| In Chris Welsby's work the camera is always an obvious presence,
either directly visible or lurking off-screen. These days obvious
allusions to production are too often shorthand for empty irony,
signaling nothing but a twitch of postmodern conceit. But like
Jacobs, Welsby—whose films were shown last month at Millennium—illustrates
how self-reflexivity can still create a moral, aesthetic. And/or
political imperative.
In Windmill III, a mirrored windmill
set before the camera divides the image into three distinct areas:
the space in front of the windmill, the space occupied by the
windmill itself, and the space behind the camera that is reflected
in the blades. When the windmill turns slowly, the blades smoothly
displace—or "wipe"—the front landscape with
the reflected images. As the wind picks up, the windmill rotates
faster and the reflected images blur, creating painterly smears
across the foreground. By sectioning linear perspective, Windmill
III not only challenges the standard presentation of space,
it also highlights what is normally unseen—the space behind
the camera.
The unseen is no longer playfully negotiated but instead threatens
cataclysm in Welsby's latest film, Sky
Light. Welsby, who is English, calls the film "post
Chernobyl"—it was shot 48 hours after the disaster
was announced. Echoing Adorno's dictum on the impossibility of
poetry after the Holocaust, Welsby stated at his Millennium screening
that "it is not possible to look at landscapes in the same
way after Chernobyl." For Welsby, the accident means that
his film project—which he (mistakenly) labels a "cool
and distant area of research"—has become "emotional
and keyed."
Sky Light begins where his earlier films leave off,
with beautifully composed images of nature. A sense of urgency
and immediacy, however, conveyed by the introduction of sound
and camera movement, soon indicates a profound shift in Welsby's
formalist project. As in Ernie Gehr's Signal—Germany on
the Air, the radio noise and voices speaking in several languages
make apparent the hidden danger masked by the benign imagery. Sky
Light ends, not with another English landscape, but with
pure white and the crackle of a Geiger counter. The visible is
longer a guarantee of absolute knowledge.
(The Village Voice on line.) |