On the day that the Tour de France rolls into Londres... for £1 (85p for members) you can watch Green on the Horizon on BFI Player. It's there as part of a cycling collection which also consists of things like Ridley Scott's first film, Raleigh advertisements, and 1940s cycling safety films, among many others.
Last night I caught Velorama on BBC Four (available on iPlayer for another six days), which is a peculiar compilation of extracts of cycling films from the BFI archive, directed by Daisy Asquith, threaded through with an odd contrived narrative, driven by music from an unlikely coalition of Bill Nelson and Chumbawumba, which sounds like library music from a parallel universe ruled by Robert Fripp.
The twentieth anniversary of the lecture and
publication 'Specters of Marx' by Jacques Derrida, was marked in April this year
by the Hauntology: 20 Years On
symposium organised at the University of Bradford. Philip Sanderson and I give
a presentation at the symposium about our current work in progress Film of the Same Name.
This project revisits the films we made in the late eighties, in particular
Green on the Horizon and Hangway Turning.
The films were made before Derrida delivered his famous lecture, but they are
prescient to recent interest around forms of hauntology which, beyond Derrida's
extended essaying of the status of Marxist thought in the immediate aftermath
of the dismantling of the Soviet Union, has rippled through art and music
and is now popularly better know as embracing other questions and resonances of
the past in the present.
Our films are in part concerned with hauntings in a
quite literal sense, one of the characters is based on local legends of ghost
sightings, but it also draws on such paranormal phenomena as psychometry,
ley-lines, and various other notions of energy embedded in the land. The
films employ forms which have become tropes associated with
hauntological concerns: voices over narrate mysterious poetic phrases
and faux documentary reports, shot on super 8 film they already evoke a
grainy ghostly nostalgia. By contemplating what it may be to revisit, remake,
reenact these projects, we are immersed in the same kind of forms of
hauntology that the word has become associated with, almost to the point of
cliche. In the face of this it’s hard not let a certain sense of irony creep in
and for the presentation we go into a deadpan performance mode while layers of
past and present manifestations of the project slip variously in and out of
relationship with each other; we read adaptions of the original text, play back
video of recent visits to the films' original locations, reenact the
revisitations right there in the auditorium, throw in extracts from the original
films, alongside recent workshop re-stagings of the original sequences, deliver
mini papers on related themes, all strung together with recorded extracts
from a semi-fictional journal about the project.
As a way of approaching presenting the material amassed
for the project and giving it a form which might lend it to public
presentation, this seems to work quite well, in spite of suspicions that
the audience are simply puzzled, there seems to be enough to do more than
simply tantalise and the presentation is followed by a quite wide-ranging discussion.
If nothing else it gives us a way in to thinking about how to begin assembling
the beginnings of a finished film, a process that is now underway.
Questions around hauntology resurface a month later,
albeit with closer regard to Derrida's original thoughts, when I write an essay about Chantal Akerman's film D'Est for a Melbourne Cinémathèque screening.
The film was made in 1993, the same year Derrida published Spectres of Marx,
and in it Akerman visits the (then recently former) Soviet Union 'before it was
too late' [sic]. The coincidence of the anniversary of the film and the book,
and their partly shared subject of the post Soviet Union, as well as the
aforementioned reawakening of interest in the concept of hauntology, leads me
to post-Marxist speculations about the resonances and relationships between the
recent and current haunted reappearance of these formulations.
Future ghosts begin to appear through videos made for
the vapor collecting Vimeo group project initiated
by Michael Szpakowski, following a conversation we had had about the
'vaporware' music phenomenon. Vaporwave as a primarily musical practice,
fascinates me with its engagement with the forms of late capitalism, often
taking quite cheesy ‘80s and ‘90s, occasionally recognizable smooth funk
and MoR, slowing, glitching, pitch-shifting it into hazy melancholia, immersed
in the world of the shopping mall and commerce as both repellant and attractive,
a kind of post-accelerationist form
that speaks to a contemporary on- and off-line capitalist experience, while
forging a more heightened affective aesthetic, it ranges not just across sonic
forms but also appropriates video material. I may write more about
this in the future but for more information and links to examples Adam Harper writes a couple of quite enlightening pieces for Dummy magazine last year and then a year later, while Aural Incognito also writes about vaporwave,
particularly interesting is his framing of it as contemporary industrial music.
The shopping mall escalator of vaporwave chimes with my
interest in the private/public spaces of late capitalism, both the real and
their virtual representations if such a distinction can still be made, and
vapor collecting is an opportunity to try a few quick experiments with the
reproduction of such spaces. The works reuse and manipulate material
mostly sourced on the web, as well as self-captured video (if such a
distinction can still be made). They are immersions in capitalist spaces, the
hazy logic of late capitalism melts into pixels, in part suggestive of an
internet consciousness as imagined through the blandest of neo-liberal
banality. They embrace the aesthetic and the ambiguous contradictions of a
relationship to such places, the repulsion from and the attraction to their
seduction. The imperative here is to distort and amplify affect through
audio-visual effects, slow motion, pitch-shifting, repetition, and in so doing suggest
hallucinations of spaces of the near future, imagining a time, perhaps
post-consumerism, when the spaces of capitalism are theme parks, pure
spectacle, within which a dream-like melancholic drift is the only activity
available.
These works already have a life beyond the internet as
a selection of the vapor collecting group videos screened at the
Synthetic Zero event
at BronxArtSpace in New York.
Capital Wharf Station and Systemic Risk Plaza from the vapor collecting series are also soon
to be screened as part of the Tuned Cities screening programmeat Baltic 39, Newcastle on 21 - 22
September.
Western pixelated blur trail (accelerated
obfuscation mix), one of the videos posted to the vapor collecting
group is an ambient remix of an already ambient video From the West made
for the latest edition of Kerry Baldry's One Minute project.
After being immersed in virtual representations of shopping malls, for
this video I pay a visit to the most recent, and in some ways most notorious, example
locally of such a place (being part of the Olympics-led regeneration
and reportedly a crime hotspot
- perhaps an appropriate reputation for a beacon of consumerism).
Not being a regular habitué of such places, this first
trip to Westfield shopping mall in Stratford offers some revelations.
I notice two things in particular: one is that it seems to have been designed
as not just retail space, but also for leisure; there are a number of places
where one can stop, relax, sit down, much like as in an airport lounge (which
themselves increasingly resemble shopping malls). The other observation is
that while the place is buzzing with people the shops are mostly
empty and appear to be doing little or no business. Have people not come here
to shop?
Where earlier ghosts of political/social
totalitarianism reemerge in Chantel Akerman's films 'from the east' (D'Est),
what future ghosts of political/social capitalist totalitarian consumerism
emerge from the west?
I think back to Derrida's writing in 'Specters of Marx'
and I try to imagine a paradox of western consumerism after the fall of capitalism:
now the shopping mall is a kind of theme park, a purely social space for people
to hang out in, it retains its aesthetics, architectural structure, etiquette,
and customs but the crucial ingredient, mass consumption, is
missing, reenacted only in the performance of the social habits
of the act of shopping. It has become a ghost of itself.
Green on the Horizon, 18 min, 1988, Philip Sanderson & Steven Ball
It was well over twenty years ago that Philip and I spent weeks scouring the folk archives and local libraries, from the marshlands of the Medway delta to the lanes of the outskirts of Maidstone and that mysterious suburban liminal hinterland between, collecting loosely connected local folklore, phenomena occurring around pagan sites, universal urban myths, hatching plans to realise this as some kind of major cinematic opus. But how to achieve this vision?
There was some interest from influential figures in the experimental film world, which led exactly nowhere. Without the means to produce the project in its entirety, we were however able to make some forays into the project, first with the extremely DIY Apostrophe S in 1986 and then in 1988 for Green on the Horizon we received funding from South East Arts. It was shot on several days over a couple of months on Cliffe Marshes, using the London Filmmakers’ Co-op’s just about functioning Nizo super 8 camera, balancing precariously on bicycles while shooting, pacing around fields and along the Thames Estuary foreshore as Angie Staples made attempts to interpret the directors’ intentions through self-choreographed parading up and down, round and round. The finished video was influenced as much by Tarkovsky and The Avengers as it was by avant-garde formalism.
Green on the Horizon was well-received in some quarters. Stephen Bode wrote “Short cuts make long delays. Green on the Horizon makes a wonderful diversion.” (City Limits, 28 April, 1988) and made it number four in the City Limits ‘Indie Vid Top Ten’ for 1988 (placing it above works by the likes of Mona Hatoum, Cerith Wyn Evans and George Barber). It was included in Electric Eyes, an early Film and Video Umbrella touring programme which resulted in screenings at the Tate, ICA, Video Brazil, and Wien Medienwerkstadtt, among many others.
But elsewhere the video received a more muted response. Mike Jones was frustrated: “A film that contains elements of dance/choreographed movements, but is not really a dance film; a film set in a landscape, but its insistence for much of the time on framing the figure closely in relation to background means that it’s not really a ‘landscape film’” and he goes on to suggest that it “…stumbles and then trips itself up…” (Independent Media, July 1988).
So, after twenty years how does Green on the Horizon fare?
It looks to me now to be something of an ante-narrative, a catalogue of gestures and phrases on a linear path that suggests a parallel narrative that it is placed beyond; the narrative elements presented only partially in the work itself, which still curiously appears quite self-contained, well-formed but paradoxically incomplete. It is an enigmatic piece and perhaps best viewed alongside its complementary works: the aforementioned Apostrophe S and Hangway Turning. The latter was made by Philip in 1990, after I had left the UK, and effectively collects most of the remaining elements that we had developed for the project into a work with a more satisfying narrative structure. This is achieved chiefly through the introduction of a second character, a kind of reluctant psychic archeologist who provides a narrative continuity, played with deadpan aplomb by Nigel Jacklin. An extract from Hangway Turning can be viewed here, courtesy of the archive at psouper.co.uk.
