MARGARET SALMON: THE MOON IS DOWN

Margaret Salmon, Fireman, 3:40 (2008), 16mm Ektachrome transferred to DVD.

Margaret Salmon, The Moon is Down, STORE, 29th August-4 October, 2008. 

Last time I saw a Margaret Salmon film it involved three large screens, arranged horizontally in the main space of the Whitechapel Gallery. It was Ninna Nanna (2007) and each screen presented a mother at home with their child,  as the soundtrack wove together three renditions of the nursery rhyme. Guns Trilogy (2008), part of two works comprising the show The Moon is Down, also had three screens, smaller and arranged vertically. This time it was three war veterans and, although the lullaby had been replaced with the narration of each of the men, the sound still lapped and overlapped, sometimes explicit in its subject matter, sometimes becoming a musical texture of sounds and rhythms.

The similarities didn't end there. Like the earlier films, Guns Trilogy was black and white 16mm transferred to DVD for projection, showing an attention both to the formal quality of film and to the conditions of screening (a loud projector would be too intrusive). A shared visual style, too, mixing casualness and formal beauty, evoking Italian neo-realism and the Maysles brothers Grey Gardens - and with whom Salmon also shares an ability to locate rich, distinctive personalities. This isn't to say I found the new films overly-repetitive. Instead, a shifting tapestry of similarity and difference seems key both to Guns Trilogy and to Salmon's unfolding body of work as a whole. 

Margaret Salmon, Guns Trilogy, 9:40 (2008) 16mm b/w film transferred to DVD.

On three screens, then, the stories of three veterans unfold, whilst on the soundtrack their separately recorded stories are interwoven. One set of images, largely on the middle screen, follow a man hunting deer in woods in the snow, mostly sat still, in camouflage geer, gun posed, amid a makeshift hide of bare branches. Another veteran is filmed entirely in a domestic setting - he reads the paper, dances with his wife, sits in a chair, watches television, lies on his bed. A third man works as a policeman and his images are more varied - shots of him on a shooting range, at work as a policeman, lifting weights in his garage.

On occasion the shots are themselves manipulated - as when the man's movements at home are speeded up. But Salmon's most obvious manipulations are to do with the contrapuntal rhythms between the images and sound, and between the three screens. Sometimes the screens converge as if, despite their differences in setting, all three show the same psychological forces of being haunted and trapped by their (military) past. Or one or more screens goes black, or one story fills more than one screen. The result is a mix of intimacy and distance. The men don't know each other, but they become the ground against which each others stories are measured, each variously appearing, sharing, being overwhelmed by, becoming indistinguishable from, the others.  

Whilst editing, presentation, and use of sound, moves the film beyond a conventional documentary structure, Salmon is definitely telling stories, and there are important acts of testimony which emerge from Guns Trilogy. The lone deer stalker's story follows a trajectory that asserts the beauty of aloneness and how nature is attracted to his stillness in the woods, before concluding the film with his decision to not go hunting anymore. Others, within the domestic context, tell Vietnam stories of shooting young girls who came towards them with grenades. No one is ever shown speaking, so the attribution of voice to image is to a degree the viewers choice, floating somewhat freely between the three men.

At the conclusion of Guns Trilogy the three screens fade to black, and there is an extended sequence of gunshot sounds. There's a clunk and a ring to the noise, which I took as highlighting the guns own machinations, mute chatter and laughter which frames the sound as part of the men's social and domestic rather than military lives. When the film loops back to its beginning sounds of windchimes, this, too, appears precariously close to becoming gunshot, testimony to a tentative screen between  present and past. Indeed, one way of reading this film is as an exploration of how history becomes manifest in the present, if we study the rhythms of bodies and lives closely enough. 

The exhibition also includes Fireman (2008), this time in colour, shot on 16mm Ektachrome, transferred to DVD and shown on a TV monitor. This offered another chronicle of maleness, this time of a fireman, shown arriving for work, going off to a fire, and emerging safely at the end. In the context of this exhibition, the film was a useful coda to the more in-depth explorations of Guns Trilogy.  

Margaret Salmon, Fireman (2008)

Often disappearing behind accoutrements of fire engine or uniform - or behind his own projector beam of a headlight -  I found myself noting the moments when a face, a gesture emerges. Indeed, post 9/11 the film seemed to be watching for the moments when an individual emerges from the archetype of the fireman. Intentionally or not, the image was often hard to make out as the viewers own reflection filled the monitor in the brightly lit gallery, aptly highlighting how both these films focus on particular lives and histories in a way that throws up both a question and a mirror.

Salmon's title for the exhibition is taken  from a novel by John Steinbeck, published in 1942, which recounts the relationship of an unnamed European community and its Nazi occupiers,  in part exploring the tension between the Nazi occupiers as individuals and as atrocity committing war criminals.  As well as its obvious connections to Guns Trilogy, this seems to speak to Salmon's own curious sense - as an American born artist now living in Whitstable - of America and Europe and the relationship beween them. 

To make (and show) such work in the UK perhaps highlights its engagement with a certain myth of America, foregrounding a quiet use of such contemporary methods as re-enactment and fictional documentary.  For an artist born in 1975, such explorations of Vietnam and its consequences are also attempts to comprehend the near fit of an historical event and the span of her own life.  

BANKS VIOLETTE

Banks Violette (from top:) as yet untitled (TriStar horse), video projection in water vapour, dimensions variable, 2008; as yet untitled (single screen), wood, expoxy, ash, steel, steel hardware, hand-cast aluminium hardware, aluminium, sandbags, duct tape, 244x 488 x 80cm, 2008. Images courtesy Maureen Paley, London. 

Banks Violette, Maureen Paley, 10 September - 19 October, 2008.

Banks Violette is making luxurious, expensive looking sculptures, whose natural home and economy is the commercial white cube gallery. Banks Violette is also much grungier than that, wanting to reveal, exaggerate and smash up a little the glossiness he constructs.  

Upstairs at Maureen Paley, as yet untitled (single screen) and as yet untitled (broken screen) (both 2008) comprise reflective, black, aluminum screens, whose plywood backs emphasize construction over illusion, and are even draped with clean and neatly folded workman's overalls. One screen is partly mangled and distorted as if it has been involved in some horrendous road crash, giving the object a history beyond its presence in the gallery, and literally  moving the piece beyond a smooth reflection of its circumstances.

Banks Violette, as yet untitled (broken screen), aluminium, fibreglass, wood, epoxy, ash, steel, steel hardware, sandbags, duct tape, 244x 488x 260cm, 2008.  Courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

This sense of disruption is also true of as yet untitled (TriStar horse) (2008), the show's centrepiece: a video projection of a galloping horse projected on a screen of water vapour.  This is a piece possessed of lavish showmanship and exhibitionism, evoking similar hi-tech plays with proto-cinema projection of the recent Mat Collishaw show at the Haunch of Venison. But, different from Collishaw, Violette's horse is dependent on a deafening racket of industrial humidifers, as if to dissuade any collector who fancies a galloping steam horse to decorate their living room. 

Violette also installs the piece in a way that highlights the bareness of the room, the equipment and machinery that he needs, as if wanting this to be experienced more as a basement or broom cupboard than the elegant, minimal white cube it normally is. Indeed, all those issues of presentation and the gallery become focussed on the shimmering form of the white steam-horse itself. 

In the notes for his show Violette reveals how the horse is a clip appropriated from the opening animation for TriStar Pictures, in which a white horse gallops against a black background, grows wings, and flies away. He further observes:

I have used the image of the horse repeatedly, it's an image that falls into that category of images that are void-exhausted and over-determined and drained of life through over-use. This idea of a void image is a constant throughout my work; the idea of an image seemingly unable to exceed the weight of its own overuse, yet somehow, once in a while, capable of reanimation. And like a zombie reanimation results in a negative return.

All of which is fascinating, but I'm not sure it had much to do with how I experienced the piece. The noise of the machinery, and the shifting folds of the horse, hold the work close to its own materiality. The horse is clearly recognizable, but such a form is also indistinct. Watching it, I became fascinated by exactly why such an arrangement of shapes should so clearly be identified as galloping horse by the perceiving mind. 

But this was as far as I went. I wonder if to shift beyond this material and perceptual immediacy to a broader consideration of horse-iconography, or to some critical engagement with Hollywood, could actually require an installation less insistent about its own presence, less brashly seductive about its own status as spectacle. 

 

Banks Violette,  as yet untitled (broken screen) and as yet untitled (single screen). Installation view. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

So, yeah, dear reader, I'm noticing that themes keep coming back in these reviews. I'm drawn to things that employ spectacle, often through a deployment of hi-tech version of proto-cinema projection techniques. But then I get upset at the claims of such work to be socially engaged. I seem to feel that the spectacle itself sets up certain relationships, which it is wrong to spoil with these claims to social and political efficacy.

But I want the work to have social and political efficacy! I'm feeling that the spectacle itself is where such efficacy must reside. I feel that if you deploy the tools of the circus, the marvelous and the fantastic, then it's out of the thrill and engagement that creates that any criticality must come. This is ongoing...     

ARTIST'S PROJECT: ANOUK DE CLERCQ

Sequence composed by  Anouk de Clercq for More Milk Yvette, September 2008. Images taken from the following films: (from top): 1&2: Petit Palais (2002), b/w stereo 15', Anton Aeki (music) and Joris Cool (animation); 3&4: Building (2003), b/w stereo 12'. Anton Aeki (music) and Joris Cool (animation); 5&6: Portal (2002), b/w stereo 14', Anton Aeki (music) and Joris Cool (animation); 7&8: : Kernwasser Wunderland (2004), b/w stereo 14', Eavesdropper (music) and Joris Cool (animation);  9: Whoosh (2001), b/w stereo, 12', Anton Aeki (music); 10: Conductor (2004), b/w stereo 2' 22".

ARTISTS' WRITINGS: JULIE TALEN on THE LONG TAKE

Julie Talen, Pretend (2003)

A long, uncut take is not at all the same as a long uncut motionless take, and, even there, the people who've used a long, tripod take with no camera movement at all, tend to rearrange things in the shot so that the visual elements are changing and the eye is being directed even when the camera doesn't move. I'm thinking of Ozu, who uses the screens in Japanese homes to cut off one space, direct the eye to a new place, and also the movements of people in those scenes - close to the camera, seated at a table, then walking off, far away - to direct the eye. 

But, more to the point - the long takes in films like I Am Cuba and Children Of Men - or the long opening take in Touch of Evil, in The Player, or in Snake Eyes - are filled with activity, with people moving in and out of frame, or (in the latter two) a steadicam following characters through all kinds of visual changes, and the eye is every bit as busy keeping up with the movement and new visual information as if they were doing rapid cutting. 

It's the fluidity of such shots that make their power and grab our attention; a kind of tour de force, where we hold our breath and see how much more they can show us while still not cutting. 

And the real power is that -- when rapid cutting has become a cliche, particularly of action sequences-- the uncut take that has action and violence in it - as in Children of Men, which does this beautifully and very effectively - we aren't prepared, by a cut, for the violence which erupts in those long takes: a kidnapping on the street, an explosion while Theo surreptitiously pours whiskey into his morning coffee, the sudden outburst of street violence in the third act scenes in the refugee camp. 

Because we're not prepared by cuts for these, their violence feels as random as it does in real life, when violence usually erupts out of the blue, confusing us - that sense at first of not knowing what's going on, what's even happened. 

So in this way, the long take is not about letting the eye take things in, but about getting the same explosive, surprising rhythms that rapid cutting first gave us many years ago. Here's a  quote from a filmmaker, Anne Seigal, whose work I don't actually know, but I think she sums up it: "…ambiguity is something that has to be added to the image. One of the places where I thought I could add ambiguity was in shot length – you'd get to the point where the shot would naturally end and you wouldn't experience an ending. And therefore, because you don't experience an ending, the whole idea of when the tension is going to be resolved, in a classical sense, is totally up in the air."

This is a very different use of long takes than something like James Benning pointing a camera at a lake for twenty minutes. 

Even though Atonement's long take in the battlefield tried to do this and failed (to my mind), that long take is full of twists and turns and the revelation of the British Army's defeat at Dunkirk. These things are intricately planned by the director, and the DP, and I know they plan very carefully for where the eye should go in such takes. There's very little time for the eye to meander over  on the screen: a cut is not the only way to direct the eye, not even the most powerful. 

Camera movement, color, the rhythm of movement in the shot, light and sound are all used within long takes to tell the viewer what to watch. In fact, because they're not alerted by cuts, it could be argued that the long take actually controls the viewer more, not less. Makes the viewer play much closer attention, because he can't just sit back and assume he's going to get visual information in the order he's accustomed to. 

A standard master wide/ medium shot/ close-up, reverse shot - can actually have the effect of much more stillness, since it's so predictable. Or in a film like, say, Days of Heaven, the shots, the cuts, are so carefully, so seamlessly, connected it makes one feel the camera is wandering over the landscape for us, albeit with cuts in place, because the cuts are not abrupt, but gentle.  A "cut" is not inherently more violent or jarring than the lack of one. It depends entirely - on both long uncut takes and cut ones - the nature of what's being shown.

Julie Talen is a film-maker and writer based in New York. Her multi-channel film Pretend will be released by Re-Voir in 2009. The above text was partly written in response to last week's article on the long take in Jean Rouch's Tourou et Bitti, which can be found here. The meaning of the long take, how it is experienced by the viewer, and its prevalence in contemporary artists' film, were subjects that dominated May's The Art of Andrei Tarkovsky symposium at Tate Modern - read about that here. 

ON MAGAZINES: mono.kultur

I'm attracted to magazines that create numerous issues out of a single, focussed idea. Something like Aggie Weston's Editions, where each issue comprised a series of poems chosen by a particular poet. It was a simple idea but it set up a series of subtle repercussions between the poet choosing and the poets selected,  the magazines chapbook-like appearance absorbed the selected poems into the editor's own work. 

Such ideas for magazines also seem, at least from the outside, to be a sustainable model. No worries about advertising or managing large numbers of contributers. The idea at the beginning pitches itself at a level the editor knows to be sustainable. Surely, such simplicity couldn't ever get out of control! Thus, at this years Publish and Be Damned Fair, there was Tony White's Piece of Paper Press, each issue comprising a single sheet of A4 paper, photocopied in an edition of 150, ongoing since 1994. 

Perhaps the upper end of such an idea - where the small idea also begins to acquire more extensive, art world distribution - is provided by the Berlin produced mono.kultur. Published quarterly, each issue comprises a single interview. All issues follow the same stapled A5 format, but within that the layout, type of paper, the overall concept for the issue, come out of the dialogue with each artist and their work. A short introduction usually precedes around twenty pages of text.

I've picked up the last three issues of mono.kultur at the Serpentine Gallery bookshop. Taryn Simon: Kaleidoscope of Entropy (#15) included photo's from the photographer's series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar in an envelope at the back of the magazine. Throughout the text were white squares, complete with corner markings and titles, with the suggestion that the reader themselves complete the issues construction. For Miranda July: Best at Belonging to Yourself (#16) the magazine slotted into a pocket formed by a large double-sided poster that documented a number of July's art projects, a design solution that emphasized the improvisatory, DIY construction of many of the documented works.

The latest issue #17 features an interview with the Polish artist Pawel Althamer. The interview itself is printed - unlike the previous issues - on glossy paper, whilst the issues outer sheets are on rougher stock, comprising photo's of the work and individuals of the Nowolopie Group, a ceramics workshop Althamer has taught 

for thirteen years, whose members all suffer from multiple sclerosis, and whose work Althamer has presented, documented and sold internationally. For example, this years Double Agent show at the ICA contained both ceramics and a video of one of the groups classes. 

This way of structuring the magazine is reflected in the conversation itself and Althamer's work, which, with invitations from galleries in various countries, leads him away and back to the Nowolopie Group. It also more broadly reflects his practice of inviting others to occupy spaces or exhibitions he has been awarded. For example, for his 2006 show at the Centre Pompidou he selected eleven art students who collaborated on a filmed shadow play, with Althamer himself contributing a film that related the history of the project. 

Like the Simon and July issues, the interview offers Althamer a chance to run through his career. mono.kultur interviews tend to be done by critics and curators - this one is provided by Adam Szymczyk - but they don't actually do any criticizing, more they provide a structure to enable the artist to lead us through his career and views. This has its advantages in that the overall feel is one of intimacy - Althamer talks about the numerous exhibition proposals that have been rejected, his marriage break up, his experiences of God - but it has the disadvantage of seeming firmly based on the assumption that nothing the artist says be challenged. 

This is perhaps more evident in the current issue because Althamer is interested in playing and provoking around notions of the artist. He emerges both as a kind of artist-bureaucrat, keen to set processes in motion and become invisible himself, and also as a Beuysian shaman, talking about his encounters with God, possessing a clear sense that his own ability and charisma hold everything together. This leads to some curious statements it would have been good to explore further. At one point, Althamer talks of how he and his art group pray for miracles - and, lo and behold, their work is selected for and sold at Art Basel Miami. 

I don't want to appear churlish about the precise forms divine intervention might take, but Althamer's sense of the divine working through booming art sales did seem to warrant further questioning. And if it's not divine will then:  "The art world is like a corporation and, as a healthy employee, I have no reason to complain. It's like an annual bonus all year round." (17) Connecting this back to the magazines design, I can't help but notice how images of members of the Nowolipie group group are over-printed in patterns of pixillated dots that makes them highly aestheticized and all but unrecognizable. Was this a collective decision or a recognition of the limits of participation? 

This highlights a broader problem for mono.kultur. It straddles a difficult boundary between its form and its content. The uncritical, artist- friendly tone of the interviews means that one reads the magazine largely for its design values, the way it places those words within a particular visual context. At the same time, this is an A5 stapled booklet, deliberately evocative of cheaply produced zines, so the reason for reading it is less any visual thrills than the urgency of its content, something that needs a more challenging encounter to sustain interest. It's a tension that, unresolved, could doom a magazine to inconsequentiality.

EVENT REVIEW: THE VISIONS OF LEN LYE

Top: Len Lye, Tusalava (1929)

The Visions of Len Lye, 9th September 2008. BFI Southbank.

I went to the BFI's Len Lye screening tired, wanting an hour of brightly colored dots and squiggles and some Latin Jazz. Maybe I hadn't read the program, but it was actually a lecture by Tyler Cann, Curator of the Len Lye Collection at the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Zealand, followed by screening of the six minute black and white Tusalava, accompanied by a new score from pianist Alcyona. It was an interesting talk, and a subtle, atmospheric performance, but I could never quite get passed my longing just to have some kind of synesthesic bath.

Cann's talk traced Lye's career, the images and film clips leaving more to the imagination than originally planned as the sound in BFI 2 wasn't working. He sought to connect the different aspects of Lye's career- sculpture, films, drawing -  through an interest in motion. He was also anecdotal, hinting at a biographical, psychoanalytic source for Lye's work: his early years as the son of a lighthouse keeper in New Zealand, living with the lighthouse pulse that he termed, somewhat stupidly, the "great flasher."

Cann also stressed Lye's time in Samoa, with slides of his notebook showing his copying of the patterns found in local crafts and art works. Most fascinating were twenty six pages of Freud, copied straight out into his notebook, with his own drawings alongside. Cann was keen to draw attention to the sexual aspects of Lye's imagery, the tension he worked with and sought to overcome between male and female, organic and mechanistic, modern and primitive. In the later films he observed this translated into a simultaneous flow of imagery and a strong, "male" pulse. 

After all this it was hard not to see Tusalava (1929) as anything other than an enactment of these ideas. Its six minutes comprise dots and circles that form an endlessly mutating series of shapes and rhythms that at one point, as if enacting some evolutionary story, create a totemic figure, that is itself then replaced by spirals and dots.

What came back to me whilst watching Tusalava were Cann's comments about Lye's debate with the nature of photography as a record of what has been, and how his techniques could be read as  introducing a sense of how that was also related to the moving body and its systems of perception and understanding. These ideas seem to be in vogue at the moment, a primary method of engagement within avant-garde histories. In the bookshop before the screening I noted P.Adams Sitney kicking off his new book - Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Legacy of Emerson -  with an exploration of Marie Mencken's "somatic camera."  

What most emerged from the evening was a sense of uncertainty, and I wasn't sure if this was me, the evening, or something about Lye himself. Lye emerged as both an avant garde artist and not. Many of the audience questions, for example, involved questions about Lye's awareness or not of various contemporary developments: had Lye seen Leger's Le Ballet Mechanique? Had he read the Surrealist Manifesto? X seemed uncertain about this but stressed Lye had hung out with Humphrey Jennings and exhibited in the Surrealist Show of 1936 in London. Lye's alignment with different strands of modernism was shown in slides of a bookwork resulting from his trip to Mallorca to stay with Robert Graves and Laura Riding. 

Lye, then, emerged from the evening as an artist whose identity was embedded in notions of the new, the modern and the future - Cann stressed repeatedly Lye's sense of himself as a 21st century artist - but who, through personality and geography, had only partial engagements with particular artistic movements or peer groups of similar artists. The clips of Lye's films left open whether this act of positioning was productive or detrimental to his development as an artist. Certainly, such artists can become difficult for future generations to read, as they adopt techniques and methods but fuse them with their own idiosyncratic philosophical assumptions.  

Len Lye, A Color Box (1935)

Thankfully, Lye's work has avoided what often happens in these cases - the work disappears or vanishes. Before his death he signed all his work over to a foundation, which continues both to organize events such as this one, and instigate the construction of his kinetic sculptures, both at exhibitions - such as the current Sydney Biennale - and in public places in New Zealand.

There were also lots of suggestive threads to come out of the evening. One was the image of a strip of film - painted or scratched - and the tension between its individual frames and the whole strips illusion of continuity. Cann traced a shifting sense of this - noting similarities in pattern between the Samoan ceramics Lye drew in his notebook, the strips of scratched and painted film that ignored frame divisions, and the patterns of water and light made in the environment by his recently constructed kinetic sculpture. 

Nor was art the only reference point for Lye. Cann noted how he took great pleasure in developments in biological sciences such as the double helix, finding in it a theory and a justification for the many similar forms that appeared earlier in his films.    

EVENT REVIEW: BEN RIVERS AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM

Stills from Ann McIntosh, Conversations with Rouch (2004).

BEN RIVERS, Nought to Sixty, ICA London, 8th August 2008

To film an event with a single roll of film. To begin outside the event, state your intention and enter. As the film ends to observe it is time to leave and to do so, withdrawing even if the event has not reached its conclusion. 

It's a powerful act, and it structures Jean Rouch's  Tourou et Bitti (1967). I don't want to tell you the specifics of the event concerned. I'm focussing instead on the effects of stating the premises and framing the film in this way, how it shifts the film in the direction of an encounter, the indeterminate and incomplete.

Ben Rivers, The Coming Race (2006), 16mm.

Of course, as the reaction to Rouch's films and ideas often proves, there are problems and questions. Is this structuring device known to those he films, or is it merely something for the film-maker? In Tourou et Bitti the film-makers search for meaningful footage is mirrored by his subjects searches for states of trance and spiritual possession. Do Rouch's framing devices constitute an act of respectful, critical distance or do they actually elevate the film-makers and his own methods above that of what he observes?

Ben Rivers, (from top:) The Coming Race (2006) and House (2007), both 16mm.

Rouch's little seen film opened Ben Rivers selection of artists' films as part of the ICA's Nought to Sixty season this week. In his introduction, Rivers stressed his own interest in ethnographic film, its history within academia where it was connected to a sense of capturing truth, and the artist's freedom to draw on this tradition with a greater freedom in how they responded . In fact, watching the films that followed, one could say that the artist probably has the opposite professional pressure: a need to produce something ambiguous, mysterious, playful or dismissive regarding notions such as truth and record.  

This was a diverse and entertaining program in which films dialogued with each other. Rouch's film was strikingly paired with Steve Reinke's The Mendi (2006), where ethnographic film entwined and was transformed through Reinke's combination of monologue and image manipulation. Barry Kimm's Measurements of Oxford (1989) was a delightful fusion of conceptual project and participatory documentary, as Kimm invited various citizens of a small town to measure objects and buildings that were important to them. Underlying the film, of course, was less a desire for measurement than the use of such a premise to explore the rhythms and characters of small town life. This was also present in Rosalind Nashashbibi's more elliptical Midwest (2002), but it was noticeable that Kimm was the only artist who appeared, Rouch-like, to consciously engage and provoke the people he encountered.

Indeed, taken as a whole the films offered various pathways following on from a rejection of recording the truth. Like Kimm and Rouch one could move towards engagement with people, presenting audience and/or subjects with a stated premise. Or like Midwest or Karl Kels' marvellous Prince Hotel (1987/2003) - a study of the men clustered around a flophouse - one could become an observer of random movements and gestures. Perhaps these two positions are less distinct when actually making a film, but they definitely served as distinct categories for this viewer. 

Ben Rivers, Ah,Liberty! (2008), 16mm.

Rivers also included two of his own films, The Coming Race (2006) and We The People (2004). These seemed to have distanced themselves even further from the ethnographic film than those he chose. Or rather they seemed to have taken its components and distilled them into some essence that was as conceptual as it was lyrical. In We The People, there were only the sounds of people as the camera roamed a deserted and - I think - model town. In The Coming Race crowds of people scramble and climb over a rocky mountainside, disappear amongst clouds at its top, the inspecificity of their actions and gestures raising questions not just about this particular scene but about human nature, representation and perception more broadly. 

The evening concluded with Ben Russell's Trypps Number Three (2007), a film which appeared to adapt Rouch's technique to filming the audience at a gig. It offered a useful example of one way Rouch's technique functions differently forty years later. Here there was no statement of intentions and methods by the film-maker. Rouch's technique of stating, participating, and withdrawing, was replaced by a shift from a recording of an event to a space where - through a change of sound and a sustained focus of attention - the image itself became a tangle of objective and subjective, interior and exterior. 

This meant there was no need for the film-maker to neatly leave prior to the conclusion of his roll of film. When the film reaches such a space there is almost no difference whether the camera leaves or stays.