- Some sketches based on two works seen on the same day.
MANY RIVERS (2022)
Video by Rene Matić installed at the South London Gallery for the exhibition "upon this rock".
- A high-definition digital video projected in a small room with the audience seated on church pews. Church pews: introducing a quiet feeling. Memories of church pews, a remembered space, a space for remembering. School days, church visits. A feeling of churches specific to this part of the world, difficult, uncomfortable, a strange dusty smell, cold stone, damp, unnerving. High ceilings that looked ready to collapse. The old wood of the pews, the smell of the wood. The Church of England, the continuing influence of which remains something rarely considered.
- The recurrent crucifixes in this artist's work; elsewhere in this exhibition there was a whole room of them. The crucifix is referenced here partly as a recurring symbol in skinhead culture. This use of the symbol has also received little attention.
- A strange gap. Maybe because the crucifix is such a common symbol in everyday life, so common that it is forgotten. The same for the church, the churches, and their influence in everyday life. These themes also receive little attention when featured in the work of Shane Meadows, becoming particularly prominent in the television sequels to THIS IS ENGLAND.
- Beginning: maybe a way of thinking about this video could be as a text.
- A text that is initially written by a group. This text is the accounts given by each person spoken to in the video, which are not quite framed as interviews - it's not clear what the question being asked would be, and the tone is more conversational. These conversations are the main structure of the video. Maybe the video itself is the question - a different way of asking a question, or a way of finding a question.
- The people aren't framed as talking heads as in a conventional documentary - the relationship to the filmmaker as family members is clear, and the accounts being given about family history are more like a discussion than a series of statements, particularly when, as the film continues, each account is seen in relation to the others and a bigger picture is built up. You experience the stacking up of paragraphs in a text by watching the video.
- Church pews: a space of memory, the video too, through the text of the accounts given.
- At the same time there's a clear relation to non-fiction filmmaking in the structure of accounts circling real events and an individual at the centre of the video (the father).
- The fact these events are seen from the different angles of each account introduces another idea, a questioning of the idea of representation. This video is about an individual, but seeks in different ways to avoid limiting, rigidly-defining, or trapping the subject in the representation given. Rather than the finality of an answer, leading up to a question, a question comes later, as something that will not produce a limit but be based in what we have heard and seen.
- The text of the accounts and the questioning of representation are elaborated by the activity of the camera. There are images of household objects, clothing on rails and dance moves which are cut into the montage without having their relation to the text signposted in an obvious way.
- Each image becomes a window into something else, complicating and bringing the various-ness of the world into the film. The collision of these elements makes each clearer, highlighting the strengths and limitations of each.
- These reminders of the various constantly prevent the complacency a video can allow by reminding you of the complexity of the world you are being given a glimpse of.
- Simultaneously, the text of the accounts is elaborated by collaging, incorporating other texts, visually with the street names of places in Peterborough, and sonically with the lyrics to the Jimmy Cliff song that closes out the video. Sitting in the pews, the organ in the song is transformed into a church organ (maybe connecting the song back to its own roots in church music, too).
- Images of Peterborough and the townscapes you never see, present and past, memories of going to Wimpy.
- This video is making clear, through the different accounts given and through the images that stray and complicate, that it's impossible for us to entirely understand or comprehend, that representation is ultimately inadequate. We are made aware that the text of the accounts given and the images recorded exist in relation to a space and time in the past that they are trying to represent, that we cannot know. This space and time is opened up.
- The space and time of representation itself: behind every act of representation, every image, an ultimately unverifiable, opaque darkness, a space moving through time like a river. Images overlay points and moments in this space, sometimes multiple images or sounds or texts are stacked on top of one another.
- So what is representation for? Why continue to utilise it? What does this particular video have to say about these big questions?
- Representation as a form of evidence - what happened? We aren't quite sure, but as is played out in the interplay of different accounts and complicating images, this means interpretation and discussion can take place and an authoritarian limiting of the past is thwarted - through knowledge of the fiction and instability of representation we are constantly made aware of the complication of the past and the need to interrogate representations and interpretations of it.
- This space is also opened up by the use of digital video. Where is a video file situated? Even when projected it seems to exist in two spaces. The image is situated on the surface used for projection, but as a file it is also situated somewhere else outside everyday space and time.
- Where is it also situated? We could imagine it on a wall outside of the conventions of space and time, a wall that could be moved to any position in the space and time of representation itself. Multiple images could be configured into different arrangements in this imagined space, imaginary cathedrals utilising an impossible architecture.
- This imaginary space can be accessed through the real space of projection, through a series of images edited together. In churches images were arranged to allow the viewer to access different narratives with a fairly closed set of interpretations, but this imaginary space of architecturally situated images could be used for all kinds of ideas. Here, it is the creation of an architecture of representation that allows interpretation and complication to flourish: no simple answer.
- An architecture of representation: a construction of an alternative arrangement of time and space over the top of this opaque space (a moving image work). A construction of space and time that is distinct from the everyday construction of space and time.
- Yet this construction is built out of materials from the world, a way to engage with the world by transforming the world, re-arranging the world in space and time, engaging with representation while critiquing representation. This different approach to representation-as-representation doesn't cancel out an engagement with the world but makes that engagement possible.
- An architecture of representation: a practice, contingent and in motion rather than finished, a structure that could produce questions, be a conduit for ideas, and allow different understandings of history, yet remain aware of its own inadequacy as a system and transparent to the opaque space below.
- These architectures are what is important in responding to the opacity of the space and time of representation, because it is equally possible to produce a productive architecture as it is to produce a distorting architecture that takes advantage of this situation to produce a new authoritarianism. This authoritarian architecture, which we can see around us every day, takes the uncertainty of space and time and constructs over it the false solution of a final, totalising interpretation as a response.
- An architecture of representation: this video is displayed in a kind of chapel with the pews, like an image in a church. As in the Shane Meadows films, there is an unexpected undercurrent in the work, an attempt to re-introduce the image into a culture based in the Church of England, which has rejected the image for centuries. This is particularly evident in the later series of THIS IS ENGLAND as well as THE VIRTUES (2019), which both also begin, unexpectedly, to deal with distinctly Catholic questions of grace and forgiveness. In the latter series you can also connect this, again unexpectedly, with an attempt to link the UK and the Republic of Ireland, and potentially their two religious systems, together into one reconciliatory narrative.
- Something similar might be happening in MANY RIVERS, in which a connection to Ireland in a family history is constantly felt. Though the video is landlocked, the sea, and particularly the sea as a space of migration, is still a constant presence.
- While these religious questions are not the main focus in either MANY RIVERS or the Meadows films, intentionally or not, there are attempts in both cases to engage with Catholic structures of meaning in a secular way.
- In any case these questions connect to one of the main ideas of the video, the post-imperial situation in this part of the world wherein constant reminders of the empire are carried in family histories and fragments of the landscape. This big idea is addressed through the particular, in particular in an adjoining room which collects together fragments including newspapers, town plans, football scarves and LPs.
- The video finishes with a final (formal) idea for putting the filmmaker and subject on the same level, with the filmmaker climbing into the frame and giving the participants a hug.
AFTERSUN (2022)
- A cinema; a darkened room, mass produced, a big screen, darkness obscuring and forgetting mass production.
- This films begins with a nightclub as the entrance to a text, the mind dancing and drifting into memories in the flashing lights.
- The rave at the end of IRMA VEP (1996) suggests a step out of cinema into the possibilities of new technology, drugs, and live or multi-media events as a potential future for cinema (see earlier article). In IRMA VEP this is followed by a sequence in which analogue filmmaking scratches itself out of existence, but in AFTERSUN we find ourselves, maybe wondering why, back in cinema shot on film.
- Beautifully shot, with great attention to detail, particularly in the soundtrack, which often dictates the moment of a cut, rather than the image.
- Formal aspects of the image are also used throughout for narrative purposes, with slow but dramatic changes in focus and clever uses of reflective surfaces allowing for changes in perspective.
- Getting lost: cinema continues in an ambiguous way, but maybe for the purposes of this article, AFTERSUN should be considered as an architectural work.
- The formal interventions made with sound and image, along with the prominent featuring throughout of footage shot on video, itself seen through the analogue camera, form a structure that allows different media to collide (returning in a quieter way to the possible multi-media spaces of IRMA VEP?).
- This collision structure, as in MANY RIVERS, opens up the space and time of representation and a discussion of space and time. In the scenes in the fictional space of the nightclub, space and time are suspended, a dark space shot through with flashing lights.
- This space, particularly when it is shown in complete darkness, could function as a representation of the opaque space and time of representation itself, over which flashes of light and sound are overlaid (acts of representation).
- Presumably the images we see and the sounds we hear in the rest of the film are taking place in the head of the filmmaker we briefly see at the end of the film (and sometimes dimly in the reflection of the television screen). They are the flashing lights cutting into the space and time of representation itself, are memories of the past. The montage of the rest of the film functions as an example of the imaginary architecture that can be constructed over the space and time of representation itself.
- For what purpose is this imaginary architecture being built? As in MANY RIVERS, we are dealing with the past and with the histories of a family member. These two works function in different ways, however.
- MANY RIVERS opens up the space and time of representation itself through collaboration, bringing together the memories, accounts and interpretations of several people, as well as complications of those interpretations made through the formal means of image and sound.
- In contrast to this, in AFTERSUN we access this space through the subjectivity of one person's mind, memories and imagination. We actually experience the construction of an imaginary architecture taking place, through the formal construction of a montage of image and sound, and narratively, through the fiction of the film that is taking place in someone's head. The complication of interpretation and representation is a process of examination of one's own memories.
- This process of complication is also mediated through technology, rather than interviews with living people, through the placing of video and analogue film side by side as approaches to the same events with different results and effects, as well as the structure of narrative cinema itself, working with actors, a crew, a script (a structure that underwrites both the video and analogue sections of the film).
- Meanwhile (similarly to the anthology of objects in MANY RIVERS that includes Specials posters, Michael Jackson mugs, curtains), cameras explore the actual architecture of the Turkish holiday resort with minute attention to detail, dripping socks, sunburned necks and glittering plastic motorbikes.
- Inevitably, especially in combination with the use of grainy film and colourful early video surfaces the question of nostalgia also opens up, leading back to the rave at the end of IRMA VEP and the question of the contemporary context and uses of cinema and the moving image.
- In the rave scene in IRMA VEP the excitement of the lights and music (which we never completely enter) are undercut by a paranoid episode which is presumably semi-drug induced but which is potentially also brought on by density of the technology itself - or, the scene might suggest that technology and drugs are becoming the same thing.
- The ambiguity of this scene, and particularly this connection of drugs and technology, might point to the void or fears that the future seems to currently present, where potential jumps forward in technology are so radically different, if not terrifying, as well as entirely mediated by capital and power relations, that retreating into versions of the past, as well as past technologies, becomes increasingly appealing.
- In particular new technologies seem to provoke a feeling of a loss of control, a claustrophobia, a feeling of being overwhelmed by light and sound from all angles, of being dragged off. Could there be a third way, beyond nostalgia as a false representation of an ideal past and all the potentially catastrophic consequences of that approach, and the blind acceptance of technology, which leads to the same thing? Today, both these approaches appear to be working simultaneously and not even in opposition to one another.
- A convivial approach, critically using new technologies and knowledge to question the past and come up with proposals for the future? What sort of world do you want to live in?
- Both of these works, in their use of technologies and form to create structures of space and time that allow the combination of different media, ideas, and histories, leaving room for an audience to move and think, as well as in their ambiguity, complexity, and refusal of simple interpretations, might suggest the beginnings of a new way forward.