Occupied Territories
For their first stab at a major video exhibition, the New York Film Festival's organizers presented the eleven-part "Videorama—A Celebration of International Video Art" concurrently with the main NYFF screenings last October. The choice of the word "celebration" was fortunate, designed perhaps to head off the presumption that the offerings would be exhaustive, visionary, or necessarily relevant. Like the short-film programming at the festival, the vidfest was something of a Whitman's Sampler of more or less interesting, more or less successful fare.
The program included many of the forms so far addressed in video, from the traditional narrative documentary (Patricia Benoit’s Tonbe/Leve and the Jonathan Demme-produced Haiti: Killing the Dream) to personal portrait/confessionals (Amit Goren’s ’66 Was A Good Year for Tourism, Tami Gold’s Juggling Gender) to home movie/video-vérité (Charles Ahearn’s Doin’ Time in Times Square, Nazeh Adel Darwazeh, Suher Ismael, and Abdel Salam Shihada’s Palestinian Diaries), in addition to tapes that might be called arthouse video (Bill Viola’s The Passing) if this art happened to have its own “house” beyond the usual museum and festival exhibitions.
Those believing the exorbitant expense of making screen art is a crime against class should have been heartened by the selection of Michael O’Reilly’s Glass Jaw and Sadie Benning’s It Wasn’t Love. Shot with rough-and-ready Pixelvision cameras marketed by Fisher-Price for children, neither is kidstuff: Benning’s piece is an aural fantasy exploring the shape of her nascent lesbianism, while O’Reilly’s is a description of his psychic injuries sustained after an assault that left his skull crushed. Both vidéastes make sensuous use of the way their simplified equipment diffuses and abstracts their images, worlds away from the throbbing hyperreality of standard video. If O’Reilly’s impresses more, it is because his precise and elegant narration makes a dignified counterpoint to his homemade imagery, while Benning’s sass trails off toward the precociously precious.
Some intimations of the emerging world videocracy might be found in Doin’ Time in Times Square, a promising but ultimately disappointing work of reverse-peeperism. Shooting from a window in his apartment near Times Square, Charles Ahearn observes the (usually) violent life below with the seasonal panoply of family birthdays and holidays inside. When the streetlife really gets to swinging, Ahearn goes slo-mo, like some agoraphobic Sam Peckinpah. Besides illustrating very well why the middle classes have fled New York, this tape underlines the truism that our future will not be dominated by a single Big Brother, but by millions of would-be Little Brothers all itching to fulfill Al Franken’s dream of a “self-contained, one-man uplink unit.”
Of course, anyone familiar with the life and variety of the real Times Square might well ask why Ahearn concentrates only on fights, fires, and arrests—in short, on the received image of New Jack City. His pattern suggests he’s mistaken what is broadcast over police scanners for reality, or else is spoiling to join one of the major local news organizations (which specialize in emergencies-without- context). When he presents yet another free-swinging tussle in the streets, this time with the music of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood trilling underneath, Ahearn is either out to bludgeon the viewer or to send an urgent appeal for a better real estate agent.
Considering the record of unrelenting ethnic hatred in the Middle East, it would be hard to make the same criticism of Palestinian Diaries. The premise here is that “an international team” lends video cameras to some representative Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories (an international team of what? what is a representative Palestinian?) to record the shape of their lives under Israeli domination. Footage of masked youths throwing stones at gun-toting troops begs the usual question of how much is real, how much staged for the benefit of the cameras. More chilling are the depths of Euripidean rage suffered by the Palestinian women, who carefully teach their children to hate Israelis and pray fervently for a poison gas attack on Tel Aviv. Most of the grown men having been either jailed or killed, it devolves upon mothers, wives, etc., to wage a stubborn political war using the generational weapon. Insofar as it is their sons and husbands who are sacrificed, it’s a weapon that cuts both ways.
There is something about the economy and compactness of video hardware that seems to elicit intimate disclosure. In Juggling Gender, Tami Gold takes an offbeat subject—the growth of character of a young woman who happens also to have a full growth of beard—and overargues her case for our acceptance by taking us into the bathroom to examine the woman’s pubic hair as well. Thomas Allen Harris’s pugnacious Splash! crams more personal bile into a few minutes than a Republican TV soundbite.
The distinction of making the most breezily entertaining long program goes to the compilers of the slick and reverential Visions of Light. Directed by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy, and Stuart Samuels, this high-definition video look at the cinematographer’s art amounted to what was probably the first major exposure to the system for most of the festival audience. HDTV proves itself capable of doing some justice to the tastiest bits of visual candy served up by the world’s best-known cinematographers, even with its advantages partly nullified by the big-screen projection. Still, there’s a certain insidiousness about this “tribute”—something of the spirit one would expect surrounding an exhibition of buggy whips sponsored by Henry Ford.
The rationale for including such selections as Raul Ruiz’s hellishly dull TV Dante—Cantos 9-14 and Valerie Lalonde and Richard Leacock’s languorous French postcard Les Oeufs a la coque can only be traced to the artists’ reputation outside the video ghetto. One instance where the slumming works, however, is Elizabeth LeCompte’s wigged-out White Homeland Commando. This tape would qualify as a brilliant sendup of the TV detective genre if the acting of the Wooster Group (Willem Dafoe et al.) wasn’t in such convincing earnest. With a story so loopily elliptical it would tempt Brecht to switch channels, WHC traces the efforts of New York’s Finest to bust a cell of ultra-rightist conspirators.
One particular sort of cop-show scene—characters lie hidden in wait, guns drawn, to ambush unknown, possibly hostile newcomer—is done over and over, with permutations, until it looks both ridiculous and pleasantly familiar; rather like a real cop show, in fact. Meanwhile, the solarized imagery and intentional video “snow” turn the electronic opiate of the masses into nerve-jangling caffeine.
Bill Viola’s The Passing also breaks fresh aesthetic ground by exploiting new technical possibilities. The inspiration for this tape must be sought in the current generation of micro-videocams—the kind sports broadcasters have been placing inside football players’ helmets and at the tips of pole-vault bars (not to forget David Letterman’s “Monkeycam”). Viola takes this gimmick and, in the spirit of California Dreamin’, turns it into a transcendent window to subjectivity.
The eponymous “passing” is outwardly the passage of a night’s slumbering, with Viola’s minicam perched on his sleeper’s cheek. His eyes close, REMs commence, and Viola spins a tale of the more significant passings of youth and death, all in perfect dream logic. His images (billowing sheets underwater, faces traced in shadow, Joshua trees in infrared, auto headlights streaming like jet contrails) look influenced by past “dream” experiments like Gunvor Nelson’s Moon’s Pool, if not the final sequence of 2001. What make Viola’s tape special are his effortless transitions from sleep to consciousness and back again-another sort of “passing” we all accomplish, but one rarely presented onscreen without a reassuring vocabulary of dream codes (drippy dissolves, sound cues, etc.). In the world of The Passing, this point of contact between sleep or wakefulness, between object and subject, is as disturbingly shaded as the boundary between inhaling and exhaling.
Some critics have tried to interpret Viola’s masterpiece as a “modernist deconstruction of consciousness,” but that’s just postmodern criticism trying to make a measly Wittgenstein out of a full-fledged Nietzsche. By evidence of his images—from the white dove beloved of Catholicism to the way his camera roosts on his shoulder like an ancient Egyptian’s mini-doppelgänger, or ka—Viola is charting not only the unconscious but the passage of the spirit. With Viola, the hi-tech successor to cinema’s camera stylo may well be a video camera sancto.
Nicholas Nicastro is a filmmaker and freelance writer who lives in the New York area.
Sign up for the Film Comment Letter!
Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week. Enter your email address below to subscribe.