Crawling from the Wreckage

When the phone rings in hell, don't answer it. 'It might be somebody looking for you to kill you,' says Fred, one half of the eponymous pre-teen duo in Leslie Thornton's film and video Peggy and Fred in Hell (1984-94). In Thornton's magnum opus, such random acts of terrorism are manufactured in the space outside of reason and logic. But as the recent bombing in Oklahoma illustrates, the need to create reason out of explosions, ringing telephones, biannual reviews of high culture, and other seemingly random events is a forceful drive in all our lives. Images of innocent victims pulled from the rubble, a desperate attempt to find the parties responsible for the disaster, the identification of possible suspects John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, the insistence of government officials that although they were described as 'white', the possibility that the two were 'Middle Eastern' terrorists could not be ruled out - all fit neatly into a longer political narrative of a crumbling American economy in dire need of scapegoats. Projections, of a convoluted plot by Islamic fundamentalists, or of random serial killers stalking children through the telephone, or a museum show that is representative of the last two years in American filmmaking have all the makings of a cheaply fabricated late night TV movie, with the accompanying silliness and melodrama. But the need to invest belief in such stories addresses the ways in which we have been conditioned to digest certain narrative fictions as sufficient truths.

The Whitney Biennial's film and video program has always been pretty much a sidebar of little consequence, a minor kudos for media makers. Why then the sudden fuss about moving the image? Probably because the boundaries between the screening room and the gallery are being repeatedly defiled these days - mostly by visual artists. And perhaps because, after all, moving pictures give mad payback and glamour.

If the galleries of the Whitney seem to lack the 'finger wagging' spirit that infused the last Biennial, not to worry, the coloured folks are kicking in the screening room. While the last Biennial and shows like 'Black Male...' shored up the severe limitations of curatorial practices based on a separation between 'our' culture and 'theirs,' this one again does little to challenge that duality. The result is a series that may have the verve to position experimental stalwarts like Stan Brakhage and Leslie Thornton next to veteran media activists such as DeeDee Halleck and Gregg Bordowitz but which doesn't do so in a way that illuminates the interrelatedness of their practices. Don't get me wrong. The curators have packed some phenomenal work in here. The most successful choices work not because they've been authored by the radical darkies and faggots who've been traditionally excluded from such hallowed arenas, but because of the ways they deal with narrative, space and time in a way that refuses the conventional, Eurocentric separation of form and content. They operate in a way that challenges our expectations of logic and reason based on the Cartesian duality of mind and matter, Self and Other.

Many of the film- and video-makers here are concerned with disrupting such reactionary continuities, tearing away at our understanding of cinematic space, time and truth while fabricating newer, more complex fictions. In his manipulated clips of classic Hollywood cinema Raphael Montañez Ortiz readjusts our perceptions of narrative time and space. And in the process, he also makes us bust up laughing. In Send Him to the Capital (1994) a demagogue's election speech stutters, stalls and squawks. Manipulated by Ortiz not as a static repetition, but as a rhythmic, nearly imperceptible shift in time. Rather than fettering the image with a temporal linear progression, Ortiz shuffles his characters forward and back. The politician seems caught in an apoplectic fit of rage as a dizzying collage of meanings evolve from his pedantic speech: 'Lust,' 'Token,' 'I'm talking about,' 'Back in the...,' 'to bandit.'

Refocusing the fixed notions of space and time of the original material on a tighter, differently framed window of action, Ortiz' work reveals the ways in which this fixity conjures both stability and at the same what Homi K. Bhabha has called 'disorder, degeneracy and demonic repetition.' In Shu Lea Cheang's Fresh Kill (1994), the director reshapes ideas of cinematic space away from space as place - a fixed territory to conquer or own - to space as the soul through which a diaspora moves. Cheang's audacious directorial debut is a lethal comedy swimming through a torrent of toxic multinational treachery. It tells the story of two young lesbian parents (Sarita Choudhury and Erin McMurtry) caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi. The place is New York and the time is now. Raw fish lips are the rage on trendy menus across Manhattan. A ghost barge, bearing nuclear refuse, circles the planet in search of a willing port. Household pets start to glow ominously and then disappear altogether. The sky opens up and snows soap flakes. People start speaking in dangerous dialects.

Intervention, or 'breaking in,' is key to the way Cheang has structured the film. Long, formalistic shots are interrupted by commercial break-ins. Cyber-activists from Africa break in on a multinational satellite dish. Different characters will show up in the most unlikely places, disrupting the narrative. Abandoning static establishing shots, Cheang's restless camera thrusts the audience into unknown situations. Her use of cinematic space is less a rooted territorial reference than a fluid exploration. In many ways, it is a response to the historical ways in which space has been framed for colonised subjects: the ground literally claimed from under our feet, or the disrespectful space the coloniser leaves for us to pass him on a quaint and narrow sidewalk.

The inter-relationships between Fresh Kill's characters, and the language in which they speak, challenge cinematic representations of 'reality.' The characters use poetic and elegant constructs that don't sound like movie dialogue, yet remain faithful to urban vernacular. Their provocative genealogies problematise ideas about race, which has traditionally been represented as a naturalised identity. A black woman is the mother of a white woman who, in turn, is the mother of a black child, and a Native American man and South Asian woman, both Indians, are father and daughter. The level of complexity Cheang portrays is true to American urban culture and begins to articulate unexpressed ideas about kinship and family. But while Fresh Kill may have the style and nerve of an 'urban' movie, it transgresses that specificity, placing the local on a continuum with the global.

Life for the Brazilian narrator in Karim Aïnouz's Paixáo Nacional (1994) ends just as his plane lifts off from native soil. At approximately the same time, the European narrator's life begins as he touches down on the same tarmac. Aïnouz layers the two narrations, competing, colliding, intersecting, over pastoral scenes of the shoreline, cockfighting, kite flying and volleyball on the beach. 'If you're born poor, you die poor,' says the Brazilian voice, 'but I can say one thing. I died without anyone ever calling me a fag.' The British voice: 'I am undergoing a physical transformation. My body is lighter.' The Brazilian died of irreversible metabolic shock, freezing to death as the plane lurched towards colder climates and more lucrative futures. The British subject is left to revel in the warmth of his host country. 'It isn't blood running through these men's veins, but sunlight,' he says. 'The vital substance of these happy tropics.' Such creepy poetics allow for an association between the two narrators deeper than either a merely reactive or fraternal one. They underscore the ways white privilege is maintained at the expense of black life while demonstrating the ever shifting and interdependent nature of colonial relations.

Interdependence, or the idea that different social and economic systems do not exist in vacuums but are interrelated, finds its echo in the discussions evolving around new information technologies. 'Globalisation', has superseded 'hybridity', as the catchword of the moment. But the idea that we're all one big happy web often masks the cleavage between technological advances and access. Who controls the means through which information is disseminated? How will newer, more rarefied technologies change the understanding of narrative space and time in some communities and not others? At a time when funding for innovation in film has all but dried up in the US and when so many 'experimental' techniques have been appropriated by commercial studios, curating work that's been produced by artists living within US borders only underscores the myopic limitations of such strategies. In his essay for the Biennial's catalogue, John Hanhardt writes that 'the new independent media are not film and not video, but a hybrid, fluid movement between theatres, exhibition spaces, and cable television, which acknowledges the materialities of media differences and yet celebrates their fusion.' In the moments that follow a debacle, there is always the invocation of 'healing.' Unfortunately, for all the talk of respecting the 'materialities of difference,' that's the first thing that gets paved over in dominant models of 'healing.' If anything, the last two Biennials affirm the necessity of moving away from healing as a process of homogenised fusion to one of historically informed syncretism. One that moves beyond mere representation and tokenising gestures of inclusion. 'To heal,' writes the poet Veena Cabreros-Sud, 'is not necessarily to make peace.' Forever sleep with one eye open.