Communicating the 'unspeakability' of violent acts in cinema

This paper explores the forensic testimony employed in James Benning‟s experimental narrative film Landscape Suicide (1986, 16mm, 95min USA). As a belated example of Judith Walker‟s „Trauma Cinema‟, this film in part re-enacts the court transcripts of two perpetrators of physical violence: Ed Gein and Michelle Protti. Teenager Protti killed another student with a kitchen knife after having been subjected to bullying by a group of girls and Wisconsin farmer Gein shot a storekeeper‟s wife, took the body home to then skin and dissect it. Gein‟s case is said to have provided the model for the cinematic serial killers portrayed in Psycho (1959), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). In its strategy of communicating or representing the overwhelming and traumatic impact of violence cinematically Landscape Suicide is contrasted to the melodrama and shock of mainstream violence in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs for its ability to identify „unspeakable‟ aspects of overwhelming experience. This paper will concentrate on the representation of Ed Gein‟s violent acts, rather than Protti‟s and enlists recent neurological research that suggests a model for forgetting that is identifiable in the film‟s structure and content.

Byron Bay hysteria

"This time lapse video work of De Bruyn's evidences the bold rythmic structures found in his nahd-painted 16 mm film work. A prolific fimmaler, de Bruyn is a master of his craft and shows in this work that that mastery knows no bounds in this format."  Fractured Light exhibition catalogue

H2

Cut down to 16mm from a 35mm trailer for the movie Shaft, the slowed down voice, gunshot explosions and lsaac Hayes' iconic music become barely recognisable and monstrous. The arbitrary framing provides glimpses of the edges of faces, fleeting urban scenes, partial text, all rendered in cyan negative in a kind of psycho-dramatic abstraction, all the more unsettling than Gordon Parks's originating gangster populated dystopia. It is a reminder of how, by simply repositioning the frame, extant material can be transformed.

The unwanted land

The exhibition/art project will consisted of work by artists who have been through migration and who, in their work, reflect upon issues of relocation/resettlement. The artworks were in the form of spatial (multi/mixed media) installations (and performances) aiming at visualizing migration experience and identification to achieve (new) contexts (and perspectives).

The performance of trauma in moving image art

This thesis argues that the perceptual apparatus required to view abstract and graphic films can illuminate our understanding of trauma as a social/medical concept. such 'materialist' films predict the new contemporary 'Gestalt of the senses' ushered in by digital media.

Performing the technical image

The recent public multi-screen performance of formalist experimental animation by film artists such as Guy Sherwin, Bruce McLure and Greg Pope respond to the immediacy and speed of new digital technologies, the rise of Vilem Flusser’s ‘technical image’ and the consequent disappearance of reflective space identified by Prensky, Kroker, Virilio and Postman. Flusser’s ‘technical images’, benefiting from the digital’s painterly hyper-malleability structure and content, signifier and signified, so much the subject of Peter Gidal’s arguments in support of his concept of ‘materialist film’ in the 1970’s.  In the digital those formal editing strategies used to create the ‘technical image’ within analogue image construction that traditionally took place in the artist’s studio within the camers and optical printer are now executed inside the computer, having migrated into the post-production process.  Within the work of these artist’s recent multi-screen presentations these manipulations are now-elusively experienced in live ephemeral performance, re-forming and laying bare those processes that have been rendered invisible in digital technology.  The significance of this work partly lies in its ability to communicate historical information a-historically. Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo’s method in their play with 16mm film flashes and after-images and Sherwin’s mirror performance further reproduces Goethe’s method from his Theory of Colours (1840). Greg Pope’s scratch performances re-enact the operation of Konrad Zuse’s 1930’s computing machine. Affinities are drawn between Bruce McLure’s immersive overpowering sonic and flicker performances with Edwin Land’s 1960’s experiments on colour constancy on which Land’s Retinex Theory of colour is based.