C104
review
Dublin:
Clare Langan at RHA
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Clare
Langan: still Forty below, courtesy RHA Gallery
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The RHA displayed
admirable percipience when it recently hosted the first
complete screening of Clare Langan's film trilogy. The
first two parts of the trilogy have been shown elsewhere,
most notably at IMMA and at last year's Bienal de São
Paulo, where Langan represented Ireland. However, with
the screening of the final film of the trilogy - Glass
hour (2002) - it is now possible to consider the five-year
project as a whole.
To date Langan's
films have been well received critically. Their narrative-based
sequence and dreamy luminosity have been welcomed as a
healthy progression from the banal repetitiveness and
low-tech anti-glamour that has till now characterised
so much experimental film-making.1 Gone are the shaky
frames of the hand-held camera, the sudden and awkward
cuts of the home-movie amateur. In their place are more
sophisticated cinematic techniques of sweeping panoramas,
slow fade edits, and above all rich, saturated colour.
Ironically, however, whilst her films and photographs
may appear as though they are the products of digital
manipulation (colour tweaking, photo-montage, etc.), her
technique is distinctly unsophisticated, involving instead
the placement of hand-painted filters in front of the
camera lens. In addition, environmental factors play an
important role. Windstorms in the Namibian desert may
have hindered production of Too dark for night, but were
put to good use in shaping both visuals and soundtrack.2
Thus very real, environmental constraints and hand-painted
filters have greatly impacted on production, resulting
in films and photographs that uncannily resemble the products
of computer wizardry.
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Clare
Langan: still: Glass hour; courtesy RHA Gallery
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Thematically,
the trilogy explores the destruction of domestic space,
either by inundation (flood waters or sand) or incineration.
In Forty below ice floes and flooding have engulfed towns.
Too dark for night focuses on the effects of drought and
desertification, whilst Glass hour witnesses the complete
consumption of human life by fire, symbolised by the burning
of a humble white bungalow in the west of Ireland. In
their portrayal of nature's indifference to human culture,
the films act as a sort of memento mori, or cautionary
reminder of imminent destruction. This thematic plan lends
itself to colour coding - blue, yellow and red - which
Langan achieves with lens filters, and which reverberates
with the red, white and blue of Kieslowski's cinematic
trilogy.
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Clare
Langan: still: Too dark for night, courtesy
RHA Gallery
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Inherent
in Langan's trilogy is an interesting conflict between
subject matter - to wit, the annihilation of human culture
by the forces of nature - and medium. For whilst Langan
still uses relatively old-fashioned 16mm film, she later
transfers the film onto DVD, which has the advantage over
film or video in that it is highly durable and capable
of resisting extremes of heat. It is intriguing to ponder
the paradox of films which explore the theme of destruction
from climactic change and extremes of temperature being
transferred from the fragile medium of film to the relatively
impervious one of DVD. Langan's camera may linger lovingly
on old family photographs, lace doilies, broken crockery
and other such domestic driftwood - the nostalgic relics
of human life - but her method suggests that in the near
future memories might be stashed more securely on durable
DVDs which could (at least theoretically) survive flood,
drought or fire.
However,
it is the title of the final film, Glass hour, which might
(retrospectively) provide the key to the trilogy. Langan's
'eye' is her camera lens, a finely ground glass prism,
produced by the firing of silica, or sand, which is in
turn produced by the action of waves upon a shore. Water,
sand, fire - the three basic elements which combine to
create glass - are the three motifs of the trilogy. Throughout
Too dark for night sand gives form to objects, filling
out the contours of a bottle in a beautifully shot nature
morte, just as light informs our sense of volume in Forty
below, and a blanket of ash reveals the skeleton of a
burnt-out car in Glass hour. However, far from providing
a clear glass 'window' upon the world, Langan's lens is
as biased and personal as the human eye which directs
it, to the extent that it actually appears to 'blink'
in the unforgettable sequence of cuts at the end of both
Too dark for night and Glass hour. Indeed, the lone figure
of a woman which wanders through each film is but a cipher
for the roving eye of the film-maker. Thus Langan succeeds
in subtly if resolutely asserting her own artistic presence
in these haunting, cautionary tales.
Jane Eckett
is a freelance arts writer.
Clare Langan:
Forty Below, Too deep for
Night, Glass Hour, RHA Gallery, Dublin,
February/March 2003
