question.
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Each production in the series is structured around the constellations (psychological and narrative) based on the characters who are at the focus of the narrative in the original films. In Nana's case (Anna Karina) from Vivre sa Vie her desire, as with the original figure, lies in the inexorably inscribed wish for autonomy and independence and is expressed in the production based on her character, X NaNa / Subroutine, as a successful attempt to symbolically liberate herself from the script by her author/director/lover (Godard).
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| Irina Kastrinidis, Judith van der Werff |
For the character of Giuliana (Monica Vitti) from Deserto Rosso the focus of the new narrative is on the issue of (female) desire and its projection on another (male? in the case of X Love Scenes, however, above all absent) person. Ultimately Giuliana decides to give up a particular preconception of 'love' to create a new void, a place for openness, a place of contingency in her life.
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| Dominic Oley |
The character of Hari (Natalja Bondartchuk) from Solaris poses entirely different questions in her original Tarkovsky version: Tarkovsky based this character on the writings of Stanislav Lem as an unstable psychological zone within which the authors comprise an entirely endless catalogue of humanistic, existential conventions — one that addresses the responsibility to one's fellow human beings, the relationship to the 'other', human nature, the essence of love, the individual's freedom to make decisions, and not least also the irreconcilable contradictions between belief and science, between emotion and rationality.
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Primarily though, and this is what the new production My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot concentrates on, the construction of the character of Hari is based on two specific problems: Hari suffers from amnesia and suicidal tendencies. She has almost entirely lost her memory and hardly recognises herself in the mirror; she is condemned to return as an undead revenant, as a product of the imagination of an ex-lover tormented by feelings of guilt, one who once drove her to suicide and still wants to rid himself of her even though he believes he is in love with her. This man, Kris Kelvin, reacts to the situation by, among other things, a rather bizarre attempt at murder: he pretends to Hari that they are taking a trip into outer space but then deliberately fails to board the rocket at the last moment.
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Hari's failed suicide attempt — a response to this paradoxical effect — belongs to the iconic repertoire of suicides in the history of film. A both narrative as well as aesthetic and entirely unassailable densification of male (authors') projections on female (actresses') characters finds its manifestation in a scene where, after drinking liquid oxygen and freezing solid in mere seconds, Hari thaws out extremely rapidly: as a highly erotic supernatural beauty covered in ice crystals and wearing a wet and suggestively transparent shirt that emphasises her bosom clearly, with her convulsing body — because thawing out and reawakening — Natalya Bondartchuk designs one of the most convincing hysterical sequences in the history of film1. This sequence suggests nothing other than a quasi-cosmic orgasm. And in the final analysis, her suicide cannot succeed because she is actually already dead, or at least not really 'alive' but merely a reincarnation, a ghost, a fantasmic apparition that has emerged from the imagination of her former-lover Kris.
1 Thanks to Christine Lang for the reference.
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UNDEAD LINKS
The intrinsically 'ghostly' element of the (un)dead links is that they always carry a shadow with them, the original form of which is no longer tangible: Precisely this missing link still appears named, although in contrast to the link, which is capable of activation as such (wherever it might lead), it no longer exists. (Verena Kuni, „Ohne Ende? Ansichten aus dem Geisterreich der (un)toten Daten“, in: ENDE - Mediale Inszenierungen von Tod und Sterben, Hrsg. Petra Missomelius. Marburger Hefte zur Medienwissenschaft, Nr. 43, Marburg 2008; here in translation)Hari is, then, a ghost condemned forever to return. In My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot Hari (Judith van der Werff) now encounters a number of other undead from film history: Godard's Nana (Irina Kastrinidis) and Antonioni's Giuliana (Dominic Oley) who, following a sex change, has in the meantime become Julian. All of the characters (including the originals) appear in their fifth versions. The departure point of the narrative in this production consists in the three characters' attempt, altogether and in alternating constellations, to close with their past: to 'find their end', to 'unearth the truth', to 'bury history', to 'hastily bury the other woman', to extinguish the memories of one another, to kill themselves, to make the evidence disappear, to beat each other to death.
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The action moves towards an abandoned forest clearing and is organised around a hole that is sometimes filled-in and sometimes dug out: a burial where nothing is being buried, that never comes to a close and so becomes an apparently endless burial loop. The three characters are captured again and again in a present that repeats in variations where they might be able to change roles but can neither leave the clearing nor really change their history. At the end of the film it looks as if the constellation has arrived at a compelling point: at the moment where the two women Nana and Hari throw the man Julian's (who had also once been a women too) dead body into the trench. But this only appears to be the case. The film begins, with the cycle of reincarnation, from the beginning again: none of them is dead.
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| Fotograf (Bild 1): Matthias Herrmann |
BURIAL PLOTS
Hence the zombies sing a song, but it is that of life. (Gilles Deleuze)Films are instruments with which one can examine the inside of people. Which is why people love films. It is the reason why films do not die… nor do the characters in them. (Jean-Luc Godard; here in translation)
The English title Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot contains a number of allusions: the use of underscores alludes to forms of writing that are standard in programming languages, where spaces between words have to be clearly identifiable to avoid being a source of errors in routine programming; secondly, the "My" at the beginning of the title alludes to forms of new subjectivity that are produced by contemporary Internet culture (myspace.com, with the call to "broadcast yourself"). At the same time the subjective perspective of the character of Hari is emphasised that forms the basis of the narrative, while also being shown as an unstable variable position by the twist implied in "Never_Ending".
The term "plot" is used in several senses: i.e. the plot as in the plot of a movie; 'plot' as in to plan, a 'plot' describing intent (i.e. referring to a planned criminal action), and thirdly in the sense of a burial plot — in this case it is an informal grave dug in a forest clearing.
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FROM SPORTS TO MURDER AS A HOBBY: Golf Club, Suicide Park…
Alfred Hitchcock's last film, from 1976, is called Family Plot2 and possesses, not only in its title, a similar range of meanings and ambiguity in terms of the identity of the characters. 'Crash Site' also has several connotations: 'Crash Site' refers to something different in each of the three scenes. In the first scene it is the name of a nearby saloon or nightclub for which the clearing that provides the setting for the action serves as a refuse dump; in the following scene it refers to a remote (rehabilitation) clinic that is dubbed so by the patients; and in the third it is possibly the place where Hari's spaceship crashed, which is contaminated with radioactivity — a Tarkovskyesque 'zone'. At the same time, however, it is also conceivable that the entire plot is unfolding in Hari's mind, in a psychological zone, and that the three figures represent splits in personality with new constellations of the ego, the id and the super-ego continually emerging. Perhaps we are in a 'clearing' in Hari's mind, a Hari who has just been for her weekly therapy session. Each scene can accordingly be understood as a variation on the (narrative) theme — an Ur-scene, a primal scene — the action is structured as a loop.
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Beyond this, the film also reflects the relationship between the author and the characters: symbolically burying the characters, putting an end to their fictive existences, transporting them to a place where they meet their own (symbolic) death, represents an attempt to establish auctorial autonomy in contrast to the characters' desire to be continued.
Transformation is essential to theatre. Death. And the fear of this final transformation is a general one, one that one can rely on, build upon. (Heiner Müller; here in translation) |
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2 Fake medium Madam Blanche (Barbara Harris) and her taxi driver boyfriend George (Bruce Dern) make a living by scaming people with her phoney powers. They are hired by an aging widow, Julia Rainbird, to find her nephew who was given away for adoption many years earlier following a family scandal. Meanwhile, an extremely clever couple, diamond merchant Arthur Adamson (William Devine) and his attractive girlfriend Fran (Karen Black), are behind a series of kidnappings of various VIPs in the San Francisco area. The two couples paths soon cross and chaos results in Hitchcock's last film. (www.imdb.com)
See also, the essay by Drehli Robnik, 'Registrat of Births, Deaths, and Copyrights: Hitchcock als Medium, Logo, Ereignis, Diagramm und Kugel zwischen Welt und Kristall', in: Shandyismus, Autorschaft als Genre. Ed. Helmut Draxler, catalogue to the exhibition of the same title at the Secession Wien, Vienna 2007
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SUICIDE STRUCTURES THE ACT
According to Kant, an act has no exterior in the sense that all its effects, consequences – everything that comes after – must be abstracted and put in brackets. In an act there is no after. This is what Kant repeats tirelessly: an act is beyond all criteria of usefulness, efficiency and suchlike; it is – to use Kant’s own metaphor – a jewel that glitters by itself and bears all its value in itself. What counts is only an act without a purpose outside itself, confining the purpose to itself, being the only purpose of its own realization – being, so to say, a purposeless act. If we act to achieve this or that, it is not an act. Ultimately, an act is essentially a by-product of itself. It represents something absolutely firm, albeit groundless. It is the point of absolute firmness and certainty that floats in emptiness: it is “in itself”. (...) Nevertheless, there is one act that conforms completely with the structure of the act required by Kant: suicide – the act of suicide as described and defined by Jacques-Alain Miller in “Jacques Lacan: Notes to his concept of passage à l’acte”. Miller states that Lacan made a model of the act from the act of suicide; every real act is a “suicide of the subject”. The subject may be born again in this act, but only as a new subject. The act is an act only if afterwards the subject is no longer the same as before. It is always structured as a symbolic suicide; it is a gesture by means of which symbolic ties are torn up. What are the key, distinctive features of the suicide as the model of the act? (Alenka Zupancic, „A Perfect Place to Die“, in: Slavoj Zizek, What you always wanted to know about Lacan... but were afraid to ask Hitchcock)FLASHBACK / FLASHFORWARD
Therein consists the “testamentary” dimension of the voice-over/flashback device: lying at death’s door, when all there was to happen had already taken place, the subject endeavours to clear up his/her life’s mess by organizing it into a consistent narrative (…). The ultimate lesson of it is that when we put all the pieces together, the message that awaits us is “death”: it is possible to reconstruct one’s “story” only when one faces death. In other words, film noir is paradoxically all too trustful on account of the very features which constitute its “blackness” (its atmosphere of hopeless fatality where the game is over before it begins, etc.): it still relies on the consistency of the “big Other” (the symbolic order). It remains entirely within the confines of “narrative closure” : its narrative forms a closed symbolic itinerary of Fate whose letter “arrives at its destination” with implacable necessity. (Alenka Zupancic, „A Perfect Place to Die“, in: Slavoj Zizek, What you always wanted to know about Lacan... but were afraid to ask Hitchcock)The scenes on which the narrative is based can be interpreted as a form of flashback or flash-forward of a Hari in whose psyche the characters (and so also the audience) are situated. The flashbacks are references to the original Hari's state of mind, and so form the core structural elements of the film. They allude to Hari's original state of amnesia, but also to the possibility of re-establishing her memory — and with it her identity. Each time that a memory emerges in Hari (apparently, or genuinely), the action stops and the characters are reconfigured. The characters themselves (Hari, Nana, Julian) rotate through the roles that are defined by their respective function: gravedigger (the ego), driver (the id), and the character who comes 'from outside', a kind of patroller (the super-ego), i.e.: one time the barman or doorman from the saloon, one time the nurse from the rehab clinic, and one time a stalker-like character who is undertaking scientific research in the zone. Within the framework of these narrative permutations each character slips into each role once, and so the function is modulated by the character, but the character also by the function.
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The flashbacks and flash-forwards are to be understood as stations within the framework of the process of the psychoanalysis that Hari undergoes: the film itself represents a kind of 'psyche' (the collective psyche of the three protagonists); the progression of the action and the plot points correspond metaphorically to the stages of analysis. The first flashback (i.e. the first scene) could be interpreted as a 'psychological defence mechanism; as an attempt by the person being analysed (Hari) to interrupt the treatment. "No" is the key word here, "that's not what happened".
The next 'interruption', the flash-forward of the second scene, accordingly corresponds to a screen memory projected into the future: one is no longer on the defensive but affirmative instead, but fails as one has not yet reached the traumatic core. So one says "yes, that's what happened", but is fooling oneself — as "that's not what happened". Ultimately, the finale, the last flashback in the third scene, would mean the confrontation with the 'traumatic core'. Towards the end of the analysis, approaching the solution, a contradiction is embedded in the epilogue however, a new game begins: one says, "yes, but I don't know what will happen. We have to start again from the beginning, but digging somewhere else."
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THREE CONSTELLATIONS
Scottie: What do you remember? Madeleine: A room. And I sit there, alone. Always alone. Scottie: What else?Madeleine: A grave. Scottie: Where? Madeleine: I don’t know. An open grave. I stand by the gravestone looking down into it. It’s my grave. Scottie: How do you know? Madeleine: I know. Scottie: But is there a name on the gravestone? Madeleine: No. It’s new and clean and waiting. Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo
The structure of the film is based on a consistent tripartite division: three characters, three scenes, three suicide attempts, three changes of roles, as well as the three functions of gravedigger, driver, patroller — id, ego and super-ego. The positions of each of the characters appear to have been infected (and vice-versa). Infection as a motif is indebted to the convention in zombie films where the zombie virus is transferred by a bite from the undead. Giuliana/Julian, Nana and Hari suddenly emerge as undead revenants in the 'body' of the (film hi)story, they traverse the boundaries between the narratives, and bring these to a symbolic 'close' with their appearance. As zombies they 'consume' the (hi)story, the characters, and the roles ascribed to them. They attempt to make the bodies of evidence disappear, or to unearth their own end — to hastily bury the other characters, or simply the story and their versions of it. They suppress the trauma, which nevertheless repeatedly breaks through to the fore. The characters do not want to commit suicide out of desperation but as an act of emancipation from the narrative cycle of death and reincarnation. Their problem is that, as characters in a film/films, they cannot die. They are already ghosts, they are merely the symptoms of various desires; they have no past, no future, and no identity — they can only apparently empower themselves through the act of taking their own lives. It is not about acts of desperation but the achievement of autonomy as the subject, to interrupt the scripted endless reincarnation, to end the exploitative projection. The characters' narratives, their source narratives, ought to be extinguished, modified or veiled. It is more about making evidence disappear and concealing the traces of the process of self-empowerment. Which is why one never sees a real 'suicide', only the 'illegible' behaviour and actions of the characters.
Where id was, there shall ego be. (Sigmund Freud) |
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SARDINE TINS ARE THE PREREQUESITE OF NARRATIVE.
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Und woher der Begriff des MacGuffin kommt? Der Name erinnert an Schottland, und da kann man sich folgende Unterhaltung zwischen zwei Männern in der Eisenbahn vorstellen. Der eine sagt zum anderen: “Was ist das für ein Paket, das Sie da ins Gepäcksnetz gelegt haben?” Der andere: “Ach das, das ist ein McGuffin.” Darauf der erste: “Und was ist das, ein MacGuffin?” Der andere: “Oh, das ist ein Apparat, um in den Bergen von Adirondak Löwen zu fangen.” Der erste: “Aber es gibt doch überhaupt keine Löwen in den Adirondaks.” Darauf der andere: “Ach, na dann ist es auch kein MacGuffin.” Diese Geschichte zeigt Ihnen die Leere, die Nichtigkeit des MacGuffin. (in: François Truffaut, Mr. Hitchcock, wie haben Sie das gemacht?)
FILM AND THEATRE
In all these three examples, we are faced with the intrusion of some “alien reality” in a specific fictional disposition. This intrusion is directly linked with death. . Of course this “alien reality” that intrudes on the stage is the very reality of film itself in which this stage framework appears. Hence the relationship between film and theater could be defined in the following terms: Every time cinematic and theatre realities coincide, every time cinematic and theatre narratives overlap, there is a corpse. (When Fane chooses the theatre for his film exit, when Mr Memory enacts his film role on stage, when Jonathan abuses the stage for his cinematic survival.) But this corpse, this death, is as much a punishment for erasing some fundamental difference between both “fictions” as it is the price for the re-establishment of this difference. Only the corpse convinces us that the stage fiction is over (that the actor will not appear in the next performance), and that only cinematic fiction is still on. The stage or theatre corpse can rise from the dead only in the next film.”Die Größe von Cassavetes’ Werk besteht gerade darin, dass es die Geschichte, die Intrige oder Handlung, ja sogar den Raum hinter sich lässt, um zu Verhaltensweisen im Sinne von Kategorien vorzudringen, die die Zeit in den Körper ebenso wie das Denken in das Leben hineinversetzen. Wenn Cassavetes sagt, dass die Figuren ihren Ausgangspunkt weder in der Geschichte noch in der Intrige haben dürfen, dass dem gegenüber die Geschichte aus den Figuren hervorgehen muss, dann nimmt er die Forderung nach einem Kino des Körpers auf: die Figur ist auf ihre eigenen körperlichen Verhaltensweisen reduziert, und was daraus hervorgehen soll, ist der Gestus, das heißt ein „Schauspiel“, eine Theatralisierung oder Dramatisierung, die jede Intrige aufwiegt. (in: Gilles Deleuze, Das Zeit-Bild, Kino 2)
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A PERFECT PLACE TO DIE
In the previous section, we were building our interpretation on the way Hitchcock shot the play scene in Murder! We particularly stressed the moment when the camera ‚jumps’ all of a sudden to the ‚bird’s-eye view’. In the next scene, this dizzy height will be given a new, retroactive meaning: it will appear to be the virtual point of the murderer’s death. It is exactly the height chosen by Fane as the place to commit suicide. Fane’ suicide is the moment in Murder! that rather dilutes and diminishes Sir John’s final triumph. It is, in the strict sense of the word, the image that makes all other images to fade in comparison. Moreover, it is the moment of Fane’s ‚moral victory’ over Sir John. One can illuminate this with a digression into the theory of an (ethical) act, the theory developed by Kant that could be related to some concepts of Lacanian psycho-analysis. The first key point of Kant’s theory of pure ethical act lies in the distinction between the act that is done only in accordance with duty and the one that is done exclusively from duty. Only the latter is ethical in the strict sense. One may act in accordance with duty because of various personal interests; one want to avoid inconvenience, one wants others to have a good opinion of oneself, one expects a benefit, and so forth. For Kant, any such action is pathological, and although it is done in accordance with duty, it is never an ethical act. The ethical act is only the one done exclusively from duty. First of all, this means that the act in the strict sense has no exterior: its foundation must always be an auto-, self-foundation. An act could not occurr on the basis of reasons that are external to it (our inner impulses and motives also belong to such reason). It can arise only from itself as identical with the moral law, otherwise it is ‚non-pure’, ‚pathological’, not an act in the proper sense of the word. On the other hand, an act has no exterior in the sense that all its effects, consequences – everything that comes after – must be abstracted and put in brackets. In an act there is no after. This is what Kant repeats tirelessly: an act is beyond all criteria of usefulness, efficiency and suchlike; it is – to use Kant’s own metaphor – a jewel that glitters by itself and bears all its value in itself. What counts is only an act without a purpose outside itself, confining the purpose to itself, being the only purpose of its own realization – being, so to say, ‚a purposeless act’. If we act to achieve this or that, it is not an act. Ultimately, an act is only a by-product of itself. It represents something absolutely firm, albeit groundless. It is the point of absolute firmness and certainty that floats in emptiness: it is ‚in itself’. From: Alenka Zupancic, A Perfect Place to Die, in: Slavoj Zizek, What You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan and Never Dared to Ask Hitchcock. |
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Credits
CRASH SITE / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot (A / D, 69 min., 2010)A FILM BY CONSTANZE RUHM
HARI Judith van der Werff • NANA Irina Castrinidis • JULIAN Dominic Oley • DEAD HARI1 Erika Hasselberg • DEAD HARI2 Gudrun Gut • MAKE UP GIRL Dana Bieler • SCRIPT / DIRECTOR Constanze Ruhm • ASSISTENT DIRECTOR / CAMERA DIRECTION Christine Lang • CONCEPUTAL ADVISOR Fareed Armaly • DRAMATURGICAL ADVISOR Sebastian Huber • DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Dirk Lütter • ASSISTENT D.O.P.1 Eduardo Lopes • ASSISTANT D.O.P.2 / GRIP Lukas Heistinger • SOUND Titus Maderlechner • SOUND ASSISTANT Stephan Koethe • LIGHTING Mathias Becker • LIGHTING ASSISTANT Falk Minkner • EDITING Christine Lang • COLOR CORRECTION Dirk Lütter • MUSIC Ekkehard Ehlers • IMPROVISATION • Subcontrabassflute / Viola da Gamba: Eva Reiter • Bass: Werner Dafeldecker • AUDIOPOSTPRODUCTION Titus Maderlechner • PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Kerstin Brandes • COSTUME Regina Möller / embodiment • COSTUME ASSISTANT Simone Simon • SPECIAL COSTUMES Zarra Kostüm Berlin • MAKE UP Dana Bieler • PRODUCTION DESIGH Judith Rudolf • PRODUCTION DESIGN ASSISTANTS Sabine Balzer • Nico Ihlein • SFX PROPS Beate Kelm • GRAPHIC DESIGN Maia Fleur / Felicitas Müller • SET PHOTOGRAPHY Lukas Heistinger / Julia Lazarus • STILL PHOTOGRAPHY Matthias Herrmann • CATERING Juliane Damminger / Amrei Karsch / Julia Lazarus / Martina Lunzer / Lisa Ruszczynski • SET ASSISTANCE Thomas Strege • BABYSITTER Ulla Piratzki / Erika Hasselberg • DRIVER Jennifer Mattes • TRANSLATION / PROOF READING Allyn Hardyck • TEAM VIENNA Friedemann Derschmidt / Bettina Henkel • TECHNICAL SUPPORT Friedemann Derschmidt / Richard Hilbert
QUOTES
Alexandra • Michelangelo Antonioni • Emily Brontë • Judith Butler • Edith Clever • Gilles Deleuze • Rainer Werner Fassbinder • Michel Foucault • Jean-Luc Godard • Robert Hamster • G. W. F. Hegel • The IT Crowd • Immanuel Kant • Alexander Kluge • Jacques Lacan • Sergio Leone • Joni Mitchell • Iggy Pop • Julia Roberts • William Shakespeare • The Sopranos • Andrej Tarkovsky • Thomas Thurman • Westwing • Slavoj Žižek
THANK YOU
Fareed Armaly • Cinegate Berlin • Christa Blümlinger • Sabeth Buchmann • Diedrich Diederichsen • Christoph Dreher • Andrea Ecker • Gudrun Gut • Thomas Fehlmann • Filmmuseum Wien • Anselm Franke • Anna-Sophie Fünfstück • Nanna Heidenreich • Bettina Henkel • Matthias Herrmann • Tom Holert • Denis Jashin • Serdal Karaça • Mikis Kastrinidis • Marietta Kesting • René Kohn • Gerd Kroske • Jürgen Kuttner • Christine Lang • Dorit Margreiter • Barbara Morgenstern • POLE • Elisabeth & Bubu Ruhm • Christian Tjaben • Eva-Maria Stadler • Volksbühne Berlin • the residents and neighbors of Gut Sterhagen
Very Special Thanks to Felicitas Thun Hohenstein
Sponsored by
FUJINON • CINEGATE • AUTAN
Supported by
Kulturamt der Niederösterreichischen Landesregierung
Kulturamt der Stadt Wien
Österreichisches Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien
Shot on location at Gut Sterhagen, Nordwestuckermark, 2009