Digibeta, 30 min, color, sound
X NaNa / Subroutine
 |
| Annika Kuhl as NaNa in X NaNa / Subroutine (2004) |
 |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  | |
| Setphotos of the shoot X NaNa / Subroutine (Vienna, Berlin) | ||||
X NaNa / Subroutine is the first of a series of planned character-spinoffs from the feature-lenght production X Characters / RE(hers)AL. Its script is developed as a subroutine to the overall X Characters... as program, which drew female characters from a set of existing films from auteur through modernist to Hollywood mainstream to be continued as new characters/voices.
 |  |
| Annika Kuhl as Nana in X Characters / RE(hers)AL (2003); Anna Karina as Nana in Vivre sa vie (1962) | |
The character of NaNa refers to the Godard film Vivre sa vie (F 1962). In this new production, NaNa is faced with the dilemma of confronting her heritage - the director Godard who searches for her, and her 'source code', the film Vivre sa vie. She attempts to make a legitimate income as sales girl in a record store, to avoid falling back to her former illicit activities as a data-bootleger. With the surprise entrance of a former colleague-in-trade, and his offer of a job "with her name written all over it", she finds herself on the verge of being caught within a scenario she vowed never to return to. She decides to undertake actions which produce a technological detour/derive that creates a narrative ellipsis moving in two opposite directions. By refusing the ordained ending she resolves her fate on her own terms, producing a loop which only she is able to break.
Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged. (Laura Mulvey) |
 |
 |
| above: Layout for the book cover, below left: Installation view ceiling ornament X NaNa / Subroutine, Kunsthalle Bern (2004), below right: Prop in X NaNa / Subroutine |
Throughout the movie X NaNa - Subroutine, NaNa carries with her a book that carries her name, its cover imprinted with a classicist ornament, a symbol representing the sun. Adapted from the same motive seen above in the Kunsthalle skylight, it symbolizes light and further, projection. As an architectural element of the glass ceiling, it marks off cosmos and earthly realms, and weaves together interior and exterior thus establishing a seamless architectural continuity.
This book that NaNa carries in the film returns to become a new architectural element within the exhibition, here scaled up to a free-standing wall display. On one side, the book jacket frames the actual film presentation. On the other, the language of the shot is framed by the movement of the book through a scene in the film. For this, the vitrine is enlisted, its structure unfolded and turned inside-out to become a layout for a presentational format.
 | |  |
| Installation views X NaNa / Subroutine, Kunsthalle Bern (2004) | ||
The wall unit thus represents a hyphen between the exhibition spaces and the scripts of the different works. It becomes an interface joining architecture and story, vitrine and object of display in a tautological turn. X NaNa / Subroutine tells of a character's movement through the empty cores of the contemporary media world. It recounts the story of her existence as a movement from symptom to trope to Mnemosyne and finally, to a contemporary movie character.
Continuity / Shot and Countershot
I now know that there exists another punctum (another "stigmatum") than the "detail". This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme ("that-has-been"), its pure representation. (...) The studium is a term for the interest which we show in a photograph, the desire to study and understand what the meanings are in a photograph, to explore the relationship between the meanings and our own subjectivities. The punctum is more about the sudden recognition of meaning, the unexpected, it "shoots out of [the photograph] like an arrow" and pierces me. (Roland Barthes) |  |
| from the titles of Vivre sa vie (1962) (manipulated stills) | |
In cinema, the continuity principle provides a seamless, spatially and temporally coherent narrative. The editing is kept invisible and thus, the film does not draw attention to the way in which the story is told. Continuity is required to provide cinema's reality-effect. As it is precisely in the relation of a shot to a countershot where something "off" or "interrupted" will first be detected, "continuity" is a management form of cinematic representational politics.
Within a post-war investigation of cinematic conventions, Godard's 1960s films appear as a challenge to the codes of mainstream cinema as an emblem of representational politics, which - as an inscribed signature - increasingly destabilize the conventions of spatial-temporal-narrative continuity. In the early Godard film Vivre sa vie (1962) this becomes evident in the film's structure in the form of 12 disconnected "tableaux" focusing on the character, Nana, and her descent into prostitution. Her reality constructed within the film leads to the final scene and her death.
 | |  |
| Installation views X NaNa / Subroutine, Kunsthalle Bern (2004; still from Vivre sa vie (1962) | ||
X NaNa / Subroutine foregrounds a new generation of "Nana's" where the enquiry of representational politics is informed by processes of a history of New Media and "identity scripting processes". As a re-engineered version, the character NaNa claims that she herself is continuity. This claim provides psychological detours that suspend the original Vivre sa vie character's conclusion, and sets the course to her actions. She makes use of her book - an empty script -, wielding it like a heraldic signifier to interrupt continuity and set course to her action. With this herald / symbol / ornament / book, NaNa strikes at the plot itself. She creates an interstitial moment, and cuts a new narrative opening to chart out the path of her intention as a trace of a "directional" as well as "directorial" movement.
The spline can be regarded as the diagram of divergent trajectories, like that of the metropolitan flaneur, or of the words in a text. The baroque stylistic figures used so intensively by Ponge, such as amplification, the hyperbole, variations and repetitions, the use of single and double parentheses, the sudden changes of direction and retractions, can be regarded as the hanging weights that determine the form of the trajectory of the object/concept in interaction with its environment. (...) The spline can refer to the trajectory of an object, but also to the trajectory of that object in space and time. (Jon Verstegen)This instance marks a "punctum", the sudden appearance of a new meaning: a moment in which NaNa re-engineers her identity as a split subject in order to advance the narrative along two distinct curves of fluctuation. Through this action, she joins with the book in an arrested dual figure of "character" and "ornament". It is precisely here that the movie character's transformation becomes visible - from Nana to NaNa, from mere repetition towards functional difference.
If you choose to show a woman's gestures so precisely, it's because you love them. (Chantal Akerman) |  |  |  |  |
 |  | |||
| Sequences from X NaNa / Subroutine | ||||
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 Camera: Jörg Jeshel / 2nd Unit / Light: Martin Langner / Sound: Matthias Schurz, Stefan Koethe / Costume Design: Max Wohlkönig / Make Up: Rebecca Herrmann / Soundtracks / Mixes: Otto Kränzler / NaNaNa-Music Research: Christian Tjaben / Setphotography: Kai von Rabenau
VIENNA UNIT Camera: Amir Esmann / Sound: Peter Czack / Sound Assistant: Peter Holzinger / Light: Harald Staudach / Production Manager: Klaus Forsthuber / Production Assistant: Andrea Salzmann / Costume Design: Ingrid Winkler, Peter Holzinger / Make Up: Maria Becker / Editing: Ilse Buchelt / Assistant: Doris Felsner / Post Production: OFFLINE Audio Post Production: Klaus Kobald / Production Graphics: Dodo Brunialti
Essays
Jean-Louis Baudry: Ideologische Effekte erzeugt vom Basisapparat (1970)
Jonathan Beller: The Cinematic Mode of Production (2003)
Chris Chesher: Why the Digital Computer is Dead (2002)
Harun Farocki / Kaja Silverman: Nana is an Animal (1998)
Harun Farocki: Schuss-Gegenschuss: Der wichtigste Ausdruck im Wertgesetz Film (2001)
Stephen Heath: Film, System, Narrative (1981)
Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)
Phillip Roe: That-which-new media studies-will-become (2003)
Script
X NaNa / Subroutine (german version)
 |