| The last decade proliferated with exhibitions focused on the relation between cinema and visual arts: “Art and Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors at MOCA,” “Dream Extension at the S.M.A.K.” or “Future Cinema,” “The Cinematic Imaginary after Film” at the ZKM at Karlsruhe to mention only a few recent ones. “Collateral,” held in L’Hangar Bicocca in Milan, a post-industrial hall adapted to the purpose of contemporary art display, contributes to the list by gathering video art installations in dialogue with selected film productions. |
|
Collateral by Olga Milogrodzka
The last decade proliferated with exhibitions focused on the relation between cinema and visual arts: “Art and Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors at MOCA,” “Dream Extension at the S.M.A.K.” or “Future Cinema,” “The Cinematic Imaginary after Film” at the ZKM at Karlsruhe to mention only a few recent ones. “Collateral,” held in L’Hangar Bicocca in Milan, a post-industrial hall adapted to the purpose of contemporary art display, contributes to the list by gathering video art installations in dialogue with selected film productions.
Concerning relation between the two media, video and film: on a formal level, the show provided another Dada lesson for the multiple and diverse possibilities for the reuse of cinematographic material. It has been being cut, moved, juxtaposed, serialized and abstracted. On an ideological level, however, besides re-contextualizing films’ plots and content, many installations commented upon cinema as an artistic medium itself, addressing mainly its comprehension and popularity. As a result of the videos presented, in general sharing form of exposition with traditional figurative arts rather than with motion picture, revealed what Pierre Bismuth’s explained as nostalgia for accessible art: one that doesn’t have to justify its existence, which simply owns its audience. Film does it naturally. New Media does not. Concluding from the collective commentary of the show, it is the specific films’ ability to blur the boundary between fiction and reality as the reason for their success. Two examples:
Kristall, the winner of the Grand Prix Canal at the Cannes Festival in 2006, presented sequences of scenes distilled from around 130 films of women and men looking at themselves in the mirror. Evidently, for female characters the mirror plays the role of the absent man, and even compensating for that absence. Men, on the other hand, see their own “menacing interior abyss” while looking in the mirror, as the film’s authors Christoph Girardet and Matthias Mueller explained. Women struggle against unwanted and imposed loneliness, while men choose it securely. The mirror distinguishes between the two solitudes, or provides opportunities to play them out in from of its surface and create self-identifying reflection. Kristall suggests that this is also how cinema works. The film provides vivid and realistic referential images that seem more credible than the reality the viewer belongs to. Thus, film accesses private spaces and crosses the boundaries where “adapted imaginary end and the sphere of an unassailable and unmistakable subjectivity begin.”
Similarly Spielberg’s List by Omer Fast. The video installation presented interviews with Jews in Krakow who were forced from their homes into a crowded ghetto by the Nazis during World War II. Years later, they took as extras part in production of Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List. The film, shot in Krakow, addresses the Jewish fate during the war period. The video material was projected on two identical screens. The only difference between the two was the subtitles below the monitors. On one side they referred to the projection as to documentary on the Second World War events, on the other as to relation form the film production. In this way, Omer Fast considered Spielberg’s realization as historical event in its own right, as a ”prosthetic” of the war which, through the vivid memories of the still alive Jewish population, extends the past into the present, or perhaps more properly, bonds it with the moment being. By recalling the double role of the actors, witnesses of both the historical and fictive realities, he suggests that the two easily merge and dissolve into one another.
Moving images tend to live cinema building and successfully penetrate both private spaces, as suggested in Kristall, and public ones, as pointed by Fast. This has been noticed on a couple of occasions in “Collateral.” The exhibition’s title indicates video’s subordinate position in relation to film, or its unfortunate spread-out in between figurative arts and cinema. But it also refers to the 2006 production by Michael Man, Collateral, a great example of cinema technique. It was partly shot in high-resolution, allowing focused and vivid nocturnal scenes in the streets of Los Angeles. L’Hangar Biocca, covered with darkness and filled with installations aiming at sharp and scrutinizing critique of cinema, somehow recalled the movie’s night landscape.
