This Film is an Exhibition
by Olivier Bardin
The film
The viewer is comfortably seated in the movie theater. He looks in the same direction as his neighbors. In front of him, a white screen. Darkness floods the room. A man sings in English. An image appears progressively. The movie starts.
During the course of the film the viewer sees four visitors walking through an exhibition. He sees the same exhibition four times. And yet he does not see the same sequence of images four times, does not hear the same sounds four times, and does not go through the exhibition four times at the same speed.
Four visitors go through an exhibition. They do not see nor hear the same thing. The time allotted to the visit, the accuracy and the thoroughness of their gaze, the correlation between image and sound belong to them. The viewer becomes what his sight orders him to become. He is free to go backwards if he wishes, free to work out the sequences to his liking.
The visitor of an exhibition edits his is a subject. Those four visitors act as middle men between the viewer in the movie theater and what is given to see in the exhibition. Through their subjectivity and through the confrontation of their vision the viewer in the movie theater reaches in turn a singular viewpoint.
The exhibition
The exhibition spreads over eight successive rooms. Each room features a 26 photograph-sequence, 26 facial expressions of a bare-chested little boy facing the viewer. The eight spaces walked up and down by the viewers are also filled by men, women and children voices resounding in several languages. Those voices come from previous works. They first existed in relationship to other images but used here in a new context, faced with the image of this child, they resound in a different way.
It seems like the voices that get through to the child are the ones belonging to people who communicate through his facial expressions and gesticulations. The voices echoing each other do not tell a story. They form the matter from which the child can construct himself. The viewer recognizes in the child an embodiment of a world he once belonged to. He can project his own image on that of the child as on a screen. Thus the image of the child becomes an intermediary.
The child is being exhibited.
The image is simple. Single green hue. Medium shot. Bare-chested, the child stares at the viewer. He is wearing glasses that allow him to see but also block his view. Those grown-up glasses are too big for him. They belong to a world he is not a part of yet, too big a skin for a young immature human being in progress. The grown-up glasses – instrument used to correct the sight – are awaiting the one who, in turn, will put them on when he is old enough. Therefore, when this child puts them on they do not fit his little face and his gaze goes through the glasses as if they were not there.
He is playing with his hand, palm facing the viewer. As his fingers are squeezing the surface of the screen, one notices another translucent wall.
The child waves his hand and his hand partially conceals his face. Between his fingers, the expression arises.
With the child’s gaze in the background, we perceive this hand trying to reach us beyond the screen while revealing a kind of fear pervading the move towards the other; it provides a mask and a protection to the child, the one exhibiting himself through these images.
Is he defending himself? Is he waving his hand? The dialogue between the motion of the hand and the facial expression gives way to all types of interpretations and
projections. And thus the young face becomes a screen through which the viewer can recognize himself. In turn, spurred by this intermediary image and the rustle of the voices coming with it, he can become a subject. The viewer is invited to walk through this intimate path; the exhibition aims at enabling this experiment.
Voices
Every room features the same series of pictures. Only the voices broadcast in the air are different. Within the transition space between two rooms the voices overlap each other.
Eight rooms, eight vocal families, several languages. Some can be perceived as the translation of others.
If the viewer understands the languages and knows when the chosen texts were written, then the viewer will reach another level of understanding, different from the abstract perception of foreign sounds. Thus, Lewis Carroll’s dream told in English gives way to the political project that launched the French Revolution spoken in French, followed by casual conversations in Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Armenian, Polish, Turkish, Hungarian and Czech and Büchner’s text Danton’s Death in German and the monotonous, synthetic voice of a computer spelling in a robotic way the rules of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.
1. Through the Looking Glass
A man sings in English an extract from this text by Lewis Carroll; Alice’s dream. Here embodied by Lou Castel, Lewis Carroll originally told Alice this story. In this movie, Lou Castel’s soft voice, rocking a child while telling his dream, lets us enter an intimate world. The dream is that of a little girl and yet it is invented and embodied by a man.
«I’ll tell thee everything I can;
There’s little to relate.
I saw an aged man,
A-sitting on a gate.
“Who are you, aged man ?” I said,
“and how is it you live ?”
And his answer trickled through my head
Like water through a sieve.»
2. Manifesta
Eight women living in Frankfurt, Germany, born from migrant parents, speak to each other in their native language. Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Armenian, Polish, Turkish, Hungarian, Czech collide and blend with each other. Each language is perfectly mastered by one of them but totally unknown to the others. They speak to each other in the most intelligible way they can, scattering their speech with common elements, often geographical, because the first thing they share is a territory. For instance, the street names in German, ringing a bell to all of them cement this improbable linguistic community.
The hearer perceives those language fragments. As a whole, they sound like a single Central European language shaped by a group of women.
3. Le Camion (The Truck)
The script from Marguerite Duras’s movie, le Camion (The Truck), appears in captions under the image of the child. Thanks to the author’s accurate indications, the viewer gets visualize manage to give us a visual and sounding frame. Speech is engraved and not driven by a particular voice. Only the remembrance of Marguerite Duras’s voice in this movie or the inner voice of each viewer can sustain the text. The viewer is left alone, face to face with the written word.
«In what land do we find each other ?
La Beauce, perhaps, towards Chartres ?
Or maybe in these emigrant cities of Yvelines..
That is where she would have started looking at the countryside.,
the sea, from far away,
the road,
the white sky,
the cold,
the diversity of things.
And then, she sings.
We would have seen the cab of the truck. It is dark inside..
The driver and the woman are quiet..
Their coming together is arbitrary, disparate..
Do you see ?
Yes, I see.
They face the road. This road is swallowed up by their eyes..
There would have been music. «
4. On the Constitution We Should Give to France
5. To be Socialist
6. Never-ending Struggle
The speech originally delivered by Robespierre Sur la Constitution à donner à la France is driven by Sylvie Caspar’s smooth and sensuous voice, well-known for its announcements on TV channel Arte; it fuses with the matter of a voice conveying political speech in the world of today. The speech of political awareness becomes one with that of the microphone, it steps aside in favor of the machine, turns into a microphone, an instrument.
In this work, the emblematic televised voice delivers one of the founding speeches of the French Republic. The discrepancy between the familiarity of the voice and the accuracy of the speech gives back to speech and to the voice what they had respectively been deprived of.
Historian and political activist Alain Boscus reads aloud a speech about ownership delivered by Jean Jaurès in front of the House of Representatives in the early twentieth century. He reads it to a class of seventh grade pupils in a secondary school in Southern France. He expresses himself in a straightforward way. His Southern accent is pervaded with a feeling of emergency that definitively cramps Jaurès’s speech into local political action.
A teenage boy reads aloud a text written for the youth by Léon Blum in 1919, Pour être socialiste. The teenage boy discovers the text as he discovers his changing voice. Both the speech and the voice are nascent. Surprised by his own voice, the teenage boy stumbles on the words, reinvents the text thanks to Freudian slips but remains faithful to its meaning and of the power of speech all the while.
Robespierre: «Until now the art of governing has consisted simply of the art of stripping and subduing the masses for the benefit of the few, and legislation, the mode of reducing these outrages to a system: kings and aristocrats have thoroughly fulfilled their duty; now it is time for you to fulfill yours, that is to say to make the people happy and free with the laws.
Never have the evils of society emanated from the people but from the government. How could be otherwise? The interest of the people is the public good; the interest of the man in power is a private interest. To be righteous, the people’s sole need is to prefer themselves to that which they are not; to be good the man of law must sacrifice himself to the people.»
Jean Jaurès: «These days much energy is wasted in our country because of the pervading class antagonism, because of the perpetual struggle, violent and blind, between the haves and have-nots.
There is this growing antagonism in the industrial sector between corporate owners and workers. There is a nascent antagonism that will inexorably increase between farm-workers and the idle propertied class. There is no doubt that this antagonism, this struggle, though we are the first to recognize it, results in a terrible waste, an appalling amount of drain of our energy on a national scale.
And here in this very place, Sirs, this parliamentary powerlessness that you sometimes attribute– if you’ll pardon the expression – to childish so-called obstructions (Exclamations and laughter) – shame on you who are laughing – so-called shortcomings in the legal system, this parliamentary powerlessness is rooted – whether we want it or not – in this very social struggle at play in all our debates, and in every issue whatsoever there reappears the deeply ingrained universal conflict between the owners and the non-owners. Here is what encumbers, agitates, and paralyzes the Assemblies.»
Léon Blum: «Socialism is born from the consciousness of human equality whereas the society in which we live is entirely founded on privilege. It is born from the sympathy and anger aroused in every honest heart at such appalling sights as poverty, unemployment, cold, hunger, when the Earth produces enough bread to feed each and every child, when each living creature’s sustenance and well-being should be secured by his work, when each man’s life should be guaranteed by all others. It is born from the both scandalous and distressing contrast between the wealth of some and the squalor of others, between excruciating labor and arrogant sloth. It is not – as has been said so many times – the offspring of envy, which is the lowest of human mainsprings, but from justice and mercy, which are the noblest ones.»
Languages
7. The Spiritual Exercises
8. Danton’s Death
The film and the exhibition end with Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises being repeated in Castillan. A synthesized voice repeats the text over and over. Mechanically, the toneless and plain voice enumerates rules to be put into practice by children on a daily basis. Other children’s voices rise against it. Young French kids read Büchner’s play Danton’s Death in German. Behind fragments of speeches delivered during the French Revolution and assembled by Büchner, behind the German language, one can sense the French accent. Thus a dialogue arises between two cultures within the context of the intimate dialogue between the languages.
The viewer is comfortably seated in the movie theater. He is watching in the same direction as his neighbors. Light floods the room. The film is over.
The film
The viewer is comfortably seated in the movie theater. He looks in the same direction as his neighbors. In front of him, a white screen. Darkness floods the room. A man sings in English. An image appears progressively. The movie starts.
During the course of the film the viewer sees four visitors walking through an exhibition. He sees the same exhibition four times. And yet he does not see the same sequence of images four times, does not hear the same sounds four times, and does not go through the exhibition four times at the same speed.
Four visitors go through an exhibition. They do not see nor hear the same thing. The time allotted to the visit, the accuracy and the thoroughness of their gaze, the correlation between image and sound belong to them. The viewer becomes what his sight orders him to become. He is free to go backwards if he wishes, free to work out the sequences to his liking.
The visitor of an exhibition edits his is a subject. Those four visitors act as middle men between the viewer in the movie theater and what is given to see in the exhibition. Through their subjectivity and through the confrontation of their vision the viewer in the movie theater reaches in turn a singular viewpoint.
The exhibition
The exhibition spreads over eight successive rooms. Each room features a 26 photograph-sequence, 26 facial expressions of a bare-chested little boy facing the viewer. The eight spaces walked up and down by the viewers are also filled by men, women and children voices resounding in several languages. Those voices come from previous works. They first existed in relationship to other images but used here in a new context, faced with the image of this child, they resound in a different way.
It seems like the voices that get through to the child are the ones belonging to people who communicate through his facial expressions and gesticulations. The voices echoing each other do not tell a story. They form the matter from which the child can construct himself. The viewer recognizes in the child an embodiment of a world he once belonged to. He can project his own image on that of the child as on a screen. Thus the image of the child becomes an intermediary.
The child is being exhibited.
The image is simple. Single green hue. Medium shot. Bare-chested, the child stares at the viewer. He is wearing glasses that allow him to see but also block his view. Those grown-up glasses are too big for him. They belong to a world he is not a part of yet, too big a skin for a young immature human being in progress. The grown-up glasses – instrument used to correct the sight – are awaiting the one who, in turn, will put them on when he is old enough. Therefore, when this child puts them on they do not fit his little face and his gaze goes through the glasses as if they were not there.
He is playing with his hand, palm facing the viewer. As his fingers are squeezing the surface of the screen, one notices another translucent wall.
The child waves his hand and his hand partially conceals his face. Between his fingers, the expression arises.
With the child’s gaze in the background, we perceive this hand trying to reach us beyond the screen while revealing a kind of fear pervading the move towards the other; it provides a mask and a protection to the child, the one exhibiting himself through these images.
Is he defending himself? Is he waving his hand? The dialogue between the motion of the hand and the facial expression gives way to all types of interpretations and
projections. And thus the young face becomes a screen through which the viewer can recognize himself. In turn, spurred by this intermediary image and the rustle of the voices coming with it, he can become a subject. The viewer is invited to walk through this intimate path; the exhibition aims at enabling this experiment.
Voices
Every room features the same series of pictures. Only the voices broadcast in the air are different. Within the transition space between two rooms the voices overlap each other.
Eight rooms, eight vocal families, several languages. Some can be perceived as the translation of others.
If the viewer understands the languages and knows when the chosen texts were written, then the viewer will reach another level of understanding, different from the abstract perception of foreign sounds. Thus, Lewis Carroll’s dream told in English gives way to the political project that launched the French Revolution spoken in French, followed by casual conversations in Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Armenian, Polish, Turkish, Hungarian and Czech and Büchner’s text Danton’s Death in German and the monotonous, synthetic voice of a computer spelling in a robotic way the rules of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.
1. Through the Looking Glass
A man sings in English an extract from this text by Lewis Carroll; Alice’s dream. Here embodied by Lou Castel, Lewis Carroll originally told Alice this story. In this movie, Lou Castel’s soft voice, rocking a child while telling his dream, lets us enter an intimate world. The dream is that of a little girl and yet it is invented and embodied by a man.
«I’ll tell thee everything I can;
There’s little to relate.
I saw an aged man,
A-sitting on a gate.
“Who are you, aged man ?” I said,
“and how is it you live ?”
And his answer trickled through my head
Like water through a sieve.»
2. Manifesta
Eight women living in Frankfurt, Germany, born from migrant parents, speak to each other in their native language. Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Armenian, Polish, Turkish, Hungarian, Czech collide and blend with each other. Each language is perfectly mastered by one of them but totally unknown to the others. They speak to each other in the most intelligible way they can, scattering their speech with common elements, often geographical, because the first thing they share is a territory. For instance, the street names in German, ringing a bell to all of them cement this improbable linguistic community.
The hearer perceives those language fragments. As a whole, they sound like a single Central European language shaped by a group of women.
3. Le Camion (The Truck)
The script from Marguerite Duras’s movie, le Camion (The Truck), appears in captions under the image of the child. Thanks to the author’s accurate indications, the viewer gets visualize manage to give us a visual and sounding frame. Speech is engraved and not driven by a particular voice. Only the remembrance of Marguerite Duras’s voice in this movie or the inner voice of each viewer can sustain the text. The viewer is left alone, face to face with the written word.
«In what land do we find each other ?
La Beauce, perhaps, towards Chartres ?
Or maybe in these emigrant cities of Yvelines..
That is where she would have started looking at the countryside.,
the sea, from far away,
the road,
the white sky,
the cold,
the diversity of things.
And then, she sings.
We would have seen the cab of the truck. It is dark inside..
The driver and the woman are quiet..
Their coming together is arbitrary, disparate..
Do you see ?
Yes, I see.
They face the road. This road is swallowed up by their eyes..
There would have been music. «
4. On the Constitution We Should Give to France
5. To be Socialist
6. Never-ending Struggle
The speech originally delivered by Robespierre Sur la Constitution à donner à la France is driven by Sylvie Caspar’s smooth and sensuous voice, well-known for its announcements on TV channel Arte; it fuses with the matter of a voice conveying political speech in the world of today. The speech of political awareness becomes one with that of the microphone, it steps aside in favor of the machine, turns into a microphone, an instrument.
In this work, the emblematic televised voice delivers one of the founding speeches of the French Republic. The discrepancy between the familiarity of the voice and the accuracy of the speech gives back to speech and to the voice what they had respectively been deprived of.
Historian and political activist Alain Boscus reads aloud a speech about ownership delivered by Jean Jaurès in front of the House of Representatives in the early twentieth century. He reads it to a class of seventh grade pupils in a secondary school in Southern France. He expresses himself in a straightforward way. His Southern accent is pervaded with a feeling of emergency that definitively cramps Jaurès’s speech into local political action.
A teenage boy reads aloud a text written for the youth by Léon Blum in 1919, Pour être socialiste. The teenage boy discovers the text as he discovers his changing voice. Both the speech and the voice are nascent. Surprised by his own voice, the teenage boy stumbles on the words, reinvents the text thanks to Freudian slips but remains faithful to its meaning and of the power of speech all the while.
Robespierre: «Until now the art of governing has consisted simply of the art of stripping and subduing the masses for the benefit of the few, and legislation, the mode of reducing these outrages to a system: kings and aristocrats have thoroughly fulfilled their duty; now it is time for you to fulfill yours, that is to say to make the people happy and free with the laws.
Never have the evils of society emanated from the people but from the government. How could be otherwise? The interest of the people is the public good; the interest of the man in power is a private interest. To be righteous, the people’s sole need is to prefer themselves to that which they are not; to be good the man of law must sacrifice himself to the people.»
Jean Jaurès: «These days much energy is wasted in our country because of the pervading class antagonism, because of the perpetual struggle, violent and blind, between the haves and have-nots.
There is this growing antagonism in the industrial sector between corporate owners and workers. There is a nascent antagonism that will inexorably increase between farm-workers and the idle propertied class. There is no doubt that this antagonism, this struggle, though we are the first to recognize it, results in a terrible waste, an appalling amount of drain of our energy on a national scale.
And here in this very place, Sirs, this parliamentary powerlessness that you sometimes attribute– if you’ll pardon the expression – to childish so-called obstructions (Exclamations and laughter) – shame on you who are laughing – so-called shortcomings in the legal system, this parliamentary powerlessness is rooted – whether we want it or not – in this very social struggle at play in all our debates, and in every issue whatsoever there reappears the deeply ingrained universal conflict between the owners and the non-owners. Here is what encumbers, agitates, and paralyzes the Assemblies.»
Léon Blum: «Socialism is born from the consciousness of human equality whereas the society in which we live is entirely founded on privilege. It is born from the sympathy and anger aroused in every honest heart at such appalling sights as poverty, unemployment, cold, hunger, when the Earth produces enough bread to feed each and every child, when each living creature’s sustenance and well-being should be secured by his work, when each man’s life should be guaranteed by all others. It is born from the both scandalous and distressing contrast between the wealth of some and the squalor of others, between excruciating labor and arrogant sloth. It is not – as has been said so many times – the offspring of envy, which is the lowest of human mainsprings, but from justice and mercy, which are the noblest ones.»
Languages
7. The Spiritual Exercises
8. Danton’s Death
The film and the exhibition end with Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises being repeated in Castillan. A synthesized voice repeats the text over and over. Mechanically, the toneless and plain voice enumerates rules to be put into practice by children on a daily basis. Other children’s voices rise against it. Young French kids read Büchner’s play Danton’s Death in German. Behind fragments of speeches delivered during the French Revolution and assembled by Büchner, behind the German language, one can sense the French accent. Thus a dialogue arises between two cultures within the context of the intimate dialogue between the languages.
The viewer is comfortably seated in the movie theater. He is watching in the same direction as his neighbors. Light floods the room. The film is over.
