X NaNa / Subroutine: INSERT

"X NaNa..." (2004) was developed as a subroutine to the original program, "X Characters / RE(hers)AL". It represents the first of a planned series of character spin-offs. In "X Characters / RE(hers)AL", the figure of "X" laid out the original position marks of the seven women. Through "X NaNa / Subroutine", "X" signifies a newly created interstitial space in the closed narrative of the film Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard 1962), and at the same time points towards a subsequent production called "X Love Scenes". In this next production which will be realized in 2005/6, the marker "X" turns into a projection surface for a new version of the character of Giuliana from Michelangelo Antonioni's Il deserto rosso (1964), which is split into three sub-characters. (1964).

Insert

In "X NaNa / Subroutine", the character NaNa is long since free (by her own devices) from the dead end originally offered her within the film Vivre sa vie. In the new work, Nana becomes NaNa: she is transformed into a contemporary version of the original Godardian character. NaNa works as a sales girl in a record store, to avoid falling back to her former illicit activities that among others included data-bootlegging. Things get complicated when a former colleague-in-trade pays her a surprise visit. He presents a job "with her name written all over it". NaNa appears to reluctantly accept the commission, in order to ensure that she remains free on her terms while she confronts her Godardian heritage. She performs one last data-search, in order to locate her original "source code", the film Vivre sa vie, whose resolution demands her character's death.

NaNa is the first character emerging from the original template of "X Characters / RE(hers)AL" with a new story. NaNa creates and keeps open a new space in the closed conventions of the Godardian narrative. She does so to establish a condition that will allow for the next productions of each character to define their relations within, and all mediated through the "X". Thus her role in the overall program is also to chart and indicate a sense of spatiality required for the program series of fellow X-characters still to come. Thus, Nana is at the origin of a series of contemporary narratives, each scripted specifically for each one of the six other characters. The syntax of the program "X Characters..." is developed out of a weave of relations that is closer to a networked space in behavior and operation. NaNa also foregrounds that which all other characters desire as well. By conveying her illicitness as "freedom", she suggests the potential for independence, so directed in force as to enable her to alter even her own original script.

Cinema Muse-alogy

Installation views X NaNa / Subroutine: INSERT, Engholm Engelhorn Gallery Vienna (2005)

In his article "Why the Digital Computer is Dead", author Chris Chesher points out that there exists a cultural continuity between the ritual of invocation and the execution of digital commands. Chesher describes digital program routines as quasi-magical refrains, as contemporary echoes of the ancient cultural form of invocations as "calls for assistance", typically addressed to a Muse.

Hollis Frampton, one of the seminal American avantgarde filmmakers of the Sixties (thus a contemporay of Godard) suggested that "cinema has finally attracted its own muse." Her name: Insomnia. Framptons first film dating from the year 1962 (the same year that Vivre sa vie was released), was called Clouds Like White Sheep, and is believed to be lost. Cloud formations evoking the outlines of sheep remind one at the same time of the popular technique of sheep-counting in order to bring about sleep. Insomnia, cinema's new muse, attempts to prevent that - this is why all that is left to the filmmaker is to record those ephemeral sheep formations on celluloid: in a startling turn, Frampton's lost film appears to be an invocation of the muse of cinema.

In order to regain control of her destiny, the character of NaNa claims to be Mnemosyne - mother of the nine muses, goddess of memory, and according to Greek mythology married to Zeus, the god of commands. Thus, NaNa / Mnemosyne activates the original myth to articulate and chart a space emerging at the intersection of new media and cinema worlds; a cosmos oriented towards the coordinates of "command" and "memory", between "Zeus" and "Mnemosyne" - a world emerging from digital operations and mythological invocations.

Mnemosyne guards human memories as well. In analogy to an understanding of "cinema" as a storage device and cultural archive, NaNa / Mnemosyne becomes Insomnia, the muse of cinema, as well. She invokes - falling back to her original story - a past "partly forgotten", altering it so she can continue to exist. She introduces a new spatiality siginfied by the "X" as an unknown constant. As a marker in the system, the "X" from "X NaNa..." points to that interstitial space of interruption produced by NaNa, and as shifting signifier in turn re-defines and links the other character's relations and their narratives with each other.

"X NaNa / Subroutine" is an identity play as filmic insert. In order to establish a spatiality, the production searches for a syntax within and outside of conventions proposed by modernist cinema as well as "postmodern" New Media. Thus the film recounts the story of X NaNa's existence as a movement from symptom to trope, from film character to the mythological figure of Mnemosyne, and finally, to a contemporary movie character: "X NaNa / Subroutine" tells the story of an identity always in flux.

Credits

NaNa: Annika Kuhl / Jean-Luc Godard: Hans Michael Rehberg / Herman: Gary Wilmes / Bewährungshelfer: Harun Farocki / G. / Melpomene: Judith van der Werff / Empfangsdame: Cornelia Heyse / Autofahrer: Alexis Bug / Kunde: Diedrich Diedrichsen / Musen: Judith Barry, Tina Berning, Aki Fujiyoshi, Katrin Heller, Rebecca Herrmann, Christiane Hitzemann, Regina Möller, Juliane Rebentisch

Script Advisor: Fareed Armaly / Consultant: Rainer Kirberg

BERLIN UNIT Kamera: Jörg Jeshel / 2nd Unit / Licht: Martin Langner / Ton: Matthias Schurz, Stefan Koethe / Kostüm: Max Wohlkönig / Make Up: Rebecca Herrmann / Soundtracks / Mixes: Otto Kränzler / NaNaNa-Music Research: Christian Tjaben / Setfotos: Kai von Rabenau

VIENNA UNIT Kamera: Amir Esmann / Ton: Peter Czack / Tonassistenz: Peter Holzinger / Licht: Harald Staudach / Aufnahme & Produktionsleitung: Klaus Forsthuber / Produktionsassistenz: Andrea Salzmann / Kostüm: Ingrid Winkler, Peter Holzinger / Make Up: Maria Becker / Schnitt: Ilse Buchelt / Assistenz: Doris Felsner / Postproduktion: OFFLINE Audiopostproduktion: Klaus Kobald / Production Graphics: Dodo Brunialti