La Jetee (The Jetty)
Chris Marker
1962
La Jetee is an experimental short film by Chris Marker which tells the story of experiments in time travel in a post apocalyptic world.
The film is made entirely out of black and white still images, some how the lack of colour makes the images seem more charged, or hold more gravitas. This is something I have discovered within my own video work, the images which are black and white seem much more appealing and power than those in colour. It could be that in a world of colour, black and white becomes a much rarer, sentimental thing.
Muffled operatic music, as though played on a gramophone eerily evokes music is used in holocaust films, such as Schindler’s List. At several times long moments of blackness are used, causing suspense and tension. Several background noises are used like heartbeats, electrical hums and whispering noises, leaving the viewer anxious and tense. All these factors, though not relevant with my current filmic works, inspire me, and open up areas of explorations for future projects.
Though the images are still, they shake and move very subtly, almost restlessly, like a home video. This makes the imagery seem alive emmerising the viewer in the moment and the story Chris Marker presents.
The transition between frames in this film is choppy, similar to my own films, it makes the story seem more stark and honest, it is not beautiful, because neither is a post apocalyptic world, and it terms of my work, it is not beautiful, because it is the truth of humanity.
The narrator refers to the films’ protagonist simply as “the man”, this creates a level of detachment, and depersonalisation, it adds a level of coldness, the narrator simply stating the facts as they ‘happened’ with out judgement or feeling. This is what makes La Jetee seem much more like an archival document, it adds realism, it is though it is a documentary telling a story of long ago, the characters names lost in time.
Maeve Connolly
Souvenirs of Spectacle
This essay by Maeve Connolly considers the spectale of artist moving image in reference to Finola Jone’s ‘Artifically Reconstructed Habitats’. Though the article is heavily focussed upon Jones’ work, some quotes that partain to my own practice can be extracted.
Connolly briefly discusses collecting;
‘[…] the collection, which tends to “replace history with classification”‘
In many ways, my archive rebels against this idea which Connolly presents. It is the human condition to make order out of chaos, to ‘file away’ or classify those things, what ever they may be which upset us, or we find distasteful, that our minds simply cannot ‘compute’. These ‘things’ then lie collated, collected and ignored in the back of our minds. It is the aim of my archive to bring these uncomfortable truths to the forefront of our minds, to acknowledge them, and face them, in some sort of justice to those depicted.
This essay also discusses the idea of the ‘Big Brother phenomenon’,
this is something I have inadvertently exploring through out my work for over a year. My previous project examined the daily newspapers, creating a cross-section of what they present, the voyeuristic nature of the paparazzi overshadowing the important news of the world. This phenomenon is certainly continued into my current work, we do not feel wrong gawping at ever facet of a celebrities life, watching them fall apart before our eyes, through mental break down, and drug abuse, often caused by our incessant need to know about their lives. We, who in all other facets of our lives are so keen to stare and watch, however, feel wrong observing lives’ truths when they are presented to us, therefore I hope my films might give perspective to the flaws in our popular culture.
http://www.maeveconnolly.net/publications.html
Una Walker – The Surveiller Project
Artist Una Walker spent 128 days, approximately 1,280 hours, producing an inventory of art exhibitions in Belfast from March 1968 to March 2001. The chronology, presented on gallery walls, and as a searchable database in an office, attempts to document the length, type, title, venue and media source of every artist’s show. Surveiller is ‘just a list’, but like many things that are ‘just lists’ it creates and communicates power structures and opposes the experience of those ‘who were there at the time’ with larger and longer patterns. (From a calatogue essay by Becky Shaw)
Una Walkers work highlights to me the power of the collection or the archive. Alone, one image/object/document is *only* one image/object/document, but when collected together with other like pieces and presented together, it becomes something much more. I think it is this transition in status, that an archive gives to an item that fascinates me so much. Certainly this added status is something I feel my archive is starting to hold, the images I have selected are poweful in their own right, but drawn together in a short film, they seem to have a haunting effect. Viewers lose themselves in the macabre imagery and reflect and remember the events they have lived through.
Hito Steyerl, ICA,
How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV
How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV (Excerpt)
Hito Steyerl’s work ‘How not to be seen’ concerns itself with;
‘[…] the mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge brought on by digital technnologies’ (Kuan Wood)
How not to be seen lesson five, centers itself around ways to hide. It examines the illusions of the digital world, how everything we see and absorb, can be altered or edited, so we rarely see things as they originally are. This is something I can connect to in terms of my own practice, it is one of the reasons I think my video work is so uncomfortable to watch. In the modern digital age, we are so used to censorship, to hardships being altered to aid our consumption. We are also used to seeking out only the aspects which we wish to; we can hear about something from the news which interests us, and Google straight to the specific article we require, with out having to see any other news of the day. Therefore, it is rare that we are confront with such graphic imagery that is so hard to fathom, even though it is easily accessible on the web. In this way, both my own work and Hito Steyerl’s become an experience of disillusionment.
In this film, Steyerl presents the music video of The Three Degrees’, ‘When Will I See You Again’ in both animation and the videos original form, at one point in the film, the two forms flick between one another, suggestive of how engrossed and lost we can become in the digital world, and also how everyday life is rapidly becoming digitised. It gives us perspective upon how detached from reality we can often become, we would much rather hide in a world of fantasy than the world in which we live. This is something I have very much attempted to tackle within my work the stark images I present break all connection with this fantasy land, it forces us to face the realities of history, and of the modern world.
In a similar way to my own films, Steyerl’s work features silent text annotations, which create a fantasy narrative, we read sentences such as “U.S. Airforce drops glitter from a stealth helicopter.” To me, these kinds of statements really hint at the meaningless of the digital age. Often we don’t see or know what is happening/happened (particularly with celebrities) yet if a magazine or website states something, no matter how ludicrous, we almost immediately tend to believe it. Yet, when we are presented with Hito Steyerl’s fact-less annotations, we find such statements laughable, why? This is something about art upon which conflicts or comments upon society/the everyday that I have always found fascinating, it has an almost magical ability to inject scrutiny upon even the most banal things we see in our day to day lives.
Sigalit landau, Barbed Hula, 2000
Like my video works, this two minute long video by Sigalit Landau is very uncomfortable to watch. The work, entitled Barbed Hula, shows the artist nude, hula hooping with a hoop made of barbed wire. With each rotation the wire cuts her flesh, and you find yourself looking at the video timer, to see how much longer you must endure, whilst at the same time, you cannot look away. I find this very similar to the way in which my video works are digested by viewers, with each fragment of text that is revealed, realisation grows, and with each flash of the image the discomfort grows.
In this work Landau responds to the delicate social issue of conflict in the Middle East, directly, inflicting physical pain upon her body. I can empathise with responding so personally to such an emotive subject, as working so closely with horrific imagery has been challenging and upsetting at the best of times.
Theresa Margolles
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/teresa_margolles/
Theresa Margolles is a Mexican artist who uses corpses as a medium to express the macabre nature of the world. In her work she’ll use water which bodies have been washed with, or blood, and even in one piece, the 1999 work, entitled Burial, the body of a still born child. Her work naturally receives a mixed reception, from shock and horror, to morbid curiousity and tender mourning.
Margolles’ work puts our day to day life into perspective, we are reminded of our own mortality, and also of death as a subject, with all which it connotes, which leave many viewing the work as distasteful. An article from Frieze questions this abjection to Margolles work;
How are we, then, not appalled that the same water washes from autopsy rooms into the drains and is recycled into tap-water? (Coulson, 2004)
In a similar way, the way in which my work reacts and responds to death also gives perspective, a moment of reflection, as we consider our own actions and our our experiences and mortality. My work similarly questions; How is it that we are so shocked and saddened by these collected images, when such attrocities happen in the present day and goes unnoticed?
[…] Margolles, who works only with the bodies of those that suffered a violent death, wants to rescue them from invisibility. (Couldson, 2004)
This paralells my own work, and reasons behind why I created the work, once I saw such horrific and sad imagery, that seemed to have been forgotten by history, I felt compelled to rescue them, and reshare all they represent, as uncomfortable as that may be.
This discomfort also includes my own, in working with the heavily charged imagery, it is not a cathartic experience, for a time it soothes, but then the reminder that there is nothing you can do to change what has happened sets in, and you end up feeling unresolved and restless. This is something which Theresa Margolles feels as Coulson states;
The artist herself is clearly haunted by the production of these works. They are not a catharsis for the poverty and violence she witnesses; they are the production of mourning. (Coulson,2004)
Lisa Byrne
The Taxi Trilogy
Taxi III “Stand Up and Cry Like a Man”
This three minute film by Lisa Byrne shows Northern Irish taxi drivers recollecting their experience of surviving paramilitary attacks during the 1980’s and the 1990’s.
The fact that the retellings come from the mouths of ordinary everyday people, makes the film seem much more sincere and honest, there is no detachment, so present in the films of Marker and Steyerl, we empathise directly.
The subtitles give clarity to the drivers uncomfortable recollections, it adds a feel of the documentary to the film, giving the simple conversations gravity and seriousness.
Parallels could be drawn between Taxi III and my own film, in the way that each time you return to one of the narrators in this film, you learn something more of their story, as within my film, the still image is understood with each section of text.
Doug Fishbone
Doug Fishbone’s installation, video and performance works place the viewer in an awkward position where we are forced to explore our interpretative resources. In previous videos and performances the artist ransacked the internet and mostly Google Image Search – to illustrate and undermine his arresting, repulsive and undeniably amusing monologues on contemporary media and our cultural, social and political (sub)life. His work weaves elaborate narrative and visual tapestries from familiar freely found imagery that question the way information is presented, manipulated and processed in the current cultural and visual landscape. Interested in the politics of representation the artistís monologues constantly shift, narrating grey areas between our perceived notions of fact and fiction, myth and propaganda, comedy and advertising. (Rokeby)
Sadly I could not find any of Doug Fishbones video work/performances online, but from the quote I can still see the connections to my practice. In terms of sourcing my image, I purposely only selected imagery that was widely available on popular culture/popular websites such as Pinterest and Google. My work too questions the nature of the imagery I present, and questions how they are so readily available, yet go unnoticed.
EthicalStatements
With the sensitive nature of the imagery I have used in my work, it is import I have a strong ethical and moral standpoint, I have already ascertained the work must be carefully handled and completely non-profit, but I am now researching the issue more deeply to consolidate my standpoint in producing my work.
Google
“Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. […] But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably and treating each other with respect.
[…]
Google is committed to advancing privacy and freedom of expression for our users around the world.
I found these two statements, which appeared in Googles ethical policy interesting, as they seem to conflict one another, you cannot give people freedom of speech with out the possibility of those using such to be “evil”. It also makes me on the complex moral stand point of not “being evil” yet displaying ‘evil’ so freely, does this then create some sort of moral purity on the behalf of google, in terms of displaying ‘evil’ as a preventative measure against ‘evil’.
Ethical Limits in Documentary Photography
This article discusses the ethical limitations of documentary photograph, in relation to Kevin Carters infamous 1993 image, ‘Struggling Girl’. The image cause a furor due to the moral standpoint the photographer had taken in capturing the image, Carter waited twenty minutes for vulture to be close enough, and once the iconic image was taken, he did not help the young girl he had captured.
This essay suggests four elements which should conform to an ethical code for documentary practitioners;
1. The ethical position in the discourse of their photograph.
2. The aesthetic representation of such ethical position.
3. The ehthical practice in the production of their photographs.
4. The way in which their work is displayed and presented to the public.
Certainly I have applied some of these factors where relevant to my video work, factors 1, 2, 3, certainly have helped form a methodology for the production of my films, in terms of the imagery I select, and how I use them. All my imagery for example is in the public domain, and has been sourced by myself from such, they all predate 1990, and most predate 1965, meaning there has been years of healing, in terms of the public reception of the image. All images which I have used have at least a sentence of provenance presented upon the image section of this website, meaning their stories are not lost, diluted or altered in anyway by myself.
Factor 4 becomes relevant within my ethical standpoint, I have created a rigid structure for how my works should be presented. A very key point for myself in this, was that neither I or a gallery/dealer would profit in any way in the exchange of my work, and that it must be free to view at all times.
‘In terms of the aesthetic representation of the photograph, what is requested in this case from the photojournalist in order to act ethically would be to show reality as it is, that is, to show the truth without manipulation’
This factor is something I became aware of in the early stages of my project, when experimenting with altering some of my imagery from colour to black and white, to create visual uniformity. This altered the imagery, romaniticising it, which was something from an ethical standpoint I was very keen to avoid.
This article also discusses the need for;
‘[…] a personal moral attitude towards the respect for the human being, their work, and their culture.’
This is certainly something which I have experienced, it was down to respect that caused my current practice to exist. During research for the project I thought I was going to create, I started finding all these heavily charged imagery, which I felt compelled to work with and explore, out of respect for those depicted.
‘Finally, the way in which the work is displayed and presented to the public is also crucial in order to judge whether the practitioner’s attitude was or not ethical. If the aim of photojournalism and documentary photographers is that of “creatively informing” society about current issues and condemn certain attitudes that could conform the absence or violation of Human Rights, it would be their duty then to try and communicate such a reality to the largest group of spectators as possible, trying not to turn the subject matter into something banal due to an inappropriate way of showing the work. ‘
I definitely agree with this statement, which is why I decided to publish my work within this website, so it is available to all who search for it. It also led me to specify with in my declaration of ethics that the work my be available to all, in galleries and institution which allow free entry, and when not exhibited it must be displayed, free to view on their websites, meaning my work would be able to reach an optimum amount of viewers. I also state that the work must either be exhibited alone, or with works of a like theme, i.e. an exhibition about war, it must never be exhibited merely to be present as a name which draws in crowds.
The article finishes with a quote which I feel echoes my practice, and also the reasoning behind the need for such graphic or upsetting imagery to be taken;
‘According to Eduard Steichen, “The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself”.’
These photographs are taken to educate, to remove the world’s rose-tinted glasses, and force us to face the realities of humanity, with the fragile hope, that the mistakes they reveal, may never be repeated.
Archiver 