The recent Philippe Parreno
exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park contained
four of the artist’s film works. The show was designed in such a way
that the audience was led from room to room, watching one film then
being given signals as to where to go in the building to catch the next
screening – cues including musical ‘leaders’ fading into an adjacent
space, lighting conditions changing as blinds closed automatically, etc.
Given this structure and the specific manipulation of the audience, it
was easy to think of the show as an ensemble piece and the separate
works within it interrelated components of a whole. Yet this idea was
not easy to reconcile with the experience of the show – no doubt there
are interesting connections and echoes running through the pieces, but
there are also vast differences between them which lead to a certain
ambivalence about their relative strengths and weaknesses as
self-contained works. A shorter piece from 1991, No More Reality,
which was positioned closest to the gallery entrance (and which
consisted of grainy digital video of schoolchildren repeatedly chanting
the title) appeared irritatingly glib, even if it may have suggested a
half-ironic ‘key phrase’ somehow relevant to the world of moving images
you were about to be corralled through. Invisibleboy, a short
film from 2001, was also strangely dissatisfying, with a series of
spectral creatures etched into the film stock to illustrate an immigrant
child’s fantasies and nightmares, all to a deliciously loud but
nonetheless tedious soundtrack by God Speed You! Black Emperor. More
interesting than either of these pieces was The Boy From Mars
(2003), a beautifully photographed film documenting some kind of
eco-greenhouse in Thailand, solely powered by a water buffalo. The slow
pace, absence of human figures and ambiguous framing of the film set up
parallel documentary and sci-fi themes, occasionally producing a flash
of otherworldly imagery that seemed closer to mythological drama or
attempts at capturing an abstractly mesmeric rhythm – particularly the
treatment of the buffalo, its isolation and physical suffering captured
alternately in deep contrast and flashes of illumination. One
particularly arresting shot captured a passing hoof pressing into the
waterlogged mud, the camera holding position as the cloven impression
rose back up, pushing the water back toward the moonlight.
Nonetheless, the most intriguing film in the exhibition was June 8, 1968 (2008). Taking inspiration from a series of photographs taken by Paul Fusco, a photographer who was working for Look Magazine,
Parreno’s film recreates a train journey made on the title date from
New York City’s Penn Station to Union Station in Washington DC. The
train transported the body of the recently assassinated US senator and
presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Huge crowds lined the train
tracks that Saturday, all the way along the 300-mile distance – either
to pay their respects, to mourn lost hope, say goodbye or perhaps just
to see. The usual four-hour journey took over eight hours to
complete. Fusco’s original photographs are compelling, as is Parreno’s
film in many ways, yet it is difficult not to have some reservations
about the latter. [Apparently a film entitled Is Everybody Alright?
- which takes its title from Kennedy’s last words before he lapsed
into unconsciousness - is being made, based on Fusco’s book RFK Funeral Train.
This would be an interesting point of comparison] I found myself
wondering about the motivation behind the work and struggled with my
response to the tone of the film. It put me in mind of some of the
things I’d written and thought about in relation to re-enactment in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah – the ‘hallucinatory’ qualities described on by Jacques Rancière (in The Future of the Image)
when a holocaust survivor is compelled to revisit places or ‘re-do’
actions that have profoundly traumatic associations for them. This is
not quite what is going on in Parreno’s film, but it made me wonder
about what such re-enactments can do. Parreno’s film is shot from the
perspective of the train, observing the crowds of people lined up on the
embankments, crossings and station platforms. Although it could be a
reconstruction of the point of view of Fusco’s camera, it could also be
that the film assumes the viewpoint of RFK’s body – the coffin was
apparently not visible to onlookers until the pallbearers raised it by
placing it on a few chairs. The ambiguity of viewpoints suggests that
Parreno is at least aware of the possibility of it being understood as a
retroactive, reconstructed embodiment of an impossible gesture of acknowledgment from
a deceased ‘character’ to the crowds that came to watch him pass. The
reconstruction allows access to what Kennedy’s corpse might have seen,
as if this might provide some kind of affirmation, or effectively tie
off a loose end of patriotic emotion some 40 years later.
But what about the way Parreno’s film was
shot? For one thing, the location has been transferred from the East
coast to the West (why not the same route?) – introducing sun-drenched
landscapes, perfect blue skies,and a dreamlike solidity to the light.
The trackside figures, all actors and extras decked out in suitable
period costume and authentic accessories (bikes, cameras), are almost
all stock-still, occasionally zoomed into, and revisited at different
speeds. Does Parreno’s film camera attempt to move with a still
photographer’s eye? As if looking for a suitable shot (an encapsulation
of the mood, just one iconic image?) in the face of an excess
of figures, faces, gestures – there is something of the saccadic
selection of the eye, as well as indecision, in the camera’s movements,
all the while bolstered by the sound of the engine and the relentless
percussion of the tracks. There is an implied stillness to the images
too, as if there was a desire to move through a precisely preserved
moment in time (i.e. a film winding through Fusco’s images, stretching
out and filling the gaps between frames) – the result being that it
resembles an orchestrated diorama in which figures have become oddly
mortified. More disturbingly, however, certain set pieces – especially
when photographed in incongruous, pseudo-nostalgic California weather –
had the appearance of adverts: commercials for an historically
acknowledged loss, accepted configurations of national grief, all
bundled in with an affirmation of liberal American values that take
little account of political realities – the moment when the dirty world
of workaday politics becomes a ceremony that stands outside that
discourse. In many places this technique was affecting, but it afterward
it seemed dubious, as if it were as manipulative as the way the
audience was directed around the gallery space.
Still, the strange melancholy
disembodiment of the film, no doubt emphasised by Parreno’s choices, is
accompanied by a stilted or deferred dramatic quality. Just as Fusco’s
photographs contain almost surreal juxtapositions of odd figures – like
troupes of archetypes often in abstract compositions, with costume sets
and ‘back stories’ that could be filled in – Parreno’s images became
emblematic of a wealth of unspoken material. The whole film is
an address to silence in many ways – the idea that there is nothing to
be said (or done) in the face of momentous events or the presence of
emergent community; these figures see the train go by, not knowing what
to do next, watching an recognisable character from the largely alien
and impossibly corrupted political system ride by in a box, on a train.
He has gone back to being inaccessible and is passing them by. But is
Parreno’s film a reformatted paean to apathy or disillusionment? Why
does he want to tap into June 8, 1968?
It’s also important to note that, whereas
Fusco’s photos capture fleeting groups and constellations of people, he
cannot purposely manufacture his focus like Parreno can. Through his
reconstruction, Parreno’s is able to zero in on individuals he has
specifically isolated from the crowd – an attention to the details of
individuality and character that might have parallels with his feature film
(co-directed with Douglas Gordon) following the minute details of
Zinedine Zidane’s performance in a single football match. Yet for all
the deliberately faked and dreamlike qualities in Parreno’s film (some
of the camera movements reminded me of the odd Steadicam weave in
Sokurov’s Russian Ark), the indications of drama just out of
shot also suggest links to more conventional cinema. The first shot, as I
recall, is of a view over a landscape of scrubby hills, dotted with
electricity pylons. The camera surveys the scene patiently before
switching to focus on waves of dust being moved about by the wind. The
atmosphere is one of abandonment, but is loaded with genre-film
significance in the police car sitting empty at the side of the track,
its lights still on and the driver’s door left open. The scene could
have been lifted from a Coen Brother’s film, with its effortless
insinuation that something has just happened or was just about to. The
sequence succeeded in immediately setting up the idea that a ‘halt’ had
been called – one that affected a pause in public services,
institutional hierarchies, routine protections, having affected an
interruption of stories, etc.
But what Parreno’s staged re-enactment
lacks is the ramshackle, improvised nature of the crowds in Fusco’s
images – the unaffected way people are climbing onto objects to get a
better view, the way they hold their bodies. As James Stevenson suggests,
it is not only the faces and the clothes that catch the eye, it is the
hands: “Reaching out, holding babies. Praying, biting nails, waving,
covering mouths, holding hands, holding flags and flowers, clutching
throat, folding arms.” Fusco’s images also gain power from their narrow
depth of field – the people caught in a narrow band between blurred
fore- and backgrounds. It is possible that Parreno is taking existing
details from the photographic archive and ‘re-listing’ them according to
a different register, yet it seemed that he was willing to intervene in
the images, creating scenes of his own, even if they seemed
incongruous. This seemed to be encapsulated by the appearance, some way
into the middle of the film, of a long static shot of a young girl sat
in a small boat, floating on still water, closely cropped to give no
indication as to location and no obvious connection to the train that
has been running through the images thus far. All there is is a
atmosphere of being un-moored, abandoned, in a picture postcard world
that does not exist now and surely did not then.
