Pieces in Conversation

Transkript

1 Pieces in Conversation A selection of works by Yvette Brackman & Maria Finn

2 Works and Letters: Maria Finn and Yvette Brackman Texts: Cecilie Høgsbro and Kristine Kern Layout: smokeandmirrorsstudio.dk Tryk: Richard Larsen Grafisk ISBN: Plum Velvet, thank you Kunststryrelsen DaNY Arts Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art Participant The Anthology Film Archives The Danish Institute in Rome Robert Haller Jane Rørdam Marianne Torp Lia Gangitano Michel Auder Maika Pollock Florian Altenburg Rita Lipson John Mhiripiri Mary Beth Edelseon Katya Levental Marisa Newman Lucien and The Pink Pony Pieces in Conversation A selection of works by Yvette Brackman & Maria Finn Nikolaj, Robert, Walter, Johannes and Emmeline

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6 Seeing the female perspective betragtninger over Yvette Brackmans film Lot Ten If Time is Psychic time, and if it thus affects our bodies, it remains the only imaginary value that the novel can offer its community of readers. 1) Julia Kristeva Kvinden har et skarpere realitetsfilter. Sådan udtalte den italienske filminstruktør Michelangelo Antonioni engang i et Tv-interview 2), og de kvindelige karakterer i hans film synes da ofte også mere afklarede og i kontakt med sig selv end de mandlige. Kvinden får i flere af den italienske filminstruktørs film ofte tildelt rollen som den, der bedst kan se årsagssammenhængene bag begivenhederne modsat manden, der er for selvoptaget. I La Notte er det den kvindelige hovedperson Lidia der er the dominant character in the film., netop fordi det er hende, som kan gennemskue problemerne i parrets forhold. 3) Det er således ikke uden grund, at den amerikansk-danske billedkunstner Yvette Brackman (f.1967) har fattet interesse for Antonionis kvindefigurer. I hendes film Lot Ten fra 2004 følger vi en ung kvinde vandre underligt formålsløst omkring blandt mennesketomme bebyggelser og i udkantsområder. Hun er tilsyneladende på vej. Hun bevæger sig gennem byen, men om ruten er bevidst eller tilfældig, ved man ikke. Om kvinden har en agenda står hen i det uvisse. Kvinden, der spilles af den østrigske billedkunstner Eva Egermann, er hovedpersonen i Yvette Brackmans Lot Ten, som er en genindspilning af udvalgte scener fra Antonionis La Notte. Hvor den oprindelige film har to hovedpersoner, har Brackmans film kun én: Lidia. I Antonionis film spilles hun af den franske skuespillerinde Jeanne Moreau. Egermann ligner Moreau ikke til forveksling, men nok til at man ved synet af Egermann i Lot Ten erindrer sig Moreau i rollen som Lidia i La Notte. Brackman har i sin knap 16 minutter lange film fokuseret på de scener, hvor Lidia optræder alene - fx de lange passager, hvor hun vandrer tænksom og mere eller mindre hvileløs rundt i og i udkanten af den moderne storby - men ikke udelukkende. I andre scener, som fx hospitalsscenen i begyndelsen af filmen og scenen på golfbanen i slutningen, er den mandlige hovedperson, ægtemanden Giovanni, simpelthen klippet ud. Faktisk optræder der stort set ikke andre karakterer end den kvindelige hovedperson i Brackmans Lot Ten. Brackman fortæller: I was interested in somehow allowing the female character the space to wander without her movements being dictated by the male character in the film. Jean Moreau s character interests me very much because I believe in the later films Antonioni pushes the neurotic aspect of the female character. [ ] In La Notte, Moreau is sober and throughout the film through her growing awareness she realises her predicament and takes action to do something about her situation. 4) Lot Ten blev produceret til en udstilling, der havde den københavnske forstad Herlev som tematisk omdrejningspunkt, 5) og derfor er filmen optaget i Herlev i et underligt forblæst forstadsmiljø, der er ikke så lidt sciencefictionagtigt. I forhold til Antonioni og hans brug af moderne erhvervsbyggeri i La Notte er dette yderligere en pointe, idet han bruger det omgivende landskab og arkitektur til at understrege den kvindelige hovedpersons sindsstemning (som i øvrigt ikke beskrives yderligere). For eksempel ses Lidia alene og trykket i et i øvrigt mennesketomt byrum og mod et meget stort, moderne byggeri ikke ulig det billede i Lot Ten, hvor Brackmans kvindelige hovedperson ses indrammet af en i billedet diagonal betontrappe. Andre scener inkluderer bl.a. det monumentale Herlev Hospital, et meget stort og paddehatteformet betonvandtårn ved Klausdalsbrovej, en forfalden parkeringsplads, et lille lokalt værtshus og Hjortespring Badet. Karakteristisk for hovedpersonen i Brackmans film er, at hun hele tiden er i bevægelse. Dette element findes også i Antonionis film, men er hos Brackman den egentlige fremdrift i filmen. Vi ved ikke, hvor hovedpersonen kommer fra og hvor hun er på vej hen, men vi følger hendes bevægelser gennem det urbane rum i et stykke tid. Hvor La Notte udspiller sig over det meste af et døgn, er tiden ikke nærmere defineret hos Brackman, men man fornemmer dog, at den følger nogenlunde samme tidsramme og at afslutningsscenen på golfbanen udspiller sig i de tidlige morgentimer i lighed med den tilsvarende scene hos Antonioni. Imidlertid - hvor bevægelsen hos Antonioni kan ses parallelt med den indre følelsesmæssige udvikling, så ved vi ikke helt, hvilken sindsstemning Brackmans hovedperson befinder sig i. Er hun fremmed i sit eget liv og i Herlev, som katalogteksten foreslår, 6) eller er hun blot en tænksom, registrerende vandrer, der som en anden Virgil fører os rundt, ikke mellem himmel og helvede, men i et moderne forstadsbyggeri. Antitesen til Baudelaures flaneur eller Situationisternes psykogeografiske byvandrer, der begge inkarnerer ekstremt maskuline positioner. 7) På et formelt plan er der flere ligheder mellem La Notte og 11

7 Lot Ten: Antonioni er kendt for sine lange optagelser. Dette karakteristika er gentaget i Lot Ten, hvor man flere steder følger den kvindelige hovedperson i lange sekvenser, mens hun vandrer gennem billedet. En anden påfaldende lighed er arkitekturens betydning. Hos både Antonioni og Brackman bruges arkitekturen som et billede på den tilstand af fremmedgørelse, hovedpersonen befinder dig i. I was trying to emulate Antonioni in his interest in expressing the inner emotional space of the protagonist through the use of the landscape that they find themselves in, fortæller Yvette Brackman. 8) Hos Antonioni kommer dette landskab eller rettere cityscape især til udtryk i de scener, hvor Lidia går rundt blandt moderne kontor- og boligbyggeri i Milanos øde gader, hos Brackman er det forstadens karakteristiske betonbyggeri - særligt Herlev Hospital og vandtårnet ved Klausdalsbrovej samt de tomme græsområder mellem det moderne boligbyggeri, der får betydning som parametre for hovedpersonens mentale tilstand. Begge film er desuden sort/hvide. Generelt beskrives Antonionis spillefilm som antitesen til suspence, idet han i mange af sine film nærmest giver afkald på et plot i traditionel forstand - eksempelvis hedder det hos Seymour Chatman: Antonio has been called the exact opposite of Alfred Hitchcock 9) Således også i La Notte, hvor handlingen trods det, at den er tidslig fremadskridende snarere konstrueres af beskuerens aflæsning af personerne end af et utvetydigt narrativt forløb. Hvor narrationen i Antonionis film altså er minimeret, synes den hos Brackman nærmest fraværende. I hendes film understreges hvad man kunne kalde de rapporterende elementer i La Notte, forstået på den måde at fokuseringen på og beskrivelsen af protagonisten understreges uden man af den grund identificerer sig med hende. Grænserne mellem det objektive kameraøje og det subjektive point of view udviskes, idet man som beskuer er usikker på, hvornår man ser hovedpersonen udefra, og hvornår det er hendes blik på sig selv, man ser. 10) Således udviskes skellet mellem (filmens) realitet og illusion eller rettere projektion, idet der måske er tale om hovedpersonens subjektive forestillinger. Deleuze skriver: the distinction between subjective and objective, [ ] tends to lose its importance, to the extent that the optical situation or visual description replaces the motor action. [ ] we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental [ ] 11) Hos Brackman understreges også de momenter af tomhed, der er så karakteristiske for Antonionis film. De sprækker af tomhed, hvor filmen så at sige kommer til syne som film, de tilstande af mellemrum, hvor handlingen går i stå for at overlade rummet til refleksionen eller hvor filmen med Ds ord bliver en analyse af billedet 12) netop dette er hos Brackman forstærket, fordi det ikke er narrationen, hun er optaget af. Snarere tværtimod. Brackman ønsker at beskrive, med Antonionis film som grundlæggende struktur, hvordan filmen som medie kan bruges til at fortælle. Hun er fascineret af beskrivelsen af den kvindelige tilstand, og af den italienske filminstruktørs brug af rummet - og ikke mindst den kvindelige hovedpersons bevægelse gennem rummet til at synliggøre kvindens psykologiske udviklingsproces i La Notte. Antonioni er et arbejdsredskab, et værktøj for Yvette Brackman. Det er strukturen i hans film, hun først og fremmest er optaget af, og ikke historierne. 13) Samtidig er hendes film dog en remake 14) set i forhold til Andrew Horton og Stuart Y. McDougals definition af begrebet. Her er jo netop tale om en gentolkning af det eksisterende forlæg, der både kan ses som en hyldest og en kritik. Set i deres optik giver det bestemt mening at diskutere Yvette Brackmans Lot Ten i forhold til remake-begrebet. Nok går hendes ærinde ud over at forholde sig til Antonioni, idet hans film i en vis forstand blot kan siges at være et eksempel på filmen som sådan, men samtidig er det jo netop strukturen i Antonionis film, hun retter fokus mod; særligt hans beskrivelse af kvinden og hans brug af rummet som generator for fortællingen. Lot Ten er imidlertid ikke Yvette Brackmans første remake. I 1999 lavede hun videoen Camp, der er en remake af en sekvens fra Stanley Kubriks 2001: A Space Odyssey fra 1968, og i 2006 lavede hun en remake, The Precise Location, af den canadiske eksperimentalfilminstruktør Michael Snows La Région Central fra Hun ser remaken as being in a dialogue 15) og er også generelt i sit arbejde optaget af tilpasning af et eksisterende materiale eller en eksisterende situation i forhold til nye omstændigheder og ændrede betingelser, som museumsinspektør Marianne Torp formulerer det i kataloget til Yvette Brackmans udstilling Land, der blev vist i x-rummet på Statens Museum for Kunst i Her skriver Torp videre om hvordan et billardbord i installationen LAND antager [ ] en ny betydning, der rummer den oprindelige, men samtidig peger i andre retninger. Dette kan også siges at gælde for Brackmans remakes, og passer i øvrigt fint med Horton og McDougals definition af begrebet. Hun [Brackman] er optaget af, hvordan systemer og strukturer af betydning på den måde udvikles og tilpasses nye situationer. skriver Torp videre. 16) Brackman selv har også formuleret sig mere eksplicit omkrig dette i kataloget til udstillingen The Making of Technically Sweet, en udstilling omkring et aldrig filmatiseret manuskript af Antonioni, 17) som hun og den dansk-svenske billedkunstner Maria Finn kuraterede i I teksten The re- emergence of the Past into the Present skriver Brackman: Reenactment is a tool for understanding history or for contemporary social and political commentary. 18) hvilket netop passer fint med hendes måde at bearbejde Antonionis La Notte i Lot Ten samt Deleuzes beskrivelse af Antonionis projekt: Antonioni s aesthetic visions are inseparable from an objective critique [ ] 19) Yvette Brackmans Lot Ten fokuserer på udvalgte aspekter af Antonionis film og tydeliggør dem. Især eksponeringen af den kvindelige karakter er central hos Brackman. Her er det ikke længere fraværet af kærlighed, der som i La Notte er filmens imaginære kontekst, men fraværet af den mandlige hovedperson. Manden er ikke længere det parameter kvindens handlinger måles i forhold til. Hun er ene. For at se det er det en forudsætning, at beskueren er bekendt med La Notte. I er Deleuzeiansk perspektiv bliver det det imaginære blik, der udvisker forskelle mellem realitet og forestilling. Dette understreget også af, at kameraet hos Brackman som hos Antonioni agerer selvstændigt, idet dets bevægelser ikke nødvendigvis underordner sig personernes bevægelser, men repræsenterer et selvstændigt blik. Også Deleuzes påpegning af rene visuelle og auditive situationer hos Antonioni er væsentlig i forhold til Brackmans film. Sammenstødet mellem de objektive billeder, der alligevel er mentale, og de tomme rum, der for Deleuze karakteriserer Antinionis film, finder man også hos Brackman. Faktisk består hendes film næsten udelukkende af den type billeder. Not only the optical and the sound, but the present and the past, and the here and the elsewhere, constitute internal elements and relations which must be deciphered, and can be understood only in a progression analogous to that of a reading, skriver Deleuze 20) - hvilket bestemt også kan siges at gælde for Lot Ten. Michelangelo s gift is to empathise and respond to the mood of a time and a place skrev den tyske filminstruktør Wim Wenders, der var Antonionis hjælpeinstruktør på Par-delà les Nuages (1995), i sin dagbog fra optagelserne. 21) Og dette er måske rammende i en langt mere vidtrækkende betydning. Kristine Kern 1) Ordene er Kristevas og anledningen Marcel Prousts På sporet af den tabte tid, men de kunne lige så vel gælde for Yvette Brackmans film Lot Ten. Kristeva, J., Time and Sense. Proust & the Experienca og Literature, Columbia University Press, New York 1996, p ) Chatman, S., Antonioni, or the Surface of the World, Berkeley 1985, p. 1 3) Cameron, p. 81 4) Se mit interview med Yvette Brackman, Appendix 1 5) instant HERLEV. projects for a Copenhagen suburb var kurateret af billedkunstneren Anja Franke og fandt sted i hendes hus i Herlev i sensommeren Yvette Brackmans Lot Ten blev vist i husets bryggers, som til anledningen var ombygget til biograf. 6) Franke, A., Ud & hjem / Home & Away, instant HERLEV. projects for a Copenhagen suburb, Herlev 2004, p. 38 7) Man kan argumentere for at den kvindelige hovedperson i Lot Ten i kraft af sin enlige nattevanding rundt i byen - og ikke mindst det, at hun går på bar alene - okkuperer et traditionelt maskulint rum. Et rum særligt Situationisterne har behæftet med maskulin gestik. 8) Se mit interview med Yvette Brackman, Appendiks 1 9) Chatman, S., & Duncan, P., Michelangelo Antonioni. The Complete Films, Taschen, Köln, 2004, p ) Med hendes blik på sig selv, mener jeg, at man så at sige ser hende, med (gennem) hendes egne øjne. 11) D, Cinema 2, p. 7 12) Cinema 2, p ) Yvette Brackman har på et tidspunkt (2006) fortalt, at hun ser La Notte som baggrundsemne for Lot Ten. Den var et arbejdsredskab for den nye film, et værktøj for en ny iscenesættelse. 14) Brackman sagde i 2006, at hun hverken så Lot Ten som en remake eller en tillempelse. Denne holdning har hun dog senere ændret jf. interviewet, appendiks 1. 15) Se mit interview med Yvette Brackman, appendix 1 16) Torp, M., LAND. Kortlægning af Yvette Brackmans projekt, LAND Yvette Brackman (udstillingskatalog), x-rummet, Statens Museum for Kunst, København, , p. 9 17) Filmen Tecnicamente Dolce var kommet så langt som til pre-produktionen, da producenten trak pengene. De to hovedrolleindehavere Jack Nicholson og Maria Schneider spillede i stedet i den næste film, Professione: Reporter (1974) 18) Brackman, Y., The re-emergence of the Past into the Present, Brackman, Y., og Finn, M., The Making of Technically Sweet,, Plum Velvet, Københan 2007, p. 15. Interessant er det her, at både hun og også Maria Finn i sin tekst bruger begrebet re-enactment om deres projekter. Der er ikke i deres måde at bruge begrebet på noget, der for mig at se adskiller det fra en remake. Jeg tror snarere det handler om, at re-enactment var og er et meget populært begreb, der med Rosalind Krauss ord fra Sculpture in the Expanded Field, er blevet udvidet så meget, at det kan inkludere snart sagt alting. 19) D, Cinema 2, p. 6 20) D, Cinema 2, p ) Wenders, Wim, My Time with Antonioni: The Diary of an Extraordinary Experience, Faber and Faber Limited, London 2000, p

8 interview with the artist Yvette Brackman on the subject of her film: Lot Ten, 2004: Kristine Kern: Your movie Lot Ten is a kind of remake of Antonioni s La Notte from How do you find Antonioni interesting and why particularly this movie? Yvette Brackman: I saw La Notte in 1979 at a film club with my mother when I was 12 years old. My parents were in the midst of a long drawn out separation and divorce. This film left a big impression on me at the time, and looking back on it, it s quite uncanny the parallels of the characters in the film to my parents lives. My father is a writer and my mother was in the process of finding her own identity after a long marriage in which my father was the dominant character. KK: What is special about your film is that we see only one of the protagonists, namely the female character Lidia. Why is that? And what does it mean in relation to Antonioni s female characters, both in this specific movie and in general? YB: Even though I did not have the capacity to analyse the movie at the time, its mood and certain scenes stayed with me and I was interested in somehow allowing the female character the space to wander, without her movements being dictated by the male character in the film. Jeanne Moreau s character interests me very much, because I believe in the later films Antonioni pushes the neurotic aspect of the female character, and I think this is also why Monica Vitti fits those roles so well. She is very beautiful, but her beauty is also very camp in the Susan Sontag sense. In La Notte, Moreau is sober, and throughout the film through her growing awareness she realises her predicament and takes action to do something about her situation. KK: I remember you once described the Lidia character in your movie as a female opposite to extreme male positions such as the Situationalists. Can you elaborate on that? YB: I think what I meant at the time is that the situationalist city wandering is so macho, in the sense that it has to do with being on some kind of vision trip, taking mind-altering drugs and expanding on the role of the dandy in the 19th century, Benjamin taking on the urban space sense. I see Lidia and my character as also taking on the urban space and writing their narratives on the environment, but they do so without the pomp and bravado of the situationalist gesture, but it has the same or maybe even more consequence, because they explore spaces that are not so comfortably traversed by women, and they do it alone and on their own terms. KK: There is also the issue of a film made by a famous male director, remade by a female artist. Is there a feministic agenda in your film? YB: I think it is definitely a dialogue that I am having. A father-daughter confrontation maybe. I made a video in 1999 called Camp, which is also a remake. I took the moments before the famous Kubrik matchcut in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The matchcut is the transition from the ape throwing his weapon (the bone) for the first murder, and cutting to the orbital nuclear weapon platform. I took the moments when the murder is being committed before that cut, and I stretched them out to seven minutes, but filming the scene in detail to create detail and variation on the event. I also made a remake of another auteur, the experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. In 2006 I refilmed my version of his 1971 film, La Région Central. His film is made with a 16 mm camera on a tripod apparatus of his design that acts like a moonprobe filming 360 degrees with varying focal lengths the untouched landscape of central Quebec. My film The Precise Location is taped on the same latitude but on the other side of the globe in a demilitarized zone on the Kola Peninsula in Russia on terrain that was used for land maneuvres during the Afghanistan war. Instead of building an intricate apparatus I use a simple tripod and make the rest of the rotations take place in Final Cut. The dialogue I am having with his film is about the differences between immediacy, purity and access as opposed to mediation, contamination and regulation. KK: The fact that you remade only some scenes of Antonioni s movie and put them together in a sequence also have a huge impact on the narrative. We know Antonioni as a director who avoids logical constructions in terms of developments in action and time. I think you take this issue even further in deconstructing our sense of logic in relation to the protagonist s acts and her whereabouts. In your work the viewer looses sense of time, for example. Could you comment on that? YB: The film follows the same timeframe as La Notte which starts in the first part of the day and ends at dawn the next day. I don t know if this was conscious on my part. I was trying to emulate Antonioni in his interest in expressing the inner emotional space of the protagonist through the use of the landscape that they find themselves in, but since there is virtually no interaction with others, there are few anchors in time for the viewer. KK: You made the movie for a specific occasion, namely the international group show Instant Herlev, which was curated by the Danish artist Anja Franke and took place in her house in the Copenhagen suburb of Herlev in the summer of This context meant that you chose to shoot the film in Herlev. Can you comment on this location in relation to the story in the film? And in relation to Antonioni s setting of his story? YB: When I started working on the project I knew that I wanted to work on the relationship between film and location. I was interested in how film fictionalizes locations. Initially I had the idea of slightly altering each location, creating a set up that would remain for the duration of the exhibition, but we had problems with the municipality. They would not allow the alterations in the city to remain. I realized that I could make the film without the altered scenography, the city itself offered enough iconic scenography in itself. The Brutalist architecture of Herlev hospital and the watertower that was emblematic of Herlev referred back to Antonioni. These two forms triggered my memory of La Notte and it developed from there. KK: In the exhibition your film was installed in a kind of cinema-situation, like a small movie theatre. Was this to emphasize the cinematic connotations in our work? Or did it have to do with the audiences experience of the work? Maybe both? YB: Definitely both. KK: I remember when I analysed Lot Ten as a remake, you were not especially happy about that reading, why is that? YB: The term remake is used so much in mainstream cinema and is usually referred to films that update and/or popularise an existing film. I see it as being in dialogue with the film, but I use remake myself for lack of a better term. KK: If one says that Antonioni s La Notte is disconnecting the traditional cinematic relations between characters, space and time, would you say that your film is taking these issues even further? YB: Yes, this really interests me about Antonioni s films, especially the trilogy L Aventura, La Notte, L Eclisse and the fourth in the trilogy, Deserto Rosso. The issues of man s alienation from himself and his environment as personified in Antonioni s approach to directing his actors and his scenematography. The exclusion of all contact with the female character coupled with her lack of neurosis that we see in Red Desert is also a kind of response to Antonioni. The female character in Lot Ten is isolated, but this lack of contact does not cause hysteria, rather it enables a heightened awareness and sense of reality. I see her as a strong figure, one that confronts her circumstances, accepts the emotional consequences and observes her environment and makes decisions. She moves forward, she is not trapped, but she is not an action hero either, she is an observer who is also part of what she observes. Kristine Kern, Spring

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10 Sometimes the Desert is Red Sometimers the Desert is Red is Maria Finn s remediation of Michelangelo Antonioni s film classic from 1964, Il Deserto Rosso. Finn has retranslated the film into her own still images of drawings and photos. In this way she has enhanced and reversed a number of the film s original ideas and aspects. By projecting her own revised picture back onto the film, Finn unfolds Antonioni s classical point, that a work is not coming into being until it is received, anew. plot Il Deserto Rosso is the story about the beautiful, nerve wracked Giuliana. Giuliana has been hospitalized for a longer period with shock and traumas following a car accident. When we meet her she is leading a vegetative life with an ignorant husband and a young son she doesn t really care for. Gradually she is driven into the arms of a businessman, Corrado Zeller, who recognizes that the car accident was in fact a camouflaged suicide attempt. The film is set in the industrial areas of Ravenna in Northern Italy. Locations and women Il Deserto Rosso embodies the late 50 s and early 60 s new wave of European films, where several conventions from the dominant American film industry dealing with story line, characters and staging were reversed. The new wave film had limited plots and was more often portraying of women than men. Dissimilar to Hollywood productions these movies were primarily shot on location. Actually, location tended to become a cinematic character in itself instead of a time and space marker to the filmic plot or the psychological development of the figures. The point was partly to show how man made landscapes, being it town plans, parks or industrial areas, once created to secure human control over time, space and nature had ended up controlling and consequently estranging humans instead. Il Deserto Rosso is no exception. Here the industrial landscape definitely coordinates the characters in the film, first and foremost the protagonist Giuliana whose mental life is directly mirrored and conducted by her technocratic surroundings. As a classical new wave movie it is a highly feminine film, but not in a feministic sense. Any trace of female vigor or agitation is completely absent. On the contrary, the women portrayed in films like Il Deserto Rosso by inveterate actresses such as Catherine Deneuve, Anna Karina, not to mention Monica Vitti, playing Giuliana, are rather passive characters, at least in their outward appearance. They are phlegmatically trapped in marriages to insensitive husbands, who support their lives but have no idea of how to cope with their deeper longings, ideas and feelings. The nature of the women s perfect elegance allows a growing synthesis of nervous disorders and mental sensitivities. From a feministic point of view new wave film was of course important, epochal in their mere portraying of women. However, as the feminist, Brigitta Steene, wrote about Ingmar Bergman and his chamber plays in 1979, these films continued to maintain a conventional male perspective on the female subject which identifies feminism with hysteria. Nevertheless the seemingly weak women in new wave films possessed a metaphorical potential of extensive critical and artistic dimensions. The stereotypes about female sensitivity and passivity in new film productions might not have had any obvious political intent, but the films were nonetheless meant to be critical. These women could be seen as an expression for a new film aesthetic and as the director s alter ego. In Hollywood films the centre of focus was always the efficient, callous man who understood how to create a melodrama and seduce the public. These films were edited in such a way as to maintain the story s continuity and logic, a so-called seamless editing. Nothing should divert the attention away of the public from the story. The film had to be a complete piece of architecture able to entirely engross the public. The feminine European neuroaesthetic new wave films did quite the reverse. They were non-linear, anti-narrative; they outdistanced themselves and were extremely conscious of their structure. Almost static. The content was created by the structure. The directors were not concerned so much about luring the public into the story as by alienating them away from it. In the editing process the director jumped in both time and space, made abrupt cuts; jump cuts, etc., with the result that the observer was forced to focus his attention on the film media and his perception of such. After the Shock Additionally, the passive and nervous women were embodying the complex breakage with industrial modernist tradition that these films had sprung from. A close connection between modern technique, nervous disorders and artistic practice was prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries. Artists and theorists from Charles Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin had described modern experiences as a neurological complex based on shock, stemming from new, sensory overwhelmingly industrial technologies and new radical ways of warfare. Modern art practice was closely connected with the concept and creation of shock The Shock of the New. Whereas modern medical neurology was trying to develop an-aesthetic cures to remedy the overtaxed nervous system of modern man, sectors of the artistic society were trying to convert this new nervousness into aesthetic expressions. However, industrial shock aesthetics was beginning to vanish in the post-war 60 s and was replaced with new aesthetic forms of alienation. The estranged and paralyzed Giuliana in the outworn industrial area could be seen as a subtle symbol of a new aesthetic era following the era of shock. Remediation In Maria Finn s remediation of Il Deserto Rosso the film s many themes are rotated once again. She translates the work by making her own fictive still images out of the film. In so doing she removes the film aesthetically from a modernistic to a current frame and artistically from a male to a female perspective. At the same time the leading psychological motive is removed from the plot. Whereas Antonioni s film takes place in a correlation between the film s characters and their determinate surroundings, Finn further radicalizes the relationship between background and characters. In Il Deserto Rosso Antonioni staged the film s landscapes the grey, geometrical industrial areas surrounding Ravenna by means of his famous, painterly use of colours. In the first scene s foggy, smoggy landscapes a group of factory workers are merging with the road, the sky and the industrial plants in a grey in grey picture plane. Antonioni had created this uniform grey colour by painting directly on his film recordings. Giuliana is seen walking in this landscape wearing a bright green coat, holding her little son by the hand. Dressed in a colorful coat she is distanced from her surroundings as, to a certain degree, an expression of her personal problems. However, the effect of a few highlighted sections in bright colours against the endlessly grey and plain background, from the stifling yellow smog to a red outfit, continue throughout the whole film. It was Antonioni s main intention to separate the screen into various colored sections as if in a modernistic grid painting, so that the characters could be isolated on a constant basis in a two dimensional reality and, in this way, the landscape became a grid determining their lives more than a background to them. Hereby any narrative development is reset and put on hold. In Finn s remediation, however, the characters are no longer abstracted entities on a monochrome background as in a traditional formal painting. They are either blank figure in meticulously drawn and detailed surroundings, or anonymous persons turning away from the spectator towards the landscape. Finns characters are projection surfaces for individual interpretation and re-narrations of the film. In this way Finn is introducing new possible narratives into the anti-narrative tradition of formal grid painting and the new wave movie. She is not against storytelling but is on her search for narratives of a far more complex nature than the classical Hollywood plot. Cecilie Høgsbro

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13 DESERTED LOT Yvette Brackman & Maria Finn 18 November January, 2006 Last year, Brackman made the short film Lot Ten, and Finn completed her slideshow Sometimes the Desert is Red. Both pieces were based tangentially on films by Michelangelo Antonioni Brackman restaged scenarios loosely culled from the 1961 film La Notte to closely follow one character, while Finn rephotographed and drew images based on moments in the 1965 Red Desert in a way that emphasized the post-industrial landscape. To say that Antonioni was their point in common, however, would be to miss the point. The women were both foreign-born artists living and working in Copenhagen (Brackman is American, Finn is Swedish). Both were making and showing art in a close community where they felt simultaneously outside a homogenous culture but resident within it. Common friends had told the two to see each other s film projects. Once they did, Brackman and Finn decided to collaborate and present the two film-inspired pieces together. The two-person show at Southfirst is more than a collaborative screening of Lot Ten and Sometimes the Desert is Red. The name of the show is Deserted Lot, combining the two movie names into one. Finn created two drawn movie posters--signage for the imaginary film of their collaborative exhibition. Brackman contributed a mobile of moving architectural shapes that could imagine a space in which the two film projects meet. By taking foreign films the kind a person might watch as a means of dealing with isolation and loneliness as a starting point, Brackman and Finn have created a collaborative space that carefully balances aspects of individual artistic production with shared names and signs. Their collaboration becomes a thoughtful model for community. Brackman is a professor of art at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. Maria Finn has collaborated extensively with the French publication Purple and shown widely, most recently at The Apartment, Athens. Southfirst thanks the Danish Arts Agency for their support of this exhibition. SOUTHFIRST is run by Maika Pollack and Florian Altenburg and is located at 60 N6th Street in Williamsburg,Brooklyn. Gallery hours are Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 1-6 PM and by appointment. Please note that we will be closed the weekends of Christmas and New Year. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact Southfirst at or

14 Technically Sweet Curated by Yvette Brackman, Maria Finn and lia gangitano January 20 - March 2, 2008 Opening Reception: Sunday, January 20, 7-9pm A screenplay has no import on its own. It is a blueprint for something else. A blueprint which tells us nothing about what is or what is not intended to be in a film. A screenplay can never resolve any ambiguity in a film. But in this case, Technically Sweet, there is no film. Only the screenplay. A blueprint, for what is not. (Henrik Uth Jensen) Amazon. The screenplay s main theme involves coping with technological invention in an industrial age, and the potentially destructive nature of progress. The title Technically Sweet is a quote from physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the person responsible for the construction of the atom bomb. He became known for using this term during the Atomic Energy Hearings in He used the term technically sweet to explain what is called the technological imperative, an assumption that if something is technologically possible, it is so tempting to realize that one considers the consequences only afterwards: When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. Technically Sweet (Tecnicamente Dolce) is the title of the unrealized screenplay by Antonioni, published in Italian in If made, the film would have been shot in Rome, Sardinia, and The Amazon, and would have featured Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider in the leading roles. When all the preparations for the film were ready, the producer cut funding for the film. Antonioni was instead offered to direct a screenplay by Mark Peploe, The Passenger, with the same actors. Both the screenplay Technically Sweet and the film The Passenger (1975) involve characters who disappear. Antonioni s films often portray people alienated from their surroundings who have come to question themselves. Antonioni describes this process by letting his characters explore the landscape and buildings around them. Cinematically, this is often done without many close-ups of the characters, rather following them from a distance. Instead of narrative based on psychology and relationships, he focuses on characters interaction with their immediate surroundings, telling stories through landscape and architecture. In Antonioni s films, landscape and architecture are not just surroundings; they are products of political decisions that influence our lives. His filmmaking reveals how we construct society, and how our decisions affect us. The Technically Sweet screenplay is a parallel story in which characters are followed from Rome and Sardinia to The The relevance of Antonioni s vision, as well as the challenge of inviting artists to work from the same source, instigated the use of this screenplay as the point of departure for the exhibition. This framework also raises questions about authorship and originality. Today, it is common for artists to use existing artworks as a source for new work. Using the screenplay as their common tool, the artists take this notion of post-production one step further, using a screenplay for a film that was never made. The artists cannot refer to an existing artwork, but instead refer to the screenplay s many potentials. Drawing whatever they choose from the manuscript, which was translated into English for the first time for the exhibition, the artists share a field of ideas originating from the screenplay, and explore questions reception and intentionality. An illustrated catalogue accompanies the presentations at PARTICIPANT INC and Anthology Film Archives, and functions as a third space, with visual material providing a further angle to the projects in Technically Sweet. The publication contains two visual components: images from each artists contribution to the exhibition, and a series of images presenting locations utilized or imagined by each artist, based on locations intended by Antonioni for use in his film, published as production stills in the original manuscript, Technically Sweet. Installation View, Participant Inc., New York, January 2008 Installation View, Overgaden, Copenhagen, November

15 Maria Finn: A Technical Problem, DVD, 16 min. 2008

16 yvette brackman: Superdeep, 8 mm + 16 mm film transferred to DVD, 11 min. 2008

17 Yvette Brackman is an American artist and writer who lives in Denmark. Her work often draws upon the history of the Soviet Union from which her family immigrated in Brackman s art evokes Russian Constructivism, a revolutionary art movement that originated around 1919 and saw art as a practice directed towards social purposes. Brackman s artistic output includes creating platforms for distribution and exchange with a performative character. In these works she engages audiences and communities in exploring issues of common responsibility and social relations. Her artwork draws upon various mediums of expression in which she uses a combination of crafted elements and time-based media to create narratives that unfold in space. From Brackman held a professorship at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen where she also chaired the Department of Walls and Space. Brackman received her Bachelor in Fine Arts from The Art Institute of Chicago and two Masters Degrees in Fine Art and Art History with a minor in Women s Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago Maria Finn is a Swedish artist that lives and works in Denmark. Her work investigates the relationship between literature, film and landscape. Maria Finn became known for her black and white pencil drawings of featureless figures. These works explore issues of identity, gender, and existential anxiety. She has primarily worked with drawing and photography, but recently has introduced film into her practice. Her films are multilayered stories that present several possible interpretations while exploring the challenge of performativity. The drawings are presented together with photographs, films and wall drawings in scenarios where the different mediums interact and reflect on each other. Maria Finn received her MFA from the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen in 1997, and has recently earned a PhD in Visual Art at the University of Copenhagen and the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Her thesis project, Images Between the Word and the Film, explores the relationship between literature and film, and how landscape and space affects narrations in film.