Claire Hooper
Hollybush Gardens, London, UK
Nach Spandau (2008), a new film by Claire Hooper, is a demonstration of an artist well versed in the language, techniques and motifs of cinema. While the work comes, at times, dangerously close to a staid retread of familiar precedents, Hooper manages to engage for the film’s entire 52-minutes, as she documents one of Berlin’s most architecturally attractive Metro lines: the U7. Spanning from the eponymous terminal to the city’s south-eastern fringes, the line was designed between 1971 and 1984 by engineer Rainer G. Rummier and is a mix of decorative Modernist stylings and run-down shopping kiosks. Hooper impressionistically documents each station with a series of collaged, forensically slow pans. The film isn’t narrated, the only sounds being the occasional rumble of a passing train or the crackle of a PA announcement
Created in the early hours of the morning, Nach Spandau is a portrait of the U7 empty of users. For a post-28 Days Later (2002) audience the melancholia of a depopulated city is a familiar pull, while the use of Berlin as a back-drop has some perhaps too obvious romantic connotations. For example, anyone who has seen Uli Edel’s Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981), in which many key scenes are set in U-Bahn stations, may be forgiven for expecting David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ to surge up towards the end of Hooper’s film. Instead the audience is treated to the clichéd cinematic full-stop of a wide-angle zoom-out that feels at odds with the intimate visual language of the rest of the work.
The vacant stations nonetheless allow the viewer’s attention to be snagged on architectural details, from which Hooper teases out a certain sensuousness - an attention to surface familiar from her 2007 film Auditorium. These abstracted planes are at times reminiscent of Luisa Lambri’s fussy close-ups, which is certainly no bad thing. Hooper must also be commended for her occasional use of split-screening that creates a mesmerizing symmetry to some of the colourful geometric tiling that characterizes the interiors of Rummier’s stations. Her comic juxtaposition of tight shots of advertising hoardings with their airbrushed models and sunny scenes against the grim reality of the early hours commute is also well placed.
In the accompanying press release Hooper nods to the voyeuristic observer of Venice in Henry James’ The Aspern Papers (1888). It is dangerously easy for an outsider to buy-in to the supposed romance of a city, and Berlin’s artful bohemianism and Modernist follies have been a familiar point of return of late. The romance that Hooper - and, indeed, this reviewer - associates with the city is doing most of the talking in Nach Spandau. In stripping away the context from her photography Lambri unsentimentally documents surface; Hooper revels in a kind of selective nostalgia, asking the viewer to admire the U7 with not even a nod to Berlin’s fraught past. This lack of political engagement would be perfectly excusable were it not for the fact that Berlin’s division had a direct effect on the U7: Rummier’s line should have linked the city - it’s the longest on Berlin’s underground system - but no through trains ran from east to west until after the wall fell. To solely address the aesthetics of this once divided infrastructure seems a strange, missed chance.
It is not just Hooper’s subject matter that seems to reference the past. The film’s unnarrated documentary approach is reminiscent of the output from the British Transport Commission’s in-house production unit. Formed in 1949, the unit created promotional films that tracked the technological advances of railways in the mid-20th century. Hooper seems to be doing the same, the key difference being that Nach Spandau details - even promotes - something long-gone: the design aesthetic of Modernism and the technological progress that it celebrated. Hooper seems to be exhibiting the very 21st-century trait of not looking forward, but hankering after a constructed past. Were this straight documentation, for the purposes of posterity or wider communication only, Hooper’s film would be a laudable venture; as art, it adds nothing new.
Oliver Basciano
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