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The Angler: The Return of the Repressed

This week: the fear of young women’s sexuality and movies made for Hitler’s Germany.

Dorothy Woodend 25 May 2018TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about culture and film for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

I have a fantasy. It goes a little something like this.

One day, I wake up and decide to say the truth about everything. Not in a vicious or unkind way, but simply to state what is clear and obvious and unexpressed.

The idea came surging to the surface at the recent opening of Altered States, a show dedicated to the work of artist Susan Hiller at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver.

Hiller is an American artist, born and bred in Florida. Like any reasonable person, she decamped for Europe and has spent the better portion of her working life in London. There is a long and august laundry list of her accomplishments and major shows on her website, but suffice to say she’s important.

The Polygon exhibition opened with an onstage interview with Hiller and curator Helga Pakasaar. At age 78, Hiller has certainly earned the right to be obstreperous, but after being a bit difficult during the interview, when the floor was opened for questions from the audience, I thought about throwing my hand into the air and saying, “I have a question, why are you being such a jerk?”

But maybe some other day.

If there was a theme for the week, it is the return of the repressed, which curiously enough is also something of an obsession of Hiller’s.

The woman has built her career on expressing the inexpressible, whether through automatic writing, the incoherence of language, or the difficulty in voicing experiences (UFO sightings, near-death episodes, dreams) for which no adequate form exists. Hiller’s installations, photographs, films, and writing have plumbed a variety of worlds, from surrealism to anthropology, but Altered States focuses on her more esoteric explorations including paranormal phenomena, telekinesis, and other fun activities.

As she stated clearly in her talk at the Polygon, the job of the artist is to create empathy, and despite her somewhat spiky demeanour that is what Hiller’s work does. It wends its way into the deeper recesses of your psyche and ferrets out what is lurking down there. Dream states, the unconscious, and the darker, weirder bits of the human mind come flying out like a Jack-in-the-Box. It is a distinctly unsettling sensation, but gentled by the artist’s deep commitment to understanding the nature of perception.

While the art world may debate defining terms like conceptualist or post-conceptualist, finding a way into Hiller’s work isn’t difficult. Many of her most influential pieces take as their leaping off point pretty prosaic stuff — postcards, horror movies, Punch and Judy puppet shows — their very mundanity all the more compelling for being overlooked.

Like most artists, she has an ongoing and central obsession. Hiller’s revolves around language, or more correctly the inability of language to fully embody people’s experiences that she says “have blown them away.”

In the case of UFO sightings, the artist has made active use of the online world as a resource to “locate testimonies, and voices that use the Internet to make themselves visible.” These stories are not always accessible in mainstream culture, but the Internet has fashioned an international, universal perspective that can be deeply mined. (Prior to becoming an artist Hiller worked in anthropology, and the lingering effects of that practice pop up in the form of collection and research.)

As she explains, it is difficult to ascertain the scale and number of UFO sightings, but they happen all over the world. On this continent we see weird things in the sky a great deal. This visionary experience is often overlaid with a science fiction vocabulary, or in other cultures, in a marriage between older folk stories with contemporary phenomena. But no matter the location, the sound of people telling stories is a uniting factor.

In his introduction to the exhibition, the Polygon’s director Reid Shier recounted his first experience with Hiller’s work, about being taken to an abandoned chapel in London to see Witness, 2000, an installation that included hundreds of speakers dangling from the ceiling with people talking about their experience with extraterrestrial presences and apparitions in 30 different languages. This fragmented discourse strains the very limits of language, and it is in this liminal space where Hiller’s work best operates, on an almost a pre-linguistic level.

It is a form of incoherence that she harkens back to the early days of feminist art practice, when leftist committee meetings were all about creating better politics. As Hiller notes in these settings, women often had difficulty expressing themselves, as there was no way to explain your reality in the dominant language of the day. As she says, this led to a form of confusion, and a little something that John Keats called “Negative Capability.” The concept, in short, stems out of artists searching for beauty, even if it entails uncertainty and confusion, or in more Keatsian language, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

This all sounds a little on the academic side, but Hiller’s work itself is alive and strange, and filled with a cracking static energy that snaps and pops like a downed power line.

In this quality, the most riveting piece in the exhibition is Psi Girls, a five-panel installation that consists of film clips from a range of movies — some great (Tarkovsky’s Stalker) and some unbelievably terrible (Firestarter). The common element is that each piece of footage depicts a young girl involved in an act of telekinesis. Individual panels are saturated with different primary colours, and the scenes move and reverse at odd tempos and speed, so that any narrative expectations that you might have are frustrated. A gospel choir from North Carolina supplies the accompanying soundtrack.

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Susan Hiller’s Resounding (Infrared), a single-projection video installation with sound. Image courtesy Lisson Gallery.

The term rupture is often applied to Hiller’s oeuvre, and in the case of Psi Girls it is a literal audio squawk of static that resets the frame, rejigging the order and sequence so that the single piercing moment of movement, of loss of control, of wild disruption occurs again and again, in different patterns of colour and form. Hiller refers to it as an interruption in the transmission.

It forces you to contemplate a singular moment, for which there is no logical explanation. Whether you enjoy the experience or wish to run out of the room screaming may depend on what is going on underneath the surface of your own unconscious mind.

When Psi Girls was shown at the Tate Gallery in London, a quote from an earlier exhibition catalogue from the Site Gallery explained her position: “I consider that definitions of reality are always provisional ... that we are all involved collectively in creating our notions of ‘the real’ ... anything which is ‘super’ or ‘extra’ is just a way of throwing up a debate around the kind of experiences that people have all the time.”

Hiller herself has spent a great deal of time in the Freudian world, and like old Sigmund she maintains that our culture is obsessed with the return of the repressed, or more specifically, fear of young women’s sexuality. It is this uneasy, slippery energy that runs through Psi Girls.

The effect lingers long after you’ve stepped out of the darkened gallery space. I am still revisited by it, with weird aftershocks that jolt when you least expect them.

The Rupture Festival

If Hiller needs another panel to add to Psi Girls, she need only look to a new film opening the inaugural Rupture Festival this week in Vancouver.

Ari Aster’s film Hereditary took Sundance by storm, and at its centre is another young woman with some disturbing internal issues.

There are some films that crawl up into your guts and fashion a queasy little home there. Hereditary is one of them. It is not a likable film, but it is well-made, beautifully edited and constructed, and exceptionally well-acted. It is also not a film I wish to revisit any time soon, and not because it’s too horrifying or too frightening to re-contemplate, but because it feels strangely irresponsible.

I’m still trying to ascertain why I want to repudiate this film so entirely. Maybe because I don’t trust the underlying motivation of the filmmaker. The film has a certain kind of authorial smugness about it, a quality that says, “I am going to fuck with you, because I can.” It’s a form of arrogance that pops up in a number of other cinematic provocateurs. (Lars von Trier recently came under fire at the Cannes Film Festival for this same impulse.) But Pasolini, Aster is not.

The filmmaker’s earlier short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons supposedly originated from a discussion about the most taboo-breaking idea possible. The answer was a story about a son raping and sexually abusing his father. The film is easily accessible online if you want to watch it. Like Hereditary, the central horror is the family itself, what is said, what is unsaid, and finally what is permanently hidden. But there is a cockiness in Aster’s work, of messing about and manipulating characters not for the sake of the story but to purposefully court controversy.

Hereditary is a much more powerfully executed work than The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, but it retains echoes of this impulse to mess with the audience for the sake of that.

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This can’t be good: A scene from the trailer for the horror film Hereditary.

In Hereditary, the parameters of the story are established in the opening (eerily) smooth pan into the small enclosed world of one family. The mother, Annie Graham (Toni Collette) is an artist who makes tiny scale models of houses and locations, often derived from her own life.

The matriarch of the Graham tribe has recently died, and her passing has triggered something in the family’s youngest child, a rather curious looking girl named Charlie (Milly Shapiro), who calmly lops the head off a dead bird with a pair of scissors, and floats through her grandmother’s funeral, eating chocolate and making odd popping noises. In short, there is something obviously very wrong with Charlie, a fact that does not go unnoticed by her parents.

But no one in the family seems particularly upset that Granny is dead. Even her own daughter explains in a grief support group that her mother was a very difficult woman.

The only person in the family who seems to be having an okay time is the Graham’s teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff), who smokes dope, ogles girls’ butts, and battles his mother. Anyone who expresses good cheer in a horror film is probably doomed, but nonetheless it is hard not to place your sympathy and empathy with Peter, as he seems the most reasonable human around.

After granny kicks it, things begin a slow downward spiral. Charlie and her mother have plenty of grimly foreshadowing conversations. Meanwhile, father Graham (a rather understated Gabriel Byrne) is dealing with somewhat unfortunate news about the gravesite of the dead granny. A fact that he keeps from his increasingly unravelled wife.

Aster has taken considerable pains to develop the family’s inherent drama and dysfunction long before the horror tropes of bugs, apparitions, and long dark hallways kick in. And it is here where the real horror lies. In the idea that we are bound to our genetic destiny, whether we like it or not. This idea alone would be more than enough. Simply look to any Bergman film if you need further validation. But Hereditary ups the ante with a heaping dose of the supernatural. There are distinct echoes of Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, The Witch, and It Follows. All of which contain an element of terrifying female sexuality.

The Devil is in the details. And those details are often female. As the action begins to rise, accompanied by shrieking groaning musical cues, you may be tempted to flee the theatre. Which is actually not a bad idea, unless you enjoy Grand Guignol extravaganzas. If you do, then stay and relish the carnelian fountains and that age-old impulse to sacrifice for mammon.

The remainder of the Rupture Festival contains some interesting films including Shōjirō Nishimi and Guillaume Renard’s Mutafukaz, and a real life exorcist named Father Amorth, which is a gentle reminder that reality is always more terrifying than fiction.

There are also artist talks (David Lowery), as well as a ritual of cleansing with fire, wherein nine new films will be immolated upon the altar of impermanence in an event titled Self-Destructive Cinema. Whether there will be an actual burning down of Vancity Theatre remains to be seen. The festival looks incendiary in the best possible sense. But o circle back to Hereditary for a moment: it’s also a reminder that if you’re messing about with the inky darkness, you better have thought it through, lest something unexpected and perhaps uncontrollable emerges.

If movies are form of the unconscious made manifest, what does this say about our current cultural moment? The idea popped up in a recent documentary entitled Hitler’s Hollywood. It is an idea borrowed from Siegfried Kracauer, whose thesis the film describes as: “films contain the collective unconscious of the period in which they were created.” Or even more succinctly by Hannah Arendt who wrote, “What convinces masses are not facts, not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the illusion.”

The fascinating thing about the documentary is the wealth of clips derived from very rarely seen German films made during the Nazi regime. One of the most disturbing comes from G.W. Pabst’s Paracelsus, that captures in a singular dance sequence the creeping horror of fascism. Hitler’s Hollywood is a curious compendium of fantasy-fuelled adventures, fluffy musicals, and costume dramas, but lurking underneath is a strange fascination with death. Perhaps the most unsettling thing contained in the wealth of clips is a single quote from Joseph Goebbels about the nature of propaganda, and by extension, cinema itself, as “an art form alluring people into an idea so in the end, they are captivated by it, and can no longer free themselves from it.”

Beware about looking into the cinematic abyss for what might be staring right back at you.  [Tyee]

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