Wednesday 3 April 2013

Epiphany : Questions in a comment

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


3 April

I am taking this space to start respond to various questions posed in a comment on Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II

I have now watched Turner Prize Video artist Elizabeth Price wins and BALTIC Bites - Elizabeth Price, and they should inform my answers



(1) I am unfamiliar with Beckett. If I were to listen to Words and Music, or watch Quad, what influences would be mirrored by Price?


(2) Did it not feel odd to spend so much time on the recreation with the burning furniture?

I can't say that it did.

After all, how do you convey the notion, the terror, of a fire without showing it, and the whole work is only around 20 minutes.

I don't even think that it could be mistaken for a re-creation. At that time, I believe less had been appreciated about how different substances in furniture burn, and how a source of fire might ignite other items.

I took the footage used by Price to be from filmed combustion tests, where the nature and spread of fire was being analysed. I have already commented on the use of two panes : for me, Price located, in this material, the bewitching, hypnotic quality of fire, as against, elsewhere, the destructive one.


(3) With Choir and with the information on the church architecture interspersed, did the fire seem like a sacrament?


(4) The description of the parcloses reinforced an absent focus on the parishioners. How did the film make you feel?


I take it that these belong together.

I watched the film twice through in succession, and therefore knew how
CHOIR
related to the other two parts of the film the second time.

In my vocabulary, a parclose is merely what I would call a rood-screen or, in other church traditions, an
iconostasis
(although, in that case, not serving to separate the choir from the rest of the church, but designating, by opaque panelling decorated by holy images, a place limited to the priest).

I am not sure how describing any of the church architecture stressed an absence of parishioners, since there was no one in this part of the film (unlike the distorted moving dancers / singers of the second part, into which the clicks, beats and handclaps drew us).

As I realized that the second section was moving towards giving detail of a fire in which people had been trapped and died, I felt uneasy. We did not see them. We saw the aftermath, and heard from those who had been outside. They were traceless, numberless dead.

They could have been trapped in the choir of a church, and, with no way out (except, perhaps, smashing the windows and climbing out), burnt to death.



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