Issue 1: Summer 2008

Three Projection Events in Cork

Review Posted: 08 Jun 08

Experimental Film at the Cork French Film Festival
The Boss (Meridian Theatre) at the Granary Theatre
Music for Minorities (Mikel Rouse) at the Opera House

It is far too seldom in Cork that we get to see artists manipulating film projectors as if playing musical instruments. Film, not video. And not film transferred to video, which is, after all, still video. Not that there is anything wrong with video. Except perhaps how accessible it has become in proportion to how hard it is to work with film in this part of the world. It's good to remember the differences between these materials and we must be grateful to the French Film Festival, under the artistic direction of Paul Callanan, for providing what will probably prove the clearest public reminders of this distinction to be seen in Cork all year. These took the form of three film performances, Blind Spot by the Burstscratch Collective, and Mexican Sci-Fi and Hyperscope both by Gaelle Rouard and Etienne Caire.

All of these events, which were held at the Triskel, involved multiple projections, images being switched, superimposed and manipulated live by the different artists involved, sometimes improvisationally. Blind Spot was a ferociously intense exercise in sensory overload, with abstract images giving way to treated found footage of fish, monkeys and, finally, humans- an originary trip. Rouard and Caire's work, less overwhelmingly dense, featured found footage from feature films and was distinguished by some interestingly subtle almost black-on-black passages. All three screenings could be faulted for their rather tired choice of representational images, especially Blind Spot's monkeys which somewhat diluted the considerable power of its more abstract sections. But do we really have the right to gripe when we are doing nothing comparable at a local level?

The rareness of an event which foregrounds film projection to such a degree only makes one more conscious of the ubiquity of video projection. A friend of mine who works in theatre recently spat out the acid comment: "If someone's putting on a play, you can tell if they're over thirty-five. They always stick a projection in somewhere because they still think that's all they need to be cutting edge." The Meridian Theatre Company production of Thomas Hall's The Boss, directed by Johnny Hanrahan, couldn't be less guilty of such token use of technology. This one-man show has put great creative investment into the video projections which provide its only backdrop. An anguished autobiographical monologue spoken by a disgraced real estate tycoon hiding out in Spain, The Boss' initially promising text soon sinks under the weight of its own self-importance. This is unfortunate given both Michael Loughnan's engaging performance and the generally imaginative production. To say that the show's video component is more effective than the play itself is not to imply that it simply swamps the text with technology overkill. What it seems to be attempting is a sort of counterpoint between the self-aggrandising rhetoric of the protagonist's spoken apologia, and darker psychic currents at best partially acknowledged in the monologue but shaded in through the surrounding audio-visual environment. This balance is never quite achieved.

Taking the project as a whole, the problem seems to be one of interiority versus exteriority. The images projected are introverted, either abstract or fragments from the narrator's reality reduced to nightmarishly abstracted details: racing horses, chandeliers, mouths, shopping mall escalators, products on supermarket shelves. The whole thrust of his megalomaniac character is expansive, outgoing, and the lack of any images illustrative of this prominent aspect of his personality, shots of the buildings he constructed for example, damagingly severs him from the projections' content.

On their own terms, the projections are very effective, creating a genuinely creepy atmosphere of emotional grime and moral decay. The grainy, degraded, often looped, presumably found-footage visuals flow like a sort of spiritual effluent seeping from the outwardly sturdy ‘boss'. The play is at its best when the video all but takes over, strongly hinting at events too dark to be spoken of. However, a lot of careful thought has obviously gone into imbricating live and video elements, with the latter sometimes no more than a background, sometimes part of the action and sometimes the focus of attention.

If the desired fusion between live performance and video doesn't quite occur in The Boss, the capacity of video to introduce a sense of difuseness into live performance is central to its employment in a very different one-man show that played at the same time as Meridian's. Music for Minorities is a concert by American composer and multi-media artist Mikel Rouse. Displaying an appealing lightness of touch throughout, it presents Rouse's live music performance with a background collage of projected documentary footage. This consists of interviews with people he has encountered, reflecting on their thoughts and feelings, and images of places that seem most concnerned with evoking moods.

On his website, Rouse proposes the whole effect as an image of memory. He further states: "Seemingly unrelated video images merge with the images of the storytellers to create a common thread: the views of the Silent Minority". But, at least for this viewer, the real interest of the event lies less in how its elements ‘merge' and more in the openness of the music / video relationship, how the two aspects compliment each other without striving for too tight an equivalence. The video never feels like a gimmicky backdrop to the songs, or simply like a series of music videos, and the music is almost always more than simply a soundtrack to the pictures. What seems to be happening instead is the juxtaposition of two streams of work that highlights their autonomous existence in the world, and the world beyond their existence. The images create a universe in which the music can exist, and lead the mind to wander beyond the music. The music prevents the spectator from becoming completely absorbed by the stories hinted at in the visuals. This subtly mediated consumption of the performance works by, as it were, gently moving the viewer outside the usual parameters of concentrated auditorium spectatorship to the media-infused outside world where sounds and images drift past us barely noticed, ubiquitous monitors and speakers publicly address no one in particular.

Yet there is frequently enough poetic force in what is being presented to conjure an ‘oustide world' generated by the show, rather than pushing us back into ours. This results in a heightened, if aethereal, sense of the environment from which this work emerged and in which one could imagine it being consumed- the ‘home' of the images. Tellingly, the only sections of Music for Minorities which completely fail are those which make clumsy use of manipulated news footage, taking the work too jarringly into the realms of meta-image.

This random, or at least purely circumstantial, comparison between Meridian Theatre's The Boss and Mikel Rouse's Music for Minorities would seem to suggest that in using projections as part of live performance, collaging distinct elements to form an unusual synthesis is potentially a far more interesting approach than using one element to amplify a theme centralised in the other.

-Maximilian Le Cain


Cork French Film Festival:
http://www.corkfrenchfilmfestival.com

Meridian Theatre:
http://www.meridiantheatre.com

Mikel Rouse:
http://www.mikelrouse.com