Exhibitions
John Gillies' Cinema Of Lost Images
Therese Davies
I remember the first time I saw a John Gillies performance and the strong affect it had on me. It was in warehouse in Premier Lane, Kings Cross, Sydney, in the early 1980s. I Like Smoking (1982) was deceptively simple. An actor struck matches and flicked them to the ground, slowly, repeatedly. A projected video of a fire was visible only when it coincided with the actor's body: the image appeared only to disappear. The soundtrack was hypnotic, a looping snatch of found dialogue. Like other Gillies performances from this period, I Like Smoking engaged ideas from process art, minimalism and expanded cinema. For me, Gillies' early performances were thought-provoking experiments in the slippery relation between the image and its referent. But I can't say that I understood them as such at the time. Rather, what I remember about them, and numerous early Gillies videos such as I Need You (1982-6) was their powerful sedative quality. Their hypnotic rhythms had a calming effect. Like many other sedatives, they also had a side-effect: a deep sense of sadness, a feeling of inexplicable loss. They were, in hindsight, sensuous lessons in one of Walter Benjamin's great insights into the image, that it is only ever a trace of an experience that cannot come to light, a ghost of what once was.
Techno/Dumb/Show (1991) abounds with the ghosts of lost images, provoking recall of long forgotten memories, cinematic and personal. This major work in Gillies' cinema was made in collaboration with The Sydney Front with the aim of integrating video into their physical and highly improvisatory process. Others have written about the significance of this piece for theories of performance. What interests me, however, is how this startling, multi-layered montage re-invigorates the facial close-up. The face becomes strange, as it was in the incredible metamorphosis sequences in Eisenstein's Strike or the startlingly radiant close-ups of Louise Brooks in Pabst's Pandora's Box. This is not to suggest that Techno/Dumb/Show is an attempt to reproduce Soviet montage or the performance style of the silent narrative cinema. Rather, it is intensely similar, an after-image of the simultaneous spontaneity and theatricality of 1920s cinema. Benjamin saw a structural reciprocity between the forms of shock produced by this cinema (through techniques such as super-enlargement, cropping, rapid editing) and the alienation of modernity. In a similar vein, the orchestration of faces and gestures in Techno/Dumb/Show is a vivid and splendorous display of the dialectic of appearance and disappearance that structures our postmodern media experience. Its endless flux of images produces a temporal sensation of being suspended in time, of after-shock.
The face features in another piece, where Gillies explores the dialectic between presence and absence, performance and representation. In My Sister's Room (2000) a grainy, super-enlarged photographic still of the artist's late sister's face is projected in a blackened room, accompanied by a soundtrack made up of the many indistinct sounds a person makes as they move quietly about a room. The face invites the physiognomic scrutiny generally activated by films: a compulsion to read character into the face, to unmask the mask. But this desire to 'know' is quickly undercut by the flickering of the projection and slight movements resulting from Gillies' hand-held camera technique. These reveal the face is doubly mediated, a work of re-photography, an image of an image. In this moment of revelation our perception coincides with the filmmaker's. Taking us far beyond concepts of character and identity, My Sister's Room allows us to feel the intense desire of those who mourn to reverse the powers of death, to awaken the dead. In the same instant, it exposes the cruel nature of the camera's pretence to satisfy this desire. Film cannot re-present what is absent. Its images are a trace of what was. And to see this, as we are forced to in My Sister's Room, is to understand in the most profound and devastating way how the dead exist only as an image.
In recent video works and installations, the lost images of cinematic history and Gillies' own past have been exorcised to make way for the ghosts of colonial history. Armada (1994-8) is one of Gillies' largest and most elaborate installations. This evocative piece was staged in Salvador, Brazil; a once thriving shipping port in the Bahia region. Gillies aimed to create an anti-heroic public sculpture. The images — the culmination of his exploration of resonances between the electronic image and pre-industrial art forms such as stone-masonry and weaving — were projected onto a specially designed sail-like screen erected on a wooden boat anchored in the centre of the harbour. Combined with a minimal soundscape of trains, bells and sailing ships, Armada's imagery evoked the lost images of Brazil's colonial past. As an ephemeral sculpture, it sparked associations between past and present. It allowed us to see the past as an impression in the surfaces of the buildings that surround the port, and to experience the past as an eloquent undercurrent in the everyday forms of exchange that make up current port life.
The notion of historic undercurrents is revisited in The Mary Stuart Tapes (2000), made in collaboration with performer Claire Grant and based on a re-translation of Friedrich Schiller's anachronistic text Maria Stuart (1800). Here, Gillies visually and sonically resurrects the text/body of Mary Stuart. The use of Sydney as the location for this is crucial. As Gillies explains: 'Australia is the inheritor of the British idea of the state. Within this idea, Mary Stuart is a buried potentiality, a force trapped within.' This idea of Stuart as an invisible silenced force in the contemporary state that threatens to break through is expressed in Grant's compelling performance of Stuart as a marginalised figure, fated to endlessly wander the crowded streets of inner city Sydney without recognition or audience. There and not there. Heard and not heard.
Historical consciousness of British inheritance is also of concern in Divide (2004). This film was prompted by the deep social divides in Australian society arising in the late 1990s from the federal government's divisive rhetoric on race relations and refugees. It follows a flock of sheep being herded from one location to another in the Australian landscape. This image of constant displacement resonates with histories of colonial displacement from the Scottish 'clearances' of the mid 19th century to more recent media images of ramshackle refugee boats herded back into international waters by the Australian navy. But it is not as simple as this. In their pathos, the sheep can also be seen as Australian citizens, vulnerable creatures easily led and even more easily spooked by encounters with strangeness and difference. And, as the film's stunning final image of dry earth suggests, sheep are never innocent, for they are also always agents of environmental destruction.
In addition to these compelling themes, Divide should also be viewed as the latest development in a cinematic project deeply connected to the physicality tradition of Sydney performance. Gathering amazing performers from various sections of this performance tradition, it introduces a new sonic and visual sensibility into Australian cinema, a new approach to the iconic landscapes and national types that characterise the national cultural tradition. And like so many other ghosts in this cinema of lost images, Divide's 'unreasonable' ghosts are uncanny. They insist we move beyond the politically limiting confines of reasonableness and relevance, and beyond conformist thinking about how we structure images in cinema.