In The Stillness Of Time

The Age

Saturday August 16, 2008

Andrew Stephens

There's a rich cross-pollination between cinema and the other arts, writes Andrew Stephens.

WHEN I WENT TO IMAX the other night, I almost fell off the seat and into the film. It is ludicrous, but the screen was so encompassing, the resolution so acute, that it seemed possible to tumble forwards into The Dark Knight's Gotham City. It was thrilling.

That is the thing about the cinematic experience: most of us love being enveloped by that well-known suspension of disbelief, despite being complicit in the deception. We enjoy being immersed in fictions that, like our own lives, move, make noise and are bounded by the passage of time.

And yet we take cinema so much for granted that we forget this art form has not been around for all that long. Kenneth Macpherson, one-time editor of the film journal Close Up, is known to have remarked in 1927 that the cinema had, even then, become such a habit of thought, word and deed "as to make it impossible to visualise modern consciousness without it".

More than a century since cinema's inception, our modern, image-swamped consciousnesses forget that once there were only still images in the world - paintings and drawings that did not move or, by the 19th century, photographs that halted and preserved the living moment. It took the imagination to animate such pictures.

One of the most interesting aspects of cinematography's evolution over the past century has been its enduring power to inform and inspire the other visual arts that, ironically, preceded it. Painters, photographers and now mixed-media artists have had their vision changed and determined by the cinema, and many use it as a springboard for their work.

There is also the art of the film still, which has itself become a distinct genre and a fascinating exercise in poetics. These images - these stills from films that are, fundamentally, just a collection of sequential still images projected at speed - might suggest a narrative, but they can be worlds entirely unto themselves.

Before me now are some stills from the works of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami and Spanish director Victor Erice. Kiarostami, as well as being one of Iran's foremost directors, is also a talented photographer. Erice by contrast said in a recent interview that he practises photography "in a sort of private, intermittent way, just for myself, as if it were a secret love, hardly with any artistic claim".

Here is one image, depicting two young girls on a railway track, one with her head on the rails. It is a still from Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), a film I haven't seen. So I make up my own tale from the available evidence: they are sisters, they have run away from home (one carries a little case), and they are on some sort of spiritual quest. There is a mood of melancholy about the image.

Or there is the still showing a woman's shadow behind a white sheet on the washing line (from Erice's Lifeline, 2002). What dramas, romances, plotlines might we impose on this beautiful image? Who is this woman?

Another still before me is from a Kiarostami film. He is better known than Erice in Australia and his output is much greater, with films such as The White Balloon (1995), A Taste of Cherry (1997) and Ten (2002). This still is from Through the Olive Trees (1994) and shows a young veiled woman, her face turned away, carrying pots of geraniums. Is she in an orchard, a park? What has happened? Enigma is bound up in the image - yet we know, if we watch the film it is sourced from, that the picture will be brought into a new and different life. Like some of the other Kiarostami film stills, such as a roadway from The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), the image by itself is full of possibilities, nuances and multiple narratives.

These two directors (born in the same year, 1940) were brought together in 2005 into an interesting correspondence by curators Alain Bergala (who is French) and Jordi Ballo (exhibitions head at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona). The idea was for Kiarostami and Erice to correspond using "visual letters" and other means, such as video, photography and painting, and to produce an exhibition as a result. They only met once or twice before the show in Barcelona in 2006, which offered viewers a "filmic experience" - without the cinema per se. At its Melbourne manifestation next week, the same sort of immersion will be available, with viewers likely to construct their own narratives from the photographs, imagery and video installations on show.

Melburnians were exposed last year to another highly creative exploration of how cinema and the other visual arts interact when the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art showed the popular Cinema Paradiso exhibition. In her catalogue for that show, director Juliana Engberg uses an apt phrase to describe the work of the queen of the fabricated film still, American artist Cindy Sherman. Engberg said the Untitled Film Stills (1977-) series comprised "concentrated moments" - a term that also captures well the nature of the photography in the Correspondences exhibition of Kiarostami and Erice.

"Removed from the narrative action of the film entire, presented instead as a collection of silent and motionless shots, Sherman's Untitled Film Stills assume their own narrative shape," Engberg writes, going on to remark that they flaunt their debt to "the sheer seductiveness of those images embedded in cinema's and in our collective imagination".

Across the road from ACCA, the head of photography at the Victorian College of the Arts, Christopher Koller, has long been exploring this seductiveness and cinema's "collective imagination", as has artist Lily Hibberd, who lectures in the department of fine arts at Monash University's Caulfield campus.

Koller was recently awarded an Australia Council residency in Spain for later this year, where he plans to continue the sorts of investigations that led to his stunning Winter Garden series of 1998. These are images that, like much of Koller's photographic work, read as if they are bona fide film stills plucked, perhaps, from a Michelangelo Antonioni film. Or there is the Milano series (1999) that is also deeply cinematic, paying homage to other directors.

In another work, A Time to Die (2005), Koller explored an obsession with film noir, re-imagining three death scenes from some of his favourite films: The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946). The video work, however, imagines the death scenes from the point of view of the dying person - not the disembodied spectator or the roaming camera eye. While they borrow from cinema, the three segments of A Time to Die are quirky works that eschew all the usual cues of cinema.

For Lily Hibberd, the influence of cinema on her artwork has also been intense, and in recent times her attention has turned to the audial experience of film rather than the visual, which informed works such as the luminous Burning Memory series (2001), strongly referencing Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940).

Hibberd's latest installation is an enormous, black hemispherical "surround sound" set of speakers. It delivers a feature-length screenplay that Hibberd wrote and recorded with the help of actors and sound specialists; at first sight, it appears to deny the image-rich cinematic experience.

"We think cinema is more visual than audial but, in fact, one without the other doesn't really function," says Hibberd. The work, Bordertown (2008) was exhibited in March and is now making a return in an adapted, smaller version.

Hibberd says that when she was devising the sound-based piece, investigating the relationship between narrative, sound and imagery, she didn't realise that she was in fact creating imagery - the imagery that we cannot help imagining while listening to the story of two women living in a conflicted town bordering two states.

Like Koller, Hibberd says she is interested in what lies behind cinema, in rupturing the cinematic experience to which we are so acclimatised. "One form of art interpreting another talks about it much better, in a more explicit way," she says.

Correspondences (Abbas Kiarostami and Victor Erice) is at ACMI from August 21 to November 2. www.acmi.com.au

A version of Lily Hibberd's Bordertown installation is at the Out of Bounds exhibition at Monash University's Caulfield campus from August 20-23.

© 2008 The Age

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