Issue 5: Winter 2009 / '10
Editorial
It is with deep sadness that Experimental Conversations learned of the death of one of its heroes, Iván Zulueta, who passed away at age 66 just two days before the end of 2009. Appreciated in his native Spain chiefly for the cult masterpiece Arrebato (1979, discussed extensively in Issue 2), he remains criminally neglected elsewhere. It is my contention that his cinema will still have its moment with international cinephiles, that a film as brilliant and appealing as Arrebato must come to light sooner or later accompanied by a chorus of dismay over how we could have missed out on such an important and deliriously entertaining work for so long... But now Zulueta, regrettably inactive as a filmmaker for many years, won't be around to witness this revelation.
Iván Zulueta
Arrebato examined the vampiric, addictive potential of filmmaking, with Super-8 film literally absorbing characters into it. The otherworldly qualities of film (and video) are also very much to the fore in two recent experimental films by Irish filmmakers. Last issue, I discussed Alan Lambert's remarkable self-described ‘ghost film' Ouroboros (2009) at some length, mulling over the way its highly complex free-form structure liberated narrative potentials latent in footage that might have initially seemed little more than unfocused trans-national ramblings, and the exciting ramifications of this process. To recycle my concluding comment: If Lambert's film could be summed up by a question, it might be: ‘what are we missing on a perceptual level as we go through the world'?
In the ensuing months, Chris O'Neill has made a video called Saint Francis Didn't Run Numbers (2009), which compliments Ouroboros in unexpected ways. The equivalent ‘concluding question' which Saint Francis begs is ‘what are we missing on a perceptual level as we watch films'? Lambert scrutinises footage he has taken in various locations and finds it suffused with mystery which he foregrounds but never really explicates, thus activating the receptiveness of the viewer in a way that will hopefully spill over from the viewing into a general questioning of reality. His film invests heavily in the current prevalence of non-professional video imagery and the bustling fluidity of the modern world.
This is not a still from Saint Francis Didn't Run Numbers
O'Neill's film, on the other hand, is as hermetic as Ouroboros is outgoing, as disconcertingly concise as Lambert's is expansive. Taking images from an iconic ‘70s movie (no need to name it, but there is a big hint somewhere on this page...!), O'Neill first rigorously strips it of any iconic elements to the point that one would have to be very familiar with its source to still recognise the original. Its major stars are nowhere to be seen, with close ups of a secondary player, whose career as an actress is largely unrecognized, and empty spaces or objects from the background of shots now highlighted. The sound is an ultra-minimal track of hissing and occasional popping, scratchy film ‘silence' taken from a much older film. The overall effect, at least on a superficial level, has more than a little in common with sections of Martin Arnold's Deanimated (2002), especially in its excavating of the stillness of background spaces from the bustle of foreground narrative. Yet whereas Arnold's film has a conceptual goal that is fairly easy to ascertain, as well as a satirical edge, O'Neill is up to something more mysterious and perhaps ultimately more intriguing.
Saint Francis Didn't Run Numbers is less interested in détournement than in following the exigencies of a super-refined fetishism, the essentially intuitive organising principle of which remains fascinatingly obscure. He is attentive to the footage in a way in which no one ever has been before, exploring a hidden realm latent in it. And his vision is precisely that of an explorer objectively reporting back on the secrets of a hitherto unseen territory, without attempting to appropriate it to any theoretical conceit.
Ultimately it is the explorer's sensibility that links Saint Francis Didn't Run Numbers and Ouroboros. Whilst Lambert is an explorer in contemporary space, seeking qualities not initially self-evident in what he films, O'Neill voyages in an historical artifact, also uncovering previously unseen elements that inhere in ‘his' footage. The fascination of both works, therefore, lies in the question of what is ‘there', there in front of us. In the case of St Francis, the very many of us who've seen the original film have already had the images of O'Neill's version passed before our eyes. The Hollywood filmmakers carefully constructed every image, yet there is nothing to indicate that they ‘saw' any trace of this short film, which has nestled like a time bomb in a movie classic for nearly forty years. O'Neill and Lambert both, in different ways, foreground the ‘surplus' concealed in any filmed image, and the implications of this ‘surplus' are nothing if not a crucial subject for today's image-workers to engage with
- Maximilian Le Cain