:Music Research Group

DYNAMIC COLLAGES:

A WORD FROM THE CURATOR

The following is the catalogue entry composed to accompany a screening of dance film organised by Edith Cowan University in association with Artrage Perth, entitled “Body Cuts”, Cinema Paradiso, 5 Nov 2006. See www.artrage.com.au for details (under Reel Dance).

In 1910, a coalition of painters from the Italian Futurist movement declared that the new art forms of cinema and stop-motion photography were those most in keeping with the modern world. Surrounded by cars, trains and later airplanes and telephones, the Futurists saw their world as one dominated by speed, by movement, and by the endless replacement of one image by another in a chaotic procession which Filippo Marinetti labelled “body madness.” Treating machines and humans alike as subjects for their representations, they proclaimed:

Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears … moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.

The Futurists themselves had little direct influence upon film or dance until the 1950s, when their work was rediscovered by the artists in the Fluxus movement and by key figures in postmodern dance and music such as choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, composer John Cage, and video artist Nam Jun Paik. Nevertheless, the Futurists’ championing of film for the creation of a kind of emotive “dynamism” in which both bodies and objects danced upon the screen as equals, accompanied by crashing, metallic noises and fervid symphonic explosions, was prescient. From the music videos of Chris Cunningham (Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy) through to Japanese anime (Akira, Ghost in the Shell), the films of David Cronenberg (Crash) or Matthew Barney (Cremaster), such modes of presenting bodies and objects have become commonplace in contemporary cinema and the visual arts.

As a performing art, however, dance is often strongly invested in notions of live “presence”—in the idea that one must be in close, sympathetic proximity to the embodied dancer to fully appreciate the work. When translated to film, this dancerly model may nevertheless create a visceral sense of physicality akin to that of Futurism or Fluxus. As in the work of Brown, DV8, or in Claudia Alessi’s films in this program, such an approach tends to emphasise the weight, texture, malleability and sensation of flesh. The body is examined in close-up, with pans and cuts across fragments of skin making up much of the montage. The body comes to feel highly “material” in these films, like the thickly painted surface of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, or the tough, glossy skeins of industrial sculpture. Such dance films also recall horror and action cinema in their attention to a body which endures being beaten, flattened, thumped, stretched and thwacked. When watching such films, one feels one could touch the body, leaving an imprint like the boot-tread on Alessi’s shoulder in Wandering.

Indeed, throughout its history, dance has been likened to sculpture. In 1921, a reviewer described one of Loïe Fuller’s films as an exemplar of “the art of moving plastique”—that is to say a performance which revealed the almost clay-like malleability of the body as it moved through space. Fuller was famous for her technique of manipulating long, serpentine extensions of her dress such that they were caught by her intricately designed light-shows and cinematic projections, transforming her dance into a display of dynamic forms and colors which whirled about the ever moving central point of her otherwise concealed body. Although a pioneer of modern dance, Fuller’s performances were as much about the creation of a vocabulary of shape and color akin to a moving, abstract painting, as they were specifically “dance” performances per se. As the critic observed, Fuller had:

constructed a film with almost no literary compromises, one in which the rhythmic movement of the characters and the skilful play of light and shadow suffices to create the expression and impart the emotion.

This short history of dance’s relation to the other arts reminds one that dance has never operated in the absence of influences from the other arts, including those from film, photography and projection. From the time of its invention as a technique to analyse movement in the 1890s, film has always been concerned with the body and its rhythms. Nor can the description and representation of the body on film be separated from principles of montage, image or sculpture. If dance represents a kind of dynamic living sculpture which pulsates and surges with different tempos and rhythms, then it is hard to see why the movement of a human body across the screen is any more a kind of “dance” than is a similar on-screen animation of the color or form of an otherwise inanimate object, such as the ice-cream we see in James Teackle’s film within this program.

With the rise in cinematic dance as a recognised art form supported by international film festivals like Reel Dance, it is perhaps time to reassess the history of both dance and film, and to see to what extent, and in what ways, the category “dance film” is really a useful one. This is especially pressing given that all forms of cinema—by definition—involve the editing of image and sound so as to create a kind of choreography via a dynamic display of forms and noise.

The program you see this afternoon is designed to recast the dance/film dichotomy, to suggest that all film is a form of “dance,” and that perhaps the best dance films are not those made to recast a live choreographic form as cinema, but rather simply good films. Such an approach to dance film would have as its canon not only great pieces of filmed choreography such as those from Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Robert Helpmann, but also the work of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Chan, Hype Williams (the music videos of Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliot and others), Dziga Vertov (Man With a Movie Camera), Jean Cocteau (Blood of a Poet), Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou), Jacques Tati (Playtime), Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull), the Wachowski brothers (Matrix), Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin), and others.

—Dr Jonathan Marshall,WA Academy of Performing Arts / “RealTime Australia”

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