Life in Film: Emily Wardill
In an ongoing series, frieze asks artists and filmmakers to list the movies that have influenced their practice
Hubert Sauper, Darwin's Nightmare (2004)
Emily Wardill is an artist who lives and works in London. A senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art, she is currently working on her new film, Game Keepers without Game, which will be exhibited at The Showroom, London, in 2010. Her solo shows at De Appel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Spacex, in Exeter, UK, will open later this year.
There are too many films for me to mention, so I’m going to hit the ground running with Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), by Hubert Sauper – a documentary about Lake Victoria, which is meant to be the birthplace of mankind. It’s a description of the people living on the lake’s shores, who export their fish to Europe and gradually become dependent on foreign food aid; planes arrive from Europe with weapons and leave with white fish. The documentary shows children sniffing glue made out of the fish bones that pile up in stinking, maggot-infested mounds – the only part of the catch left behind for the people who harvested it. Shot in colours of riotous decay redolent of Goya, it evokes the sense of a lens held up that squashes into emblematic proportions everything that is ‘just business’ behind it.
Thinking about filming stained glass windows and about how religion used imagery as a means of communicating morality to a largely illiterate medieval society led me to consider the way in which religion was used as kind of pre-lingual communication device when woven into Republican discourse in the USA by Karl Rove. It made me revisit Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films, especially Lola (1981) and Die Dritte Generation (The Third Generation, 1979), where the actors and set are lit like cartoons – in simple shapes and saturated red, blue, greens and pink. Fassbinder was influenced by Douglas Sirk – especially in the way he used melodrama as a structuring device that glosses over the deviance of his content. This goes full circle: back to stained glass and cartoons activated by light.
Cartoons lead me to Sally Cruikshank’s animated film Quasi at the Quackadero (1976). The characters’ chewy voices emerge from felt pen on soft paper, broken up in hallucinogenic timing like the black outlines in the same way the windows at Lichfield Cathedral break the human figure up into jarring combinations. Also, I imagine the biblical parable Greaser’s Palace (1972), directed by Robert Downey Sr., as something that Captain Beefheart might have made in 1969 if his album Trout Mask Replica had been a film instead. I have never seen a funnier scene than the zoot-suited Messiah on his way to Jerusalem to become an actor/singer performing a song to Greaser’s people with the misplaced vocal confidence of someone who can walk on water.
It’s childish to have an absolute favourite film and mine is Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch (1974). I am in awe of the responsibility of making such a film, which works like a body and makes the mind feel like an organ. In Edvard Munch the body is akin to a conspiracy, but because it cannot be rational this makes it clear it doesn’t matter. Or it is matter. The film intersperses interviews with footage of Munch and his peers; it’s a portrait of Norwegian society that looks as if it were created in the late 19th century. The film is brutal and reveals an awareness of the sickness inherent in representation. Munch and his contemporaries stare out from the camera straight at you – time stops, and you are reminded that human relationships can be both simple and unsolvable. Watkins drenches and traps you in these relations. He has an awareness that every mode of communication both separates and connects the supposed subject to its audience and that the best way to explore an idea is to run alongside rather than to take a snapshot, which freezes and stultifies. Edvard Munch has the humanity and timing of Ingmar Bergman’s TV drama Scenes from a Marriage (1973): the way in which it is filmed and the spaces within it are inseparable from the action.
Jeanette Iljon’s That’s Entertainment … (The Conjuror’s Assistant) (1979) is more like a sculpture than a film. It helped me to think through my film Sea Oak (2008); about the relationship between the lapidary nature of film and the use of solid language pretending to be material. That’s Entertainment analyses 100 feet of documentary footage over 35 minutes, breaking down both the gestures of the subject, the filmmaking itself and the style of analysis, and has a kind of sense of meaning that is implied through the act of searching.
John Smith’s film Associations (1975) has been important too, as have Peter Gidal’s Upside Down Feature (1967–72) and Close Up (1983). When I told Gidal that his almost entirely black film with a soundtrack of interviews of Nicaraguan revolutionaries had been in my mind when I was editing my own 51-minute entirely imageless film, he replied ‘That’ll be a hit’.
‘Is that the person that you came in with? Are you sure? Where is that dollar that was in your pocket?’ asks Vito Acconci in The Red Tapes (1976). The question moves from himself to himself within America; he intonates like he is your friend, a director, a zealous teacher, shouting up to a closed door, a tour guide, an argumentative lover, an actor, the revolutionary addressing the people. Each text and image locks into the others but remains separate like a pile of outlines of various goods made from cast metal and then stamped together. Things don’t blur into each other, though; the film is not a collage – because Acconci is there, walking among his ideas and working them out on-screen: ‘I am singing for my supper but I realize that it is America’s song, so I change my tune.’ He’s whispering; it’s sexy, annoying and so stupid that it travels full circle and becomes smart again. It’s intimate and brutal and leaves you feeling like you’ve been on an epic journey, but the journey was never explicit: it’s assumed. Acconci builds up a sense of space from a studio and limited means. He is talking about The New World, but this is 1977 and the dreams and ideas that existed when this world was being founded have become soiled and shaped by use. It seems so slight and yet precise that Acconci would talk about America through the limitations of his own form and his ability to affect his surroundings – because it takes the irresponsibilty of ideas back to the responsibility of the human form. It reminded me of the chemist Sir Harry Kroto talking at London’s Royal Society about the C60 molecule that he had identified, that was ‘so strong and so light that it could be used to build ladders to the moon – and then adding, in quiet parenthesis, that it was actually being used by the military and to make trainers. Acconci lets us enjoy his suffering. As he is struggling, his body is tied up like a parcel saying, ‘I’m coming, don’t start without me’.
And finally, I am so excited about Pedro Costa’s retrospective at the Tate this year that I might break into a sprint, and I’m hoping very much that by the time that this is published a venue will have been found to screen the cracked up, crafted together perspectives joyously created in the films of Vlado Kristl.
Emily Wardill
Paranoia, hallucination and expectation; making sense of hidden systems
Hamlet’s famous advice to his mother – ‘Assume a virtue, if you have it not’ – packs in a wealth of philosophical questions about the divide between what we are conscious of (pretending to be virtuous) and what comes across (being virtuous). It’s this silty ground between intent and actuality – the idea before it is put into action – that is the territory explored in the mosaic-like short films of London-based artist Emily Wardill. Works such as Born Winged Animals and Honey Gatherers of the Soul (2005) and Basking in what feels like ‘an ocean of grace’, I soon realise that I’m not looking at it, but rather that I AM it, recognising myself (2006) capture scenes of city life in brief, fixed point-of-view shots, setting these vignettes to the even tempos of a plodding piano or the ringing of church bells. The films cohere in visual rhythm, texture and style but give the impression that a complex meaning is being deliberately withheld. Wardill makes films, it seems, with instinctual talent, and the opacity of her work is both a measure of this and an inquiry into the degree to which we are conscious of our own behaviour – into how reality rubs against expectation.
Ben (2007), Wardill’s most recent film, juxtaposes two psychological case studies: one used by Sigmund Freud to illustrate the idea of ‘negative hallucination’ (where a patient believes a room full of objects to be empty) and the other regarding a subject called Ben, used by American psychoanalysis students to understand the condition of paranoia. The first case is intoned by an actor assuming the voice of a hypnotist, while the other is haltingly read aloud by a non-native English speaker (a favourite distancing mechanism of Jean-Luc Godard). Neither of these two strands is explicated visually. Ben is a colour film of a set made entirely of black and white props. Actors in theatrical face-paint and plumed hats perch by rickety Modernist tables, bare light bulbs and awkward stocky sculptures. The two narratives remain as separate as oil and water: Freud’s melodrama and the hypnotist’s voice-of-God narrative play off the unsteady reading and flat scientific jargon of the American study. The two stories intersect only at the end, where the name ‘Ben’ comes to designate the apparently non-existent object to be picked up by the hypnotized patient.
Arguably, Ben also enacts the paranoia and negative hallucination it describes; on watching the film the viewer’s instinct is to conceptualize the existence of a relationship that is not visibly given. This is the logic that links the three strands of Ben: the two dissimilar narratives and the stylized actors and film set. And, as in cases of paranoia in which a system known only to the paranoiac gives meaning to apparently random configurations of events, the logic of Ben remains known only to the artist. Even in the less elaborate film Basking in what feels like an ‘ocean of grace’…, Wardill hides clues; the film’s piano soundtrack, for example, was generated so that the musical score would look symmetrical when transcribed to sheet music, playing forwards and then backwards. How does this come across when it is included in the film? Can the viewer ever know about this system just from watching the film?
This isn’t a criticism levelled against the work; it’s a question Wardill anticipates. It is precisely this potential obfuscation and transfiguration of meaning, through the processes of communication, that she seeks to explore. Wardill’s work, Sea Oak, scheduled to be completed this autumn, addresses how people understand information better when set in narrative form – with the specific example of the US Democratic party, who are revising their campaign presentations to incorporate narrative and melodrama, and gain some of the rhetorical force recently monopolized by Republicans. The final section of Basking in what feels like ‘an ocean of grace’… features a focus group, filmed without sound and through a window. How is information given? Is it paid for, set into a narrative or represented visually? And how is it received? The focus group’s ‘exemplary’ opinions become symbolic of life in a city, refracted into images whose meaning is based on both structure and assumption.
Melissa Gronlund
frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com.
