Cerith Wyn Evans
Cerith Wyn Evans' elegiac 15-minute film Firework Text (Pasolini) (1998) is drenched in twilight. Fragile, fading and painfully metaphorical, it's a particularly melancholy time of day wherever you are, but on a filthy beach - site of the brutal murder of a great film-maker - lapped by waves dulled with pollution and surrounded by crumbling Modernist shacks, twilight can be a state of mind almost too despondent to bear.
On one wall of the gallery, a text modestly declares that 'The film documents a small event situated on the Idroscala di Ostia, close to the place where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered on the night of November 2, 1975. A vandalised concrete sculpture now commemorates the spot where Pasolini died a few hundred yards away from the mouth of the Tiber.' Wyn Evans' commemoration of Pasolini's life and death uses materials a little closer to the filmmaker's heart than concrete: earth, sea, fire, film and flesh.
Firework Text (Pasolini) is a silent film in that it's not accompanied by a dialogue or soundtrack. But the gallery is filled with sound - the clanking, whirring and sighing of celluloid moving through a projector, an apt threnody for a filmmaker acutely aware of the mechanics of film-making. The film opens with a group of bare-chested male workers saturated with golden light. They stand on the grubby beach with their backs to the viewer, discussing something we cannot hear. It's a very Pasolini-esque image - at once enigmatic and very physical. Coupled with the noise of the projector, it establishes the psychological space of the film as one of both homage and lament.
As the workers begin to erect a scaffold in the sand, the camera drifts around the beach like a detached voyeur, lingering on the effects of light on water and the seemingly aimless movements of people on the periphery. Finally, it returns to what the builders have constructed - a billboard-sized text taken from Pasolini's Oedipus Rex (1967) which describes the idyllic setting of both the film and the filmmaker's childhood in Sacile: 'On the banks of the Livenza / silvery willows are growing / in wild profusion, their boughs / dipping into the drifting waters'. Framed by the intense sinking blue of the sky and the expansive ocean, it's an absurd, touching sight - grandiloquent yet a little forlorn. The achingly romantic words are, at first, hard to read, before the poem, letter by letter, bursts into flames, explodes and fades. It's a wonderful image - words as fireworks, erupting joyfully before their own annihilation. In their last moments, sparks fly wildly about and float down to the beach like languorous shooting stars.
When every flame is extinguished, the sequence starts again, but shot from a different angle. Once more, men erect the scaffolding, people wander about the desolate beach and Pasolini's poetry is again consumed by the mystical elements he loved so well - air, water, fire and light. The beach, a harsh counterpoint to the Arcadia described in the text, becomes a multi-layered site - a memorial to an individual and a loaded historical space at the dead mouth of the Tiber.
In the next room of the gallery, a circular red neon sculpture hangs from the ceiling like a bloody crown, inscribed with the words of its title: In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni (1999). A Latin palindrome that translates as 'we go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire', it's a phrase that embodies the sentiment and impermanence of the images in the film. But without a knowledge of Latin, it's impossible to decipher. Unlike the film, in which the writing is literally difficult to read, this text insists more obliquely that understanding can only ever be a form of translation - always a parallel and never a literal transcription of a feeling or an image.
Wyn Evans' use of repetition and elliptical meaning indicates endless possible readings: his choice of a quote replete with both classical and personal implications placed at the junction of earth and sea nods to Platonic ideas about renewal, while the decaying beach reflects a more negative image of repetition as a kind of dead end, a form of stasis. But the film and sculpture are also about something emotional and indefinable - a mixture of despair about a brutal death, combined with a sensual, gloomy delight in the aesthetics that such anguish can generate.
