The Makes
A series of neon-lit panels with film-stills, reminiscent of the vitrines in old movie theaters. Among the black and white pictures there is also a short text, a page torn from one of two books: That Bowling Alley on the Tiber and Unfinished Business by Michelangelo Antonioni. The texts are what Antonioni called “narrative nuclei,” ideas, fragments of stories, notes for films he thought about, but never made. They transcribe intentions that were often impossible to film, because they test the limits of cinema itself, limits which Antonioni is exorcising through this writing process.
Recontextualized within the vitrines, these narrative nuclei come to life with the film-stills that surround them, found photographs from 1960s and 1970s Japanese cinema collected by the artist during a residency in Japan. The vitrines offer a juxtaposition between an intention for a non-existent movie and real pictures that have been isolated from their native narrative context. From this assemblage emerges the possibility of a film.
The process is reminiscent of Eisenstein’s collision-montages, or Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, since it delves into the unconscious memory of images and plays on the narrative possibilities that emerge from the space between juxtaposed images. But it is very much an assisted Mnemosyne, because the orphaned film-stills are put back into movement by a text that functions like a program dictating the reading of these images. The program deliberately hijacks the stills from their original context, transposing them to a new space, filling the void left by Antonioni’s unrealized intent. What feels like a remake, is actually just a make. Or rather the traces of a make, since there is no actual movie, just a ghost of a movie behind a document attesting to its possibility – a movie that exists only in the imagination of the viewer facing the finished piece.
The vitrines collapse two times onto each other: a non-realized future (Antonioni’s), and a non-experienced past (Japanese films we most likely haven’t seen). And yet from these two tenses emerges a cinematographic experience in the present, and a sort of Anabasis – a movement that never ceases to ask itself whether it is an end point or a beginning.