Play Time (1967) by Jacques Tati is a relatively unknown movie. It is a more than two hours long and highly sophisticated visual comedy with nearly no dialogues, which probably explains why it wasn’t a big success in the box office. The film is however the best criticism of modern society that I have ever seen, and is still very relevant today. It is also a sharp criticism on modern architecture, both capturing the ideals of modernism and pointing at its delusiveness.
Hiroshima mon amour (1959) directed by Alain Resnais is an emblematic film of the French New Wave. Its opening scene showing images of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb is narrated by Emmanuelle Riva, her voice delivering with great sensitivity the screenplay of Marguerite Duras. I could not stop thinking about my study on the appropriation of space when I saw the movie. The female character is from Nevers, a small town in France. The male character lives in Hiroshima, where they both met. There is a feeling of placeless during the whole film; the past of Hiroshima “had to be forgotten” and the couple seems to be lost in a city without any apprehensible meaning. The two characters are unrooted, they move from one place to another without care, all the settings look impersonal and interchangeable. Staying one more day in Hiroshima is too long and the night seems to never end. But there is no coming back, Nevers can only represent the troubled past of the female character. The paradox is that the film is undeniably about places, described in great details, but from the point of view of a painful detachment…
Two videos that I made to illustrate my Study on Verticality were displayed few weeks ago on the screens of the Toronto subway, thanks to the Toronto Urban Film Festival. The ‘Concentration’ video was part of ‘The medium is the Message’ selection, and the ‘Elevation’ video was presented in the ‘Urban Ideas and Politics’ section.
I have always been convinced that video art should not only be screened in galleries and small cinemas, but also in public spaces and unusual locations. Many of my videos don’t require the same kind of attention than a film, displaying them in public spaces can prevent some of the misunderstandings deriving from how we are accustomed to consume films in a ‘formal’ context. So I hope that these distribution channels will become more frequent!
I was invited by Michaela Freeman to present three of my videos during a video art event at the TAP: ‘Concentration’ and ‘Elevation’ that I did just few months in Hong Kong, as part of a study on verticality, and The Ordeal of Scentless, a less recent video that I made in Las Vegas in 2006.
