Test Transmission

This was a quietly delirious farrago of scratching, hesitation, desultoriness, repetition and heart-breaking regret.

As Michael Chion puts it, "when we dive into our memories, we are diving not into our past, but our present".

The voice from Krapp's 'past', is almost painfully dislocated from the man we see on the stage, shambolic and frail, though it speaks for him more plainly than his 'real' voice ever does. His fiddling and frustrating attempts to get the correct tape from his archive and into the machine beautifully stage our faltering and fragmented relationship with our memories and the fruitlessness of trying to get those same memories to speak or live for us in the now.

The sparse room in which the 'action' takes place is almost an antechamber or waiting room for forgetfulness, in which Krapp's number is never called.

Swan So Long

I hear Natalie Portman got a gong or two for this, which is believable enough; it's a florid and hysterical marathon, with more than enough Feelings to make an American film panel feel like it had been hit by a train.

Portman does a good job of having the sheer stamina to deliver a drama queen with no life skills; the bulk of the film away from then dance sequences has all the electricity of a desultory early rehearsal for a dance routine nobody gets yet.

The characters are without exception manipulative, preening, self-serving, hackneyed, and living at a fever pitch of performativity.

The central theme of transformation and duality ends up imploding, as the credible character required to act out (and when I write Act Out, I mean act out) these processes is completely absent.

Any of my (few) readers who gave this vomit of a film any house room needs simply to be directed to the glorious drama and globally choreographed "The Red Shoes". There's even a full review of it earlier in the blog.

TV Sky

The gangways and cobbled dockside spaces at Liverpool were almost spectrally quiet, even at the weekend; I flicked my eyes over my shoulder regularly, waiting for the packed throngs of gallery-shufflers who just never appeared. Like Tate After The Triffids.

There's a genuinely meditative air around some of the pieces, particularly the candle being CCTV'd and re-projected on the walls of the space it sits in, surrounded by the paraphernalia of camera, tripods, wiring.

At moments it all looked very dusty and old, the battered instruments that he disembowelled and jury-rigged with barged wire and glued-on detritus appeared as if they really belonged in Paik's garage, as they carried only a very poorly mediated folk memory of the incidents they lived and were destroyed in.

As if the Aktion, performance, Moment that was constituted by the physical violence visited on them necessarily meant their uselessness as Memoriae of that event. The pianos, especially, were almost bathetic, only ever gesturing at what was absent from them.
The 'family' of robots, even though apparently the most recognisable of Paik's work, were quite sad specimens, museum pieces, garden-shed approximations of an idea.