Alia Pathan - Graffiti, Minerals and Mirrors
61st Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, Germany, 2015
On route from Oberhausen train station to the festival I encountered some graffiti scrawled on a wall in white chalk; it merely read ‘YouTube’. It was a reminder of the digital material proliferating and accumulating in our time; images which circulate online with no definitive sense of value. It felt mocking of anyone moving beyond their laptops to watch films in a cinema, I noticed having flown in from London. The festival took place in the Lichtburg Filmpalast, Oberhausen, but the writing was on the wall outside, a one-word comment on the division of what we understand as artists’ film and video and the economies of distribution in the film circuit after the arrival of the Internet. Despite this curatorial decision one of the most memorable films I saw was Jennifer Reader’s funny, complex and raw White Trash Girl that (at the time of writing) is also available on YouTube, and after the festival I am able to share it with friends and widen its audience.
I wondered if the films we were about to watch were available online and how this may change the relationship of working with distributers and festivals. How do you make sure your work is seen? In filmmaking the idiom ‘straight to DVD’ after cinema release has been sarcastically rephrased ‘straight to VHS’, meaning it has no future, life or lucrative value in its mode of distribution. Will 'straight to YouTube' replace this derisive expression? Perhaps soon it will be that ‘straight to Vimeo’ or ‘straight to mubi’ will be our choice motto to demarcate between a successful video that generates income from industrial distribution and a film that joins the great sea of everything else online. This delineation is visible in the festival programme, which categorised competition shorts aside from distributer’s screenings. The following two films are part of the Video Data Bank collection and approach the human body and video as mirrors to memory.
Jesse McLean's ‘I'm in Pittsburgh but it’s raining’ centres on the use of a stand-in or body double in film. She often features in her own work, her hands appear in shots reinforcing the subject matter and the production process of an artist’s film, the authors hand. Both the artist and the stand-in’s bodies act as choreographed objects of memory, in that they remember choreography and re-perform another’s movement for the camera. Footage from the workshop-production of a mirror and descriptions of the way dancers are trained creates visual and voiceover metaphors for how the body double is required to mirror and replicate for a scene in a film.
This video presents the stand-in as a sometimes-uncomfortable yet ever adaptable body and an object or prop simultaneously. The editing is stark often cutting between black frames and images of a figure on a set onto whom we attach a story unfolding in progress. As we are guided around the film set and behind the silver screen, Jesse lets us step inside the scene, revealing and then reproducing its undeniable magic.
Her video makes us aware of the nuances and craft in filmmaking by dissecting shots from a famous Hollywood film staring Anne Hathaway and her body double. We pay more attention to Anne Hathaway’s hands, this time, now we know they belong to a body double, to try and detect where we were previously tricked. It unveils the inherent trickery of cinema where entire cities are used as sets for other locations in the script and where bodies are hired to imitate other bodies, but leave no name or trace. The space for credits is often itself riddled with inflections and contradictions too. Secrets in the way films are edited often lead to the invisibility or masking of some crucial elements; for example, the city of Chicago also has a stand-in – but Pittsburgh remains off the credits. This film holds up a mirror to the way we watch and remember scenes from films, it fills in the gaps of things we didn’t quite see or chose to misremember.
In the same screening, Louis Henderson’s film ‘All That Is Solid’ delves into the production processes of electronic material, from what he describes as the ‘neo-colonial’ mining of gold used in chips and circuit boards, to the eventual recycling of this technology once it becomes defunct and no longer valued in predominantly western markets.
The film opens with a Google translate page from English to French, setting the opening scene in ‘a hard place, a hard drive, and an imaginary, a soft space – the cloud that holds my data, and in the soft grey matter, contained in the head”. Within this tumbling assemblage there is text from a Wikipedia page that reveals a short history of Ghana’s Gold Coast. The white of this page is excavated away, and translucent white background layer scrolls over footage of the mined production of solid gold bars in Accra, Ghana. The text speaks of the implications of the conditions of producing these components from raw materials to enable data workflow. In a sense, Louis’ film is a rendition of the digital and post Internet technological revolutions that we see unfold as we age and grow within it. The whole time we are made aware that we are watching this production, postproduction and exhibition through a recorded preview window on an Apple Mac workstation. This effect makes for a highly empathic viewing experience, whilst somehow naturalising the inherent complicity and contradictions in one of the most contentious tools of artists moving image practice today. As with Jesse’s film it is this attempt to naturalise a highly covert action that alarms us to the trickery and misdirection with disillusionment – but how did we not notice it was Pittsburgh? How did we not notice it was Ghana?
With gold mined in Ghana and electronics fitted in factories in China, computer hardware and their respective programs provide ease and fluid workflow. The film montages this, duplicates it and scrolls through the archive of media stored in folders on his hard drive - a central character in this narrative. The work, method of production, source of material, and context of filmmaking begin to collapse and expand on one screen before we see the penultimate stage of the consumption lifeline - the waste depots in Ghana.
Once they reach this depot the copper, gold and other precious metal components are retained for their inherent value, while the plastic casings are hacked away and burnt in large pyres exuding poisonous, noxious and carcinogenic fumes. The bodies of the workers handing the materials of electronic waste wear no PPE and there is nothing protecting their health.
We cut to a video clip of an Apple spokesperson’s seductively simplistic explanation of what The Cloud is.
'It just all works. It just works'.
The film multiplies this mirage in the images of advertising, and in doing so allows us to enter the smoke and mirrors of our digital memories; mirages of privileged possibility with lack of responsibility. It is an industry of manufacturers that collectively hide and neglect to acknowledge the wreckage left to developing worlds.
In 2013 Apple ran out of products simply because they couldn't produce them fast enough. The same could be said of this film, that the chain of technological production will have only accelerated and moved so quickly that the only reason the film ends at all is due to available resource. The cadence of this film is the greatest fiction in this politically charged and illuminating narrative constructed to present to us the reality of the mirage.
The film draws parallels between the neoliberal economies that enable online and digital media, and the neo-imperialism of gold production and colonial civilising of the Gold Coast, with archive footage of English lessons and exoticised photos of Ghanaian women. This film takes place through assemblage in a post-networked world, to the soundtrack of Black Futurist musician Drexciya whose electronic sounds describe The Black Atlantic and slaves bodies as the first machines of modernism. The underlying link between the transatlantic slave trade and the conditions of the transatlantic movement of technological objects are tenuous and does not accurately describe the contemporary situation. The use of montage in this context creates an arbitrary juxtaposition between the transatlantic slave trade and the situation of workers on ewaste dumps in Ghana. These parallels have yet to be clarified in a way that appropriately considers both historical and contemporary references to the bodies of black workers.
Both films tell a story of memory in a post-networked time, from the recording time, replay and afterlife of this memory. In Jesse’s film it is a female body that is re-enacting and reexamining the act of memory through choreography and mimesis, however it is the task of this body to ultimately not be seen or remembered for what it is and comply with being written out of memory. In Louis’ film electronic memory takes form as material that requires lethal and unregulated methods for its salvaging or disposal but the bodies affected by the re-emergence of digital memory components are in their many and exposure to biohazards are severe; moreover there is no protection for these workers.
The Cloud and other such data servers are the mirror image of a trompe-l'oeil. Gargantuan data farms are dense physical objects masquerading as lightweight, illusionistic and tiny hyper objects.
This leads to a perceptual paradox in the idea that because the data itself is bite-sized that our memories are stored digitally in bite-sized containers. The Internet crushes our sense of scale in relation to these digital memory objects and therefor the scale of production, consumption and waste management is also distorted. The mirror is help up to us to support the delusion of a benign Neo-Imperialism, whereby consumption in such products sold by markets in the developed west are justified by relativizing the very disparate list of benefits.
