VISUAL ARTS
PHILIPPE PARRENO: THENABOUTS
Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Until March 13
Some poems tell stories; some declare an emotion; some make observations or witty comparisons or arguments; some draw out moods by otherwise disconnected words and others paint pictures or convey sensory experience through suggestive descriptions.
A similar range of expression arises in film, even though film in popular culture is overwritten with narrative. The films of Philippe Parreno are an example. This exhibition shows Parreno as a painterly maker of vignettes that suggest but also transcend the story-telling impulse.
In mainstream cinema, dedicated to storytelling, Parreno's long deliberations on a dark landscape with an evening sky would be considered indulgent. But relieved of the relentless need to move on, to reveal a sequence of events, the photographic lingering is evocative; and paradoxically, the slowness makes you expect a narrative result, a turn, as if energies are building up. The absence of episodes that transpire makes you expect something to happen.
As in the grand manner of narrative film, Parreno sets up beautiful scenes, panoramic vistas with rich light. He loves the time of day when natural lighting is no stronger than electric light, a balance which you know cannot hold. The daylight will soon die and the artificial light will become absolute, unless the decline of the natural glow is rescued by moonlight.
These cosmic registers in Parreno's cinematography also have a sense of portent, proposing that a moment is closing and something either epiphanic or tragic might occur.
In a deep park with seductive alleys and boulevards, studded with ornamental lamps, each one a landmark, the camera turns to a lady wearing high platform shoes. Their tock-tock-tock is recorded scrupulously, suggesting not so much the impact of the heel on the pavement but the hollow parts of the footwear whose resonance fills the environment. The pulse seems to anticipate an encounter, as if an analogy to a heartbeat.
We don't see the encounter, at least not in the snippet screened at ACMI; and I imagine that there is no meeting in the complete film. Maybe it's a reckoning of the protagonist with herself; but even that seems too literal. The sense of action is self-referential. It's a sample of filmic experience that sets up resonances with the enormous archive of filmic memory in all people who have been brought up with movies.
Similar feelings arise with a little boy in New York, whose rise in the morning is prefaced by the early hours of commercial activity in empty streets still muffled by their shutters. What expectations race through your imagination as the dear little chap clambers over his stairway of books and goes out to encounter the metropolitan dawn!
You even find yourself triggered by some kind of squid, perhaps better recognised in the restaurant than the aquarium. The specimen is expertly photographed, as the film dwells on the irregular serrated eye or the tentacles which are the nose or something, in all events, that goes first.
As in nature documentaries, while speculating on the weird evolutionary parallels with us mammals, you're expecting a strike, the carnivorous coup de grace, the master narrative of animal survival that finds an aesthetic home in the TV genre.
The only fishy part of the exhibition is the installation. You've never seen ACMI look so nebbich. The gallery, which normally accommodates a labyrinth of busy chambers and passages, is diminished by its emptiness: just a screen at one end with a projection booth. At the entrance, some inflatable fish flop forlornly on the floor.
Known for his take-over installations in august places like the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, the Venice Biennale and Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, this nondescript installation seems a bit too modest.
Perhaps the artist and curators were thinking: nah, this is about film. It isn't about space. The installation returns film to the purity of the medium, with its illusory space that trumps real space and perfectly suspends disbelief.
Still, it looks weak to me; and as with a poem that doesn't proclaim something, there's a risk that not enough is there.