Christian Jankowski
Federico Fellini defined a film director as 'a showman: a mixture of magician and conjuror, prophet and clown, travelling salesman and preacher'. As a Conceptual artist who directs most of his own projects, Christian Jankowski's multimedia oeuvre never met a more apt and animated summary of his intentionally amateurish, deliberately absurd work.
Jankowski's recent show 'Now Playing' included a new 16mm film, What Remains (2004), and tacked a few cinematic flourishes on to older projects such as Rosa (2001) and This I Play Tomorrow (2003). What Remains explores what Roland Barthes describes as 'cinematographic hypnosis'. Shot in a documentary style, the film is a succession of monologues of cinema-goers describing what they had expected from their film of choice, what expectations were met and what was left wanting in their experience. The monologues are shaped by an unseen and unheard interviewer; nor do we discover what film each participant is talking about.
The ground floor of the gallery was occupied by This I Play Tomorrow, which was originally produced by and exhibited at the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Rome. At maccarone it appeared as a two-part installation, containing a casting video and a projected 35mm film conceived from issues raised in the videos. The casting video is displayed in a bank of three video monitors visible through the shopfront window so it can be viewed from the pavement, echoing the manner in which the interviews were originally conducted, while the lush, full-colour 35mm film is presented in a dark and cavernous space.
The Italian cinema that inspired This I Play Tomorrow is both vital and poignant. For the project the artist spent two days talking with film buffs and aspiring actors outside Rome's legendary film studio Cinecittà, before finally selecting a cast of eight women and five men who agreed to be videoed answering questions and then to portray whatever role Jankowski came up with for them, based on their responses.
The resultant film was shot at Cinecittà on a set resembling the centre of a small town. While What Remains is more of a documentary, This I Play Tomorrow is a brief but full cinematic production structured around each participant's answers to Jankowski's inquiries as to 'what role would you like to play?', 'what type of set would you prefer?', 'what are the big lies of cinema you wouldn't want to be yours?' and 'do you think cinema can offer hope for salvation?' As with all of Jankowski's projects, there is always the possibility that what you see is not what you think you see, and the film, far from denying the very lies its claims, actually places the participants in collusion with the 'lies' of the cinema, even though they seek to tell the 'truth'. For instance, in the interview tape one woman, Alessina, first declares that her ideal role would be a policewoman or a princess, and then says 'well, earlier I talked to you about this book I just read, The Sorrows of Young Werther' - it becomes clear that her ideal role is actually to play the woman Werther falls in love with. The similarities here between Fellini's 'live for the moment' dictum in 8 1/2 (1963), which inspired some of Jankowski's questions, and Alessina's diagnosis of Werther's suicidal ideations make it apparent that Jankowski employs his cast to convey his own message, making exploitation and complicity lurk in the deeper waters of the seeming innocence of the cinema.
One of the more moving moments of the show occurred during This I Play Tomorrow. At Cinecittà, Jankowski, who had a tight budget, was forced to use the set of a film about Francis of Assisi. One of the women, Aurora, talks about her son's death and how she would like to sing a song for him, and performs the 'St Francis Prayer' with her church choir. The communal atmosphere of the set, the open square and interconnected architecture, combined with a mother reaching out to others who have lost children, come together to create a poignant moment that strips away the many levels of artifice, illusion and complicity to reveal the potential strength and power of cinema.
