Texts

Quoting from The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin: “Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.”

My work revolves around the idea that our society is in every aspect influenced by film. Ever since it became an omnipresent force in society people have started to measure their lives against their cinematic heroes. The aesthetic influences are innumerable and can be viewed in our desires for fashion, decoration and even our preferences in (sexual) relationships. In a way we believe what we see in the movies and perceive it as reality, even if we are conscious of the fact that it is ‘just a film’. Cinema is a strange being amongst the arts. As Susan Sontag says in A Note on Novels and Films: "Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotion."

In my work I make use of cinematic imagery because I feel it is and has been very important to me. The cinema has been a place where I have learned about life as a child. It is here that I’ve learned what good relationships are supposed to be, how you should behave in certain situations and what kind of people I should admire. Whether is this is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen. Cinema has created my desire, or as Slavoj Zizek says in Looking Awry: “It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire.”

Are we homogenized by these influences or is our own interpretation of them enough to create diversity? When I travel to a foreign country or am in a strange situation I always feel the happiest when I realize the situation or place is ‘just like a movie’. It makes me feel like the hero in an adventure, and it makes the experience seem more valuable and maybe even more real. I think that should I find myself in a certain extraordinary situation, for instance a bank robbery or a car theft, my first reference point for behaviour in this matter would be found in film. I realized that I measure everything in life by the values that have been created by the films I’ve watched. I do not believe I’m the only one who does this. So many things in our culture are compared to film. Many of the people who were around the World Trade Centre at 9/11, or who saw it on TV, said it all seemed like a movie. In fact, Zizek claims in his Welcome to the Desert of the Real that the terrorists themselves were re-enacting the fantasy they saw in films. They said they did not do it primarily to provoke material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it. People saw the disaster fantasy that was so often portrayed in films suddenly come to life.

So the relationship between the tendencies in culture and film is reciprocal. Important sentiments of fears will influence the type of films that are produced during that time. In the nineties there was a sudden rise in the popularity of vampire-films and this coincided with many of the concerns that arose around the sudden explosion of HIV/AIDS. The vampire films contained the fear that people suddenly felt for blood. The horror films in the fifties revolved around the things that could happen with nuclear power, journeys into space and mad scientists. These were the new developments in that time and they were obviously troubling people. The films just offered the ‘what if’ that everyone was thinking about. But even in a more subtle way films show the mentality of a time. At the end of the forties and the beginning of the fifties the Film-Noir became popular because after the Second World War people couldn’t believe in the Hollywood ideal of a purely good or bad character. Many people wanted to see characters that were both; good characters that were corrupted halfway through the story or bad characters who could still do one last good deed before their end. These stories about ambiguous characters gave people some redemption and maybe even explanation for what had happened during the war. But we can also see the popularity of the completely escapist film during times of war or crisis, like the Busby Berkeley films during the 1940s. This tendency can also be seen in the types of film that are popular in Third-World countries. In India for example, the Bollywood film is what people wanted to see, not stories about poverty, disease or death. The cinema, for some, is a place where one goes to forget about troubles and not to see them. Yet when we go to see a horror or a disaster film we are confronted by situations that we would never want to be in. But the emotions we experience are very strong emotions indeed. As Burke says: “The ideas of pain, sickness, and death, fill the mind with strong emotions of horror; but life and health, though they put us in a capacity of being affected with pleasure, they make no such impression by the simple enjoyment. The passions therefore which are conversant about the preservation of the individual, turn chiefly on pain and danger, and they are the most powerful of all the passions.” We experience the adrenaline of fear in film, we suddenly feel like we are surviving and we can forget it completely when we leave the cinema. I believe the feeling of survival is something that is missing in the Western world and that we are looking for this feeling again when we go to see these stories about threats to our lives. It is precisely in the cinema that these feelings of threat are increased. The cinema is a gateway between worlds where anything can happen. The surrealists realized that being in the cinema transports you to another place and to achieve a feeling of complete confusion they would leave the cinema half way through a film and go back in again. In many horror films the cinema is the place where the murders happen. As a location it is terrifying because it signifies a place where anything can happen. The darkness, endless amount of chairs and the enormous screen, it feels like a shrine to another world.

In many ways the cinema has given me experiences but it has also taken them away from me. There was point where certain films scared me; I couldn’t watch horror films because I would find them too terrifying. Then at a certain point I decided to force myself to watch them. I wanted to prove a point to myself and I thought I was missing out on such an enormous genre of film. I have watched many more films, and like a true addict I have needed to up the dosage to get the same effect. Now it is extremely hard to be frightened by a film. The genre of horror now is something to be watched for the humour or interest in how they portray a certain story; it is not about survival any more. I have become numb, as so many around me. Is there something like nostalgia for fear? In a way watching a scary movie is like cutting yourself to make you feel something again, to induce pain to make you feel alive. Zizek says that the destruction of the Twin Towers was a hurt to create pleasure, to feel the Real again (for one last time). He describes our society’s need to do something against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving itself as non-existing. Even though film is in fact a ‘virtual reality’ and is in itself a bee without a sting, horror was the genre where one could actually feel close to a semblance of real life. Susan Sontag describes our willingness to see these films in Imagination of Disaster as a need to inure ourselves to situations in reality that are psychologically unbearable, a need that fantasy in films provide for us. But numbing down emotions destroys these functions horror films would have for us. What becomes of the image of horror once it has been released from the emotions it used to invoke? In this situation images of gore are ridiculous mirror images of ourselves on the brink of death, revealed in all its banality. When we have no emotional investment in pain, disease or death they have become inured (as Sontag describes it), they are completely harmless. In some aspects the whole action of watching horror films is therapy, in the way that people who have an irrational fear of something are often advised to confront it.

The idea that cinema is a place where one can confront the image of their death can also be found in photography, in a different way than film. Photography just portrays the stillness of death, even if the subject is not dead. It is the life in between life and death that both media of film and photography seem to display. Looking at older films is disturbing in some ways because we know the actors in the film are mostly diseased by now. Yet especially in film they seem so alive. Film is, as a camera-based medium, similar to photography but in many ways very different. It is the time-based aspect that is most important in this difference. Film is more like life; it is a sequence of things where you have to pay attention to notice certain things. While photography is something that can be meditated upon, it contains more of a regret of nostalgia then film can ever have; the moment is over and can never be experienced in the same way, only this fragment of time remains. Both media create a distance to the viewer in the image that is produced. We are pushed into the chair of the observer and it is only empathy that makes the moment come to life. I find it fascinating what makes us identify with what we see in film or on photographs. Barthes talks about the punctum, the element of a photograph that surprises him, that reminds him of something in his own life or of something he has seen in the past. It is also the element of a photograph that was not studied upon (the studium). It is an element that the photograph contains by accident. Film must have something alike. An element that makes us identify with a certain situation in film, more than what the filmmaker has perhaps intended us to feel. Perhaps it is only a romantic ideal that makes us believe this, because it can also be argued that we are programmed to think and feel exactly what the filmmaker expects of us, after watching thousands of films growing up.

It is in the way we are programmed by film that other elements of our perception of life are altered as well.  Film has influenced what we remember of history. Historical events such as the Second World war, the war in Vietnam or the peace protests in Washington have been portrayed in film so often that our memory of them (if we haven’t lived through the actual event, or maybe even then) is shaped by film. Fiona Banner made her Apocalypse Now text piece about the idea that all she imagines of the war in Vietnam were shaped by films such as Apocalypse Now. It goes so far as to say that historical events that haven’t been made into a film are forgotten or at least not considered on the same level as the war in Vietnam (or similar events that have been thoroughly portrayed in film). The conflict in Rwanda, for instance, was completely (by the majority of people) forgotten until ‘Hotel Rwanda’ was made. It was only after this movie that more people became interested in the events that had taken place, now they felt this conflict had become ‘real’.

It is precisely this contrast in how film makes elements in our life unreal and more real at the same time, how it makes our lives into fictional stories, but mostly how it finds a way between fiction and reality that I find so very interesting about its place in our culture. Many of its influences seem to happen without us being conscious of it and it is this aspect that I want to illuminate in my work.