On Location 1

image from 'Image Description' by Martin Blazicek

Martin Blazicek brought a collection of films from Prague to last week’s Lux Salon (Martin Blazicek & Recent Works from Prague, Lux Salon, 23rd November 2005), not all necessarily Czech films but works by filmmakers who have spent some time in the city.

The first film ‘Screen Hatching’ (5 mins, 2005, silent, colour, 16mm, Czech Republic) is by Ondrej Vavrecka, a student of Australian artist Marcus Bergner who spent a year teaching at the FAMU film school in Prague. ‘Screen Hatching’, Blazicek explained, is a not very good translation of the Czech, ‘priming’ or ‘preparation’ might be better words suggesting as they do, the preparation of a canvas prior to painting. The screen in question is not so much literally the area of fabric on which projection is to be focused, as it is the conceptual screen that ‘contains’ the image. Vavrecka prepared for the screen by determining camera movements in advance so that each frame is a single camera movement: up, down, left, right. The programme notes tell us that the film was then shot during a walk around the small village of Lidice that was completely destroyed by the Nazi army during the war. Through the fast colour fields of the blurs it is possible to read the fleeting images of fields, sky, trees, building, the sensation of movement is simultaneously and paradoxically discombobulating and energising.

The rigour and energy of the ‘Screen Hatching’ (‘Priming’/’Preparation’) makes it a fine example of structuralism, as well as an interesting impressionistic landscape film. While its processes have more than a passing relationship to the concerns of Michael Snow’s ‘Back and Forth’ and 'La Region Centrale', it also reminded me of the paradoxical nature of the structuralist project as it was manifested in the London Filmmakers’ Co-op in the 70s, particularly in terms of its relationship with landscape.

In so many films from the height of the structuralist period there was an intentionally problematic relationship with notions of representation and reproduction of location and spatiality. Many of these films, such as those by Chris Welsby, David Parsons, John Blake, Malcolm Le Grice, et al, were theorised in terms of the structuralist project by Peter Gidal. His theories are well documented and don’t need going into in great detail here, but much of them are spent engaged with the issue of ‘problematising’ the ‘pro-filmic’ (the subject or object in front of the camera) and its relationship to the viewer, duration, shape, of the film, the viewing experience, an analysis of just about everything to do with the universal context of viewing of the film, except, one sometimes suspects, the actual external reality of the thing in itself photographed – which is of course central to the problem anyway as it exists only as a representation, and representation is problematic... Of course there are good reasons for serious consideration of the ‘problem’ of photographic representation in moving images, something that Gidal might place within the realm of the “artifice and ideology of meaning” (see his book ‘Materialist Film’, 1989, for much, much more of this). But with Gidal one suspects that he was equally fetishising the meaning of representation by problematising it. I was in attendance at the premiere screening of his most recent film at the RCA a few years ago and in the ten minute parenthetical sentence that it took Gidal to introduce the film, one thing he insisted upon was that the location where the film was shot was inconsequential. The film is called ‘Volcano’ (25mins, 2003, colour, 16mm, UK) and in sweeping, rather lovely, flowing fluid landscape snatches, we do indeed catch glimpses of an impressive looking geophysical structure that does indeed closely resemble what I imagine a volcano might look like had I ever been in sight of one in the real world (and continually moved my head and occasionally closed my eyes for a couple of minutes at a time). But why this flippant reluctance to identify the place? I suspect for fear that by locating it geographically the attention goes back to the pro-filmic, the viewer might decide that here is an object worthy of attention, as much as perhaps considerations of camera movement and representation/reproduction of the place itself. Of course not all of those of a structuralist inclination had such anxieties and many such as Welsby, William Raban and more recently structuralist influenced filmmakers like Patrick Keiller or John Smith seemed to be at home with the idea of location, identifying, or at least acknowledging it as more than just a prop to work out some structuralist phenomenological puzzle.

Recent theoretical studies have observed how representations and experiences of space and location have evolved through the developments of 20th Century media forms. In the book ‘Warped Space’ Anthony Vidler considers these in terms of psychological space, agoraphobia, claustrophobia and so on whereas Mitchell Schwartzer in ‘Zoomscape’ considers how camera technologies have altered how we perceive architecture and location. As interesting as these might be from their positions on the Western European/North American cultural axis they are in danger of falling into the trap of ignoring situatedness itself, including their own. Or at least making the assumption that the mediatedness of perception of place is a common globalised experience.

One might well imagine that in a part of the world where place, names, nationalities, ethnicities are contested, specificities such as names of places, resonances of place and significance might be considered a lot more keenly. These Prague-related films are very much situated and locational in scope. ‘The Threshold of Transcience’ (13 mins, 2004, sound, b&w, 16mm to DVD, Hungary) by Hungarian Gyula Nemes, documents three years of life on the bank of the Kopaszi Dam prior to its demolition. It is more an intuitive kind of documentary as it traces the seasonal rites of passage of a small lakeside community, the weather worn inhabitants with their dogs, cats, kids, houseboats, chopping logs, breaking ice, drinking big mugs of tea, and as the years pass we arrive at the demolition of these rudimentary dwellings. The soundtrack throughout is a recording of a travelling brass band rehearsing trying to play the Egmont Overture; its faltering attempts at a fanfare become a melancholic accompaniment to the demolition.

One of Martin Blazicek’s films is interesting in terms of relation to location. ‘Image Description’ (11 mins, 2003, sound, b&w, 16mm to DVD, Czech Rep) consists of the voices of 7 people answering questions about the way they get oriented in a city. Answering variously in Lithuanian, Czech, English, Russian, Portugese and French they describe urban areas. Blazicek describes the soundtrack as a “linguists’ operette” as the music follows the rhythm of the different languages, while the images are dark, urban, with maps, tower blocks, pedestrian street scenes, subway steps, all located in the everyday experience of living in a city. The sense of the situatedness of the respondents to the questions, heightened by their different languages, suggests a differentiation of experience, one that hints at universality while it resists globalisation and privileges specificity. Blazicek’s film is a great example of how one can approach the question of relationship with place. With its variety of languages, presented untranslated, it reminded me a little of Lisle Ponger’s ‘déjà vu’ (1999) where the clichés of far away tropical exotic places in holiday home movies are set against the untranslated observations of holiday makers.

Blazicek and Ponger have found particular answers to a question that I have often used to frame processes I’ve used in my work. That is how can one make work that explores and interrogates notions of location or place, using forms and processes driven by the media one is working in, which develops new syntaxes in that medium rather than slipping into generic forms? An example of this is in my ‘The Defenestrascope’, where an old Norfolk folk song ‘Go from my Window’ provides a lyrical reference and a musical structure within which to frame the idea of the view of cities and towns from towers. This is done in a somewhat eccentric way; it is as much whimsical and opportunistic as it is following a specific process of enquiry. It doesn’t, however, play on clichéd notions of the folksong, rather to embed it within the conception and processes of the piece, providing structure as well as semantic resonance. Of course the lynch-pin of much post-modern practice is to play (often knowingly or ironically to quote, to appropriate) with generic forms, and there is a danger in this of making a cliché of a cliché of a cliché, or to layer on the irony where there could be a more intrinsic formal relationships.

British filmmakers working in a post structuralist film practice have often applied a post-modern approach to structuralist stylisations. I am thinking particularly of the aforementioned John Smith and Patrick Keiller. Both have incorporated a highly formalised visual style, Smith’s frame is often ‘structuralist’ in composition and editing style, Keiller’s is more like conventionally composed landscape photography, both often rely on static locked-off shots. Both also make much use of voice-over, where Keiller’s redolent with slightly theatrical, ‘voice of authority’ that wouldn’t sound out of place in a television documentary, and Smith’s like a dry raconteur in a pub conversation. In both filmmakers’ work these have become stylistic devices, formal conceits that identify the makers of the film more than they are strategically formal.

In an urban milieu where relationships with place and situations is already highly mediated, and much art practice is (still) often a kind of mediation of mediation, I am interested in work that explores aspects of a relationship with space, with place, urban and rural, built and ‘natural’, movement and media, where the formal qualities of the work is integral yet the work is not just formalist, where the structure of the work has a direct relationship with what it is structuring, but is not just structuralist. I probably haven’t, and may never, achieve this in my own work. Videos such as ‘Local Authority’ and its recent update ‘ex-Local Authority’, ‘Metalogue’ and the above mentioned ‘The Defenestrascope’ embody some of these qualities. A video project that I am developing at the moment is another kind of attempt at doing this. But more of that later.