If: people and places in recent film and video
Bloomberg Space, London, UK
Ben Rivers, This is My Land (2006), 16mm, duration 14min
Since the 1990s many artists working in film and video have explored portraiture through the form of the documentary. Even before this, artists working out of avant-garde, experimental and independent cinema traditions ranged over the same area. What was often claimed to be at stake in these works was the extent to which documentary’s perceived veracity was questioned, deconstructed and then reconstructed to perform both a critique of the form and a more truthful portrayal of the subject. ‘If: people and places in recent film and video’ brings together five young UK-based filmmakers – Mark Boulos, Dwight Clarke, Stephen Connolly, Ben Rivers, and Stephen Sutcliffe – who engage with portraiture in an altogether more folksy, self-conscious and humble way.
Stephen Connolly, Film for Tom (2005), s16/anamorphic video, duration 12min
Stephen Connolly’s film, For Tom (2005), introduces the eponymous subject through a series of interior and exterior shots with a voiceover. The sitting room, which we see repeatedly, is later revealed to be where Tom is brutally stabbed to death. The details of this, and of Tom’s life, are presented in a fragmented and incomplete way. We learn that he was bisexual and frequently homeless, as well as something of his thwarted academic ambitions, his sense of self and opinions about psychoanalysis. Part portrait, part murder mystery, the film disturbs and unsettles. The final section, in which Tom’s murder and his killer’s court case are quickly described with subtitles, leaves a gap in our understanding which is at once constructive – producing this sense of unease – but also makes it difficult to understand Connolly’s attachment, his personal involvement with the subject and his motivation for making the film. Judging by the slightly sour subtitles at the end, this was – at least in part – out of anger at the lenient sentence that Tom’s killer received.
A similar atmosphere of malevolence and exhaustion inhabits the other works of note in the exhibition. Mark Boulos’ The Word Was God (2006) puzzlingly juxtaposes an interview with an elderly hermit in Syria, who laments the passing of his way of life and his children’s desire for the trappings of modern life, with images of the effusive congregation of a Pentecostal church in London. One rapturous woman sits on the floor, between pews, rocking and nodding, bracing herself as if about to give birth while belting out a prayer.
A baleful atmosphere emanates from Stephen Sutcliffe’s strange, slight and elusive films. Each of the four presented here (none of which runs for more than two minutes) feels like a fragment rather than a completed work, and this inchoateness draws you in, as if scrutinising the inscrutable will reveal something of the mysteries of the world.
Although the curatorial rationale attempts to frame these works within the context of a documentary-related discourse, the works presented in ‘If’ have either more modest aims or are caught in a completely different continuum. Clammy, soiled and defeated, the malaise explored in these films seems particularly male and distinctively British.
Dan Kidner
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