Of the 30 minutes I saw yesterday (they’ve been performing 6 hour segments over the past 3 weekends) it keeps true to their promises of “twinning” and butoh-inspired movement.  But that’s a facile description.  Yes, they’re really sisters and, yes, they have on heavy face make-up & move in seemingly non-choreographed but stylized patterns.   But there is more there than that.  An aspect of forced youth, of psychological neotony, plays at odds with the menace of their costuming & gestures.  At times they fall into tug-of-war with the knotted band that keeps the two connected but then one falls to the floor in fetal position while the other capriciously covers her with the shredded paper strewn across the space.  I’m reminded of the proto-animal environs of Eiko & Koma minus the somnambulence but with an added athleticism.

64 years ago the U.S. dropped two uranium bombs on Japan: one on Hiroshima and one on Nagasaki.  The picture above is from Hiroshima where the epicenter was 1920m away and still the shadow of the utility pipe wheel was burnt into the adjacent steel from the initial flash of the blast.  This isn’t Henry Fox Talbot, Robert Rauschenberg or Ellis G.

I grew up 30 years after this event, in the dwindling years of the Cold War, and still there was never a second that the threat of a repeat wasn’t around.  It was the biggest monster under the bed but this one actually killed 70,000 people in a second and nearly that many again over some years through its radiation’s memory.  Even now when the “players” have increased is it ever out of any of our minds?  Like the scene in Hal Hartley’s “Trust” where the then-teenage and now unforgettable, late Adrienne Shelly perks up at the dinner table with her family in Suburban Long Island and says: “Shh!  Did you hear that?  Was it The Bomb?”

This picture, from The Boston Globe’s collection up today on their site, sits disturbing and above Time, adjacent to its passing.  The light stopped and the shadow imprisoned, it feels inhuman.  We still must retain its history b/c otherwise, as they say, we forget and it repeats.  But I really think of those that have grown up here (U.S.A.) in the last 20 yrs. without a conception of an alternative to being 110% American.  Yet I think of how lucky I was to be born an American, and even further a New Yorker; the freedom that comes with that lottery win.  But it was Americans that dropped the bomb, have invaded countless countries and if they didn’t expressly “invade”, allowed money and munitions to those they could buy to exert their policy that way.  It’s an allowance to be free through supplied definitions with an inheritance of fear that is really just the fear of losing that superscribed freedom.

That’s where this picture hits me.

“At first you’re optimistic and you think you’re in a cathedral.  Then, you’re realistic and see that you’re in a snake.  And you do your work because what else is there to do but do your work?” – Ingmar Bergman

The above quote is from an interview with Bergman in the Special Features of the DVD release of Passion of Anna.  I find myself unable to stop thinking about how he references structure and it’s effect on the artistic working process; the correlations implicit in what appears quite an off-the-cuff remark seem pretty concrete.  The cathedral was historically a sanctuary meant to exist in godly proportions, for many centuries it was usually the pinacle of architectural thought and praxis.  One thing I always first notice upon approaching a cathedral are its “ribs” or flying buttresses.  They basically look almost like a rib cage and exist to maintain the dizzying height ceilings of cathedrals attain.  Thinking back to Bergman’s quote: this is the prima facie of the artistic endeavor: inside the chest of an enormous presence.  I see deep breath, space to imagine–really the experience of being in a confined but imaginatively infinite space.  From that we are brought into rebuttal of “the snake.”   A snake’s anatomy is basically all rib.  An average snake has up to 400 verterbrae each with two ribs extending on each side.  Snakes ingest prey whole and digest through enzymes secreted in their body.  I’m sure we’ve all seen one of those pictures at least one where a feeding snake takes on an eery outline of their prey their body stretched around it like latex.  Back to Bergman.  Here this space is equally vast but inverted into intense constriction.  The “realistic” area for creation exists in antithesis to the persona that creates.  In the snake the ribs (you can think of them as the threat of an un-inspiration) make the urge to create real by confrontation.  They make the need to create more immediate than a vast space would.  It is the manic space which brings one to the end game: the action confirmed solely by existence.  How can I not think of Beckett and his quote “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” at this juncture.  It’s the state every artist enters into every day.  The crisis-point of new creation.  The only exit being to relinquish all control and continue.  Continue the musical line, continue to shoot, continue the paragraph, continue the stanza.  It’s no wonder that Passion of Anna was made at an all-time low for Bergman (and THAT’s saying something!) having just split with Liv Ullmann and suffering from the dreadful failure of his previous film Shame.

photo by CGHT

The three sisters encourage even as the poisonous spider crawls down the neck of the eldest.  It will be okay.  Bent down, like a child at their skirts.  It will be okay.  There’s courage and then there’s forward movement.  It will be okay.

This is the first double play here on Wunsch Apparat but wandering over to Clayton Cubitt‘s blog, Constant Siege, today I came upon another truly amazing long portrait (check here to see my previous wax eloquence about these things). Graciella Longoria is an exquisitely beautiful photo muse/model who I first saw in Tanyth Berkeley‘s show, Grace, at Danziger Gallery earlier this Summer. It makes perfect sense that she’d sit for one of Cubitt’s long portraits. And there is an intensity in this one that is downright tumultuous (its subtitle explains, “on the first anniversary of her father’s death in a car accident”). The fourth wall is smashed into little pieces in this one. It’s gobsmacking how engaged Longoria is with the viewing and being viewed.

1) I can’t help but hope/guess he’s using one of the newer HD Video-capable DSLR’s that have found their way into the market in the last year.  The quality of image (even over a web stream) looks amazing and there’s something poetic about a photographer using a still camera to make a (literally) moving portrait.

2) The comparison to Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests is a no-brainer but this really takes a sharp turn off that highway pretty quick.  Whereas all those Factory people looked bored, strung-out or even, rarely, cognizant of what was happening they NEVER look invested, present with the camera that was before them.  I don’t know if Cubitt is intending this but in these portraits there is a dialogue going on between the sitter and the camera.  They look away, blink their eyes more than seems necessary (not in a flirtatious way but rather a slightly nervous way as if they’re thinking “did I just blink?” and they blink again just to make sure) or even smile.  I like how this references back to a still photographic portrait in that the 4th wall is broken and permeable.

3) Time.  These pieces, of course, veer far, far away from photography through their sustained moment.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t pull this back into film lore and talk about the “long shot”,  Andrei Tarkovksy and Béla Tarr, two masters at that, come immediately to mind.  For them the mise-en-scene was all important, how is the shot set up, where do the people move, how do they inhabit the space.  Whereas others might primarily sculpt a film through editing they showed through composition.  To talk about mise-en-scene with these Long Portraits would be pushing it but there definitely is a concern with how the subjects inhabit their space.  Most of them are credited as artists and as having been shot in their studio spaces.  At the most mundane level, it’s like you’re sitting in the room with them.  Looked at from another angle, you’re being allowed hints of their own creative methodology.

Spend some time with these things.  They won’t disappoint.

Photo by Teresa Isasi-Isasmendi

I just saw Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control in the city at The Angelika (which has fallen deep into the lower hells of cinema–this was the same place where I saw a midnight screening of Perry Farrell’s Gift back in my impressionable teen years.  What happened?).  The film was a strange almagam of Claire Denis’ “otherness”-aesthetic (ironically Jarmusch’s former AD!) and Hal Hartley’s discursive use of repetition but what really struck me and what I want to discuss here is what I’m calling “persona non persona”.

The lead (Isaach de Bankole pictured above) consistently portrays no emotion in his face (another tip to Hartley, although Hartley uses the monologue in contrast to the non-emotion) yet quite admirably fills the shoes of the protagonist. He barely reacts or speaks and the lines said to him (as mentioned) are often the same lines repeated by different foils but somehow the movie moves forward with a steady thrum, completely engrossing the viewer.  Having just finished a shoot for my JIVA project (more to come on that soon!) in which emotion is completely withdrawn from the subject, TLOC is intriguing because it doesn’t suffer from that “bored vapid model” look that’s deathly nor does it come off as over-earnest or contrived.

The heart of its success lies in its joining of stasis and action.  Lone Man (de Bankole’s official credit) repeats actions throughout the film: a tai-chi progression (honestly, it looks COOL and NOT cheesy), removing instructions from matchboxes given to him in repeated meetings, drinking two espressos, each in their own cup.  Taken out of context these seem to lack meaning but woven into the exchanges their intent forms a rigid (if not simplistic) and static narrative structure.  This feedback loop creates an energy (like aural feedback it can just as easily be annoying or beautiful) that is very present yet also lacks ground, lacks a “why”.  Lone Man’s stripped-down human face thus creates these vibrations by providing the variation: the human face lacking emotion.

We would normally look to the face in the above for the “why”, it would tell us why are we watching this repetition of events:  “it’s inane” or “it’s funny” or “it’s pathetic”; we would rely on the emotion of the face to close the circuit.  Here, however, we are allowed a face but no emotion.  We are given the semblance of resolution but no satisfaction of reaction.  Some might say what’s the point?  I believe, if handled well as this was, you allow the viewer to truly enter into the bargain, into the art.  They have to question the art.  And not simply to satisfy a socially-cultivated promise of discourse but to further the art piece.  They become complicit with the art.