Trading Places

What would happen? When I went to the screening of Sharon Lockhart’s latest film Lunch Break (2008) at the Arsenal Cinema, down in the vaults below the Sony Center at Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, I really wondered what kind of reaction it would get from a mixed audience made up of ‘regular’ cineastes, avant-garde film aficionados and art-world types (the cinema was packed, and there seemed to be no clear lean towards any of these different groups of viewers). The film was shown as part of the Berlinale’s ‘Forum Expanded’ – a section of the film festival devoted to the cross-over between experimental film and fine arts – so it was clear to anyone attending that this work might well be unconcerned with character and plot, or even the auteur-style cut-up deconstruction of these, but – in line with a different legacy – with minimalist abstraction and performative duration. And as if to forcefully confirm that point, Michael Snow – creator of Wavelength (1967) with its 45-minute long zoom – was in the audience, as was Tacita Dean, while Lockhart herself was present for an audience Q&A.

I wondered about these reactions because in November I had already seen the film, installed as the centre-piece of Lockhart’s exhibition at the Secession in Vienna. Her tackling of the beautiful, if very demanding, main exhibition hall of this key Art Nouveau building was arguably the best in recent memory (judging from what I’ve seen, whether in the flesh or in images). Upon entering, one was directly confronted with a dark, corridor-like box occupying the centre of the exhibition hall, and as the film projected in it was also an endless-seeming moving shot along an endless-seeming corridor, it was as if a new, imaginary architecture had been layered on top of the existing one. At the same time the box (pictured below), white on the outside, in effect created a circular course around it, along a series of photographs hung on the outer walls (this design was conceived by Lockhart in collaboration with LA-based Escher GuneWardena Architecture).

Secession installation view

Played as a loop, the film is a single, uncut moving shot (the first time Lockhart has unhinged the camera after the static shots of her earlier films) through the corridor at the heart of a shipyard in Maine, passing by workers on their lunch break. We see them sitting in small, seemingly improvised areas between metal dressers and machines covered with stickers, as they sip coffee from Thermos cups, read newspapers or take a bite from their sandwiches. A few are walking; one is having a nap on a bench. But we see all of this in super slow-motion: the piece was shot on an 11-minute roll of 35 mm, which was then digitalized and slowed resulting in a duration of 83 minutes.

One might at first think of Bill Viola’s super slow-motion pieces, attributing historical weight and painterly gravitas to the ordinary, but that association quickly gives way to something much less pathos-driven. For this is not based on the assumption that the importance of contemporary film and video in art needs be buttressed by heavy-handed references to, for example, historical painting. It is also never suggesting – as is the case in Viola’s The Greeting (1995), a detailed reconstruction of Jacopo da Pontormo’s mannerist painting The Visitation (1528-29) – that this is an allegorical constellation that requires deciphering in classical iconographic terms. Here, the ‘allegorical’ is all in the methodology itself: the super slow-motion echoes and exaggerates the workers’ break from busy production, but it also manifests the desire to grasp intensively that this kind of classical workmanship – as well as its attendant habits – is on the retreat.

Beyond that, there isn’t much to be deciphered here – just looked at, carefully. But what is ‘carefully’ in a 83-minute film? How do you sustain that? In the gallery, at Secession, the answer was fairly simple: for as long as you liked, or felt. You could watch for a while, then stroll around and look at the photographs – portraits of workers by way of still-life images of their ornate lunchboxes; pictures of workers having lunch at impromptu tables; displays of workers selling snacks – and return, and watch some more of the film. It has a beginning and an end, but they are sutured into the loop. There is neither the feeling that you have seen it if you saw just one glimpse – nor the feeling that you completely don’t get it if you miss one minute of it.

That was, obviously, completely different in the cinema setting. Almost all seats were taken by the bustling festival crowd, some of whom were here on passes giving access to most screenings, while others might have stood in line for a long time to buy them. In the row in front of me sat video artist Phil Collins with a friend. He turned around to greet and chat, saying something like ‘hmm, wonder what we’ll be going to see.’ When I innocently and maybe prematurely told him we were about to witness a 83-minute single shot, he went a little pale around the nose and said: ‘Darling, don’t give it away!’ I apologized and noticed that the person next to me had just been looking at the festival guide, apparently not even knowing what film he was in. As the lights went down and the film came up, I felt lucky to sit in the very back, seeing the auditorium dimly illuminated by the film.

For those who weren’t prepared, it must have taken a while to sink in that there was not going to be a cut to a different scene, or even a diversion from the course down this endless corridor. It took about ten minutes, perhaps longer, before the first few left. In the end, it was less than a fifth of the audience that had left before the lights went up. I’m sure that not so long ago more than this would have left, not only because people are patient or well-behaved, but because the willingness to subject oneself to this kind of experiment has increased, given the tradition it already has and that audiences are more familiar with these slow films. Nevertheless there is a deciding difference in the unwritten contract between artist and audience compared to the exhibition situation: the cinema setting prescribes that you obtain a ticket in advance, and even if you don’t buy it because you are a festival professional, you still devote valuable time that you could possibly spend in a Hongkong action movie, or a Peruvian melodrama. The act of leaving includes the option that it might be read as a symbolic act; and some indeed want it to be read as such.

But even if you enjoy experiment, and the film (as I did), you may feel that urge to use your time more ‘productively’ (and aren’t culture professionals, often self-employed and used to working super-flexible hours, anxious to lose time on an almost existential level?). I had to think of Doug Aitken’s observation that about an hour into looking at a cinema screening of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966), when he started to look around and saw others in the audience doing it as well, he realized that this was so apt as the film itself was very much about that desire to be looked at. In a similar vein, Lunch Break is as much about the break from production by the workers as it is about the ‘break’ from doing the kind of ‘production-consumption’ that cineastes enter in when they analyze the plot and smartly fill in its elliptic gaps.

I also had to think of Roland Barthes essay ‘Leaving The Movie Theater’ (1975), in which he suggests a kind of antidote to the passive-narcissistic, perceiving body of the moviegoer, in the form of a ‘perverse’ body that breaks the illusion by recognizing everything off-screen as a crucial part of the experience: the dark crowd of the audience, the projector beam, the entering and leaving of the cinema. Nevertheless, the ultra-slow move down that shipyard corridor in Maine had its own dynamics that called for different ways of reacting to it. At first, you try to concentrate on details, most of which sit at the periphery of the image – what’s on the stickers that grace the metal lockers? Did that guy come down that metal ladder and walk along the corridor for a bit because he was asked to? Then you realize that the film’s peculiar movement is almost literally like the tool of a hypnotist, and you try to concentrate on the image’s edge to see how it is ‘closing in’ on the scene. Then again, you look straight down that corridor, trying to see the image simply as a constellation of figures, of dudes (few, possibly just one woman) with their tool belts and their imperturbable-seeming dignity of skill. But there is no way around admitting that you also feel moments where it’s not about being mesmerized or losing a sense of time but very much about feeling pushed away from the film, being very aware of time. I think there even is a sense of sportiness involved in watching such a 83-minute shot – not that it’s a marathon, but it has a somewhat similar dynamics between joy, struggle and gratification. The way it rewards you when you start not too fast, patiently; the way you try to keep a pace; the way you hit a wall after about two-thirds into it; and how you come out of that in the end exhausted, but deeply content.

It was exactly when I felt that I was hitting that wall, after about an hour, when a Led Zeppelin tune came up on the soundtrack. Lunch Break was created in collaboration with composer Becky Allen and director James Benning (himself a great veteran of the long shot) and was largely based on sounds from the site, intricately mixing machine humming, subtle sounds and metal noises, as well occasional voices. Not slowed down, the soundtrack nevertheless seemed to correspond to any given point in the corridor – that is, Led Zeppelin came up when the camera passed a group of workers that could well have had the radio on. And yet as this occured two-thirds into the film, it also incidentally presented a kind of ‘climax’ within a next-to-non-narrative, dragging me out of my stupor.

Its decelerated, purposeful uneventfulness, combined with the insistence on 35 mm (though digitized in post-production), makes Lockhart’s film the minimalist antipode to Alexander Sokurov’s baroque Russian Ark (2002), which not only features a single 90-minute steadicam shot recorded directly onto hard-disk, but also 300 years of history and 2000 performers. One can see how in the mind of the average viewer this kind of manpower and historical scope functions as a compensation for the duration of the shot. But it must also be said that Lockhart’s minimalist approach, once the film is seen separated from the photographs, produces a catch: the beautiful lunch box photographs effectively portrait a person, and their respective sense of workers’ pride (and humour), as some are handmade elaborate devices. But they also provide coded hints: in the form of navy stickers, which give away that this is a military shipyard (something that is nearly impossible to decode from the film alone). Of course visitors could have made the effort to see the show of the photographs at neugerriemschneider gallery in Mitte – here their experience would have been ‘completed’ the way it was at Secession. But nevertheless: with many viewers the heightened intensity of sitting rather than strolling through a projection of the film was traded off against a loss in context as provided by the photos.

That was no excuse though for a couple sitting right in front me trash-talking all the way through Lockhart’s film. The guy, in the Q&A, tried to crack a joke by asking whether Lockhart could play that scene with the water cooler again, before stating that he felt it was an insult that Lockhart wasted the precious time of the professionals gathered with her boring film. This kind of moronic smugness was topped only by the genuine-seeming outrage of a lady who felt flabbergasted by what she perceived as Lockhart’s effrontery in presenting such a ‘lazy’ film (lazy, I suppose, because it only used one shot; now isn’t that great logic: the more shots, the less lazy…). What was stunning about these statements was not so much the frustration expressed – a frustration that has accompanied art all the way through modernity – or that they proved that the acceleration of cross-overs between disciplines such as art, ‘expanded cinema’ and ‘regular’ film has not only multiplied the possible options, but also the possible misunderstandings. No, what was stunning was the self-righteousness which had kept these people from leaving early on (which they would have had every right to). Both seemed to consider themselves speakers of a supposed silent majority in the audience who just didn’t dare to say, like them, that the emperor was naked. The opposite was the case. ‘Those idiots made me like the film even more,’ said Phil Collins, an artist who is not likely to be joining the my-shot-is-longer-than-yours club any time soon.