FotoFreo. It’s in Fremantle.

I’ve been trying to convince my editor to send me to Fremantle, Western Australia as a special correspondent for this year’s FotoFreo photography festival. Since my editor is, well, me, and since I demonstrated a stunning lack of anticipation in realising this was going to be on in April, all I can do is watch wistfully from the across the continent.

One of the highlights I’ll be sore at missing will be the presence and work of Edward Burtynsky, whose Manufactured Landscapes is a powerful essay that has life both as a photo series and book and an important element in a Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary of the same name. He’s spent many years documenting large-scale industrial effects on the natural landscape, and at FotoFreo he’ll be presenting a new series of work on Australian mines.  As a strong admirer of his work, I want to know more, but I also note that the Fremantle exhibition is sponsored by BHP Billiton. Aside from the PR cachet of sponsoring a photographic activist like Burtynsky, I wonder about the specific spin that BHP might put on the series. Does he photograph BHP sites? What is his take on the sponsorship and demands of corporate resposibility that he might have made?

[image: Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy,
Western Australia, 2007 © Edward Burtynsky]

 Much of Burtynsky’s other work has been shot in China (including in shipyards, coalmines, factories, and the Three Gorges Dam site), and so it’s interesting to see among the Chinese presence at FotoFreo the work of Chen Nong, who constructs his own response to the Three Gorges Dam with subjects dressed as terracota warriors, seemingly enacting a pause in some battle against large mystic forces.

[From the San Xia series by Chen Nong]

These are just two of the many things on offer; I’ll be keeping an eye open for any substantial material on the web that FotoFreo might put out. Meanwhile, if you’re in Freo in April, go have a gaze at some photographs for me.

 

Forget the tripod – just run! oh, is the battery charged?

The pleasures and terrors of Cloverfield (2008) seem to have receded somewhat, and, even this early in the year (can I still say it’s early in the year?), other, more weighty, movies have crowded it out of view. (But who can say how accurately I’m glimpsing the zeitgeist from here in Adelaide anyway?) Still, I was thinking about it recently as I was reading an essay by Victor Burgin on how the viewer constructs a sense of cinema from memories, VCR freeze-frames, and still images. He talks about a cinematic heterotopia, where “we encounter displaced pieces of films: the Internet, the media, and so on, but also the psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelaire first identified as ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’.” (166)

Most of the films we consume now exist in this kind of space, with viral marketing campaigns and fake websites adding to the mix, but Cloverfield depends much more on this sense of being made up of accumulated bits (this site allows you to shuffle through some strange photographs that actually tell you nothing). If you’ve not seen Cloverfield I don’t need to tell you much beyond the fact that it’s a monster movie set in New York. You probably know that it’s shot with a moving camera that judders and shakes its way along. But it’s the fragmentariness of the narrative, rather then the camera’s behaviour, that is the dominant aesthetic of the film.

[image: Sam Emerson/Paramount Pictures]

It’s interesting to note that I’m talking about a film of fragments (well, two fragments, really; the main action is taped over something else) which is constituted – in the story world – of a whole unedited tape. This is the basic paradox of cinema, of course: fragments of still images run together allow us an experience of a continuous whole, but also in a larger context, the conventions of continuity editing do this for the narrative. The frame of Cloverfield is that of the video camera wielded by Hud, one of the group of friends making its way through the chaos of a trampled-through city. He seems reluctant at first to take the camera, then comes to relish the idea of shooting everything. He intrudes on a lovers’ conversation and when caught justifies himself by saying “I’m documenting.” Later, once the chaos becomes apparent, he says he needs to film it to show others “how it all went down.” Another time, when his friends are planning a hasty passage across some collapsing buildings his contribution to the proceedings is “okay, I’ll document”. This commentary on the ubiquity of cameras is clear, but this all also reminds me of the diary entries that make up Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That story is told through fragments, disparate and by different characters. Because it’s not told in hindsight by a narrator who must somehow have lived through the events, it heightens the suspense – sort of like: I’m writing this diary at the end of a long and strange day, but oh, I can hear some scratching at the door, I’m just going to put my pen down to investigate. Is that it? Is that character now dead? Something similar happens with Cloverfield. The camera could stop at any time, no-one’s editing this, it’s just been found. Unlike a novel or a feature-length film, a diary entry or just buttoning on the camera has no rules about long it should last. (yes, I know I am actually talking about a novel and a feature film; play along.)

I’ve yearned for a while for a movie trailer that is simply a fragment of the film it’s advertising, not a précis of the whole plot. Why do we need to be told the story before we are told the story? The first Cloverfield trailer did just that: a desultory meander through some guy’s farewell party is interrupted by some loud something. The camera runs outside to see distant explosions and the careening head of the Statue of Liberty. We don’t even know the title of the film.

This gives us what I think is one of the compelling things about Cloverfield, and for me one of its main pleasures: the rigorous first-person view gives us little sense about the facts of the larger event. There’s a monster in New York, but how did it come to be? And why is it so annoyed? Most other movies would explicate all this, show us the origins of said creature, detail the military’s response, but here the plot narrows almost purely to what we can see in front of a single camera, and this too adds to the sense of suspense and unease and expectation: what’s going on and what will happen next?. The glimpses of news footage on TV seem superfluous. The monster is like one of Hitchcock’s maguffins: we don’t really need to know why it’s there, it just is, now let’s just enjoy watching the characters jump.

[yikes. I just jumped. Writing alone in my quiet office, I left 1-18-08.com (one of those Cloverfield websites) open, waiting for a little effect that happens after about six minutes. I forgot about it until a minute ago.]

§

Victor Burgin. “Possessive, Pensive and Possessed” in Joanna Lowry and David Green, eds. Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image. Photoworks/Photoforum: Brighton, UK, 2006. 165-176.

 

Worlds in a small room

Like Tina Barney and Nan Goldin, New York model Elle Muliarchyk makes photographs that emerge organically from her own life. But unlike Barney and Goldin, what she does is not document that world, but make fictions out of its props and objects. Specifically, she goes into fashion stores, chooses an outfit, and transforms the changeroom into a set, dressing, shooting, lighting everything herself. You can see more pictures at Stern and a video about her at Fashion Television. (thanks, Danielle, for the tip.)

[images: © Elle Muliarchyk, 2006]

I’m sure the changerooms at the Hermès store are more salubrious than my local Salvation Army op shop, but they do the same thing: they are places for us to try on our dreams. With this shirt, I’ll look better, be better somehow. The changeroom is small and not a site for lingering; it’s a transitory space, both physically and psychologically. We use it to imagine the outlines of our future selves. The ultimate point of the changeroom experience is to integrate it into reality. What Muliarchyk does is to leave that impulse behind and tack to the opposite direction, into fantasy.

[image: © Elle Muliarchyk 2006]

And what better thing to enact a fantasy with than cinema? This picture with the gorilla’s hand draws on what we already know of the story of the beast and the girl. It opens up two latent narratives: is this the bit where Kong is dead or are they just starting the climb up the tower, and, how did Elle Muliarchyk get that prop in there?

 

I want to believe (2)

I wrote a post a while back on Anna Broinowski’s documentary Forbidden Lie$, which examined some of the claims of Norma Khouri’s autobiography Forbidden Love. Well, Broinowski’s film has just won the Australian Film Institute’s award for Best Documentary and was the subject of discussion on yesterday’s Australia Talks on Radio National. If you follow the link you’ll be able to listen to the program which will be available online for a month.

Most of the books were pulped after the scandal around the fanciful nature of Khouri’s autobiography broke; but I like the story of the French publishers who simply put ‘fiction’ stickers on the covers of their remaining stock.

 

Photographs as pebbles on gravestones

This week I attended a masterclass given by Susannah Radstone, a cultural theory and memory studies scholar, as part of the Flinders Uni Moving Cultures, Shifting Identitities conference. She had to the ability to make less-than-familiar ideas into something recognisable. I felt with her that I was travelling into new territory and getting there before realising it.  The session I attended was about memory research in cultural theory: wih the early twentieth century concerns with memory as evoked by Freud, Benjamin, Proust; and the more recent concerns with oral history and how individual memories are treated, as well as the rise of trauma theory and thinking about how we can imbue a presence to the traces of those taken away by war and other tragedy.

This got me thinking again about the book of photographs by Simon Norfolk, For Most Of It I Have No Words: Genocide, Landscape, Memory. (His site above has many images from the book as well a chance to flip through some of the pages.) What he does here is to document sites of genocide as they stand today: Rwanda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Auschwitz, Dresden, Ukraine, Armenia, Namibia. The structure of the book is simple but indicates clearly that as the event recedes into the past, so do its traces recede also. The events are placed with the most recent (Rwanda) first, and the most distant (the extermination of the Herero tribe in Namibia by German colonists) last. The traces of murder in Rwanda are much more visceral, with ragged bones still lying where they fell, while the landscape in Namibia is covered by new sand, a smooth and beautiful landscape. Admittedly, the desert landscape is more likely to shift and change, and the European reconstruction of Dresden is likely to proceed differently from that of a Cambodian village, but I think the argument still holds: that we must make efforts to remember, otherwise what happened will disappear. (Yes, it’s arguable, as the book admits, whether the American war in Vietnam was a genocide; it’s at the boundaries of the definition. But the scale of destruction visited on that country and still present in unexploded ordnance is pretty clear.)

This photograph, of chimney stacks in Aushwitz, shows how much of the architecture has disintegrated and how much the natural landscape is growing over its remains.

[image: Simon Norfolk. 'Auschwitz: Chimneys of destroyed barrack blocks' © 1999]

One of the differences between history and memory is that memory is about something that is experienced. These photographs are of a different order to archival photographs that document the events of the past as they happened. Those older images can have a set of resonances of their own, but they are from the past. What Norfolk’s images do is, by being contemporary images, locate these sites into our present. If we really wanted to we could go and stand in that church in Rwanda, that field in Ukraine. They come close to making the locations a part of our own lived experience, our own memory.

I guess that’s what ritual and commemorations do: they move events of the past into the lived experience of those in the present. And that is what Norfolk’s pictures do also. They do tell us a bit about the events, though words can do that better. But even more, they are elements of a process by which we bring traces of the past into our present. Michael Ignatieff writes in the introduction that “[e]ach photograph here is like those pebbles placed on the top of gravestones in Jewish cemeteries, the symbol of a link which not even death can destroy.” But that is not enough: “these photographs also tell us that nature will wash away both pebbles and headstones alike. All we can do is to place them there, over and over, from generation to generation, for as long as we can.”