John Menick Blog | Archive for March, 2006

If one were to make a chronological list of ‘last-person-on-earth’ films, somewhere near the top, if not leading the list, would be René Clair’s 1924 silent short, Paris qui dort. Called alternatively in English Paris Asleep, The Crazy Ray and At 3:25, and inexplicably expanded to longer running times by distributors, Paris qui dort is currently available in the US in the director’s preferred 35-minute form as an extra on Criterion’s release of Under the Roofs of Paris.

Last-person-on-earth cinema — a subgenre of apocalyptic films — often concerns an unsuspecting individual who awakens to find a densely populated city devoid of humanity. In Clair’s film, Albert, the caretaker of the Eiffel Tower (was there such a job?), rises one morning to find the entire city frozen in time. His watch has stopped, and the denizens of Paris are immobile as statues. It’s easy to see that for the former avant-gardist, Paris qui dort was a kind of populist surrealism, a common dream and sexual fantasy made public, an early example of what would later become the full utopian and erotic potential of the cinematic dream factory.

Although it can be seen as an anticipation of much to come, Clair’s pre-Holocaust, pre-Hiroshima fiction takes a naïve view of Albert’s situation, so naïve in fact, that any contemporary viewer raised on the all-against-all scenarios of later post-apocalyptic films, could only judge it as insufficiently Hobbesian. There are no flesh eating zombies, decaying bodies, power-hungry cult leaders, cannibalism, etc. — only a group of revelers whose greatest menace is boredom. Ennui is the true enemy of the film, and as one wag pointed out, it may occasionally threaten the viewer of Paris qui dort as well.

Clair is still a surrealist at heart, but his film anticipates many of the themes that would come to dominate all shades of post-apocalyptic films and literature. Here are some of the ground rules:

1) All survivors owe their existences to statistical improbabilities, such as an accidental arrangement of their lives or genes. Often this advantage will be purely Darwinian — a genetic mutation that renders a small group of humans immune to a disease. In Paris qui dort the cause is geographic, which works just as well.

2) Science must be to blame for the protagonist’s isolation. It doesn’t matter whether the cause is accidental or not, the guys in the lab coats are to take the hit.

3) For every ten or so men, there is only one woman. At first blush this seems to favor the sole female, as she seems to have her pick of any man, but after a few reels the truly ominous nature of the arrangement becomes apparent to all involved. (Additionally, although always implied, the homoerotic nature of the situation can never be mentioned.)

4) Money becomes temporarily useless, but must always return in some form. As illustrated by prison economies, anything can become money — cigarettes, for example — and although characters may toss their pearls off the Eiffel tower, they must at some point either reintroduce money or money will reintroduce itself. In Paris qui dort this return is literal as characters switch back and forth between real time and the frozen time of the scientist’s ‘crazy ray.’

5) Clocks and machines become useless. Immobility reigns. If society reconstitutes itself at all, regular schedules and mechanical efficiency never fully recover. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds functioned almost on this principle alone.

6) Social classes dissolve, and power relations are often reversed. Who needs a stockbroker after the apocalypse anyway?

7) Eventually, after all is thought lost, a message from the ‘outside’ is received. The message can truly be from outsiders — other survivors, government officials, aliens, etc. — or can be a false hope, which, of course, must have some ironical socio-political meaning. Often false hope and idols come in the form of comic books or some relic of trash American culture.

When Artists Say We opens tonight at Artists Space. Looks like a huge show, with lots of friends and former collaborators. I’ll be showing a video or two later in April with Jenny Perlin and Annmarie Jacir.

When someone asked Orson Welles whether he wanted to make movies for a mass audience (instead of marginal art films like F for Fake), he sighed out what is probably one of his few honest responses: “I’ve been looking for a mass audience all my life.”

I remembered Welles’ lament while reading Rob Storr’s thoughts on video art over at Frieze yesterday, especially when the former MoMA curator pushes artists and dealers to realize “that a culturally and, from an financial standpoint, numerically significant constituency for video art exists.” Storr then goes on to say, “the time has come for video to return to its technological roots in order to find its wider public.”

Storr is dead-on when talking about a need for — or at least a possibility of — a larger market. But the medium is not the answer here. Or to put it another way, when talking about cinema, one can not only mention a single medium. To take a slightly dated example, Danny Boyle’s brilliant 28 Days Later was shot on the Canon XL-1s, the same cameras used to shoot many years worth of video art, but why does one work captivate millions and make millions of dollars more, and another whole category of works gets “relegated” to the sidelines? To answer in a few words: dramatic narrative, cultural conventions, marketing, audience expectation, and distribution. Not to mention the fact that cinema can’t be reduced to the medium on which a particular “film” is shot. Any DV film passes through a whole number of media: first mini-DV, then sometimes 35mm, then to VHS, DVD, and onwards and outwards to ipods, quicktime videos etc, etc. Not to mention the millions spent on marketing.

The topic is too complex to cover here, but some answers to Storr’s questions might be found in a whole range of new marketing, audience, and political theories. Speaking of mass audiences can be tiring, especially if one takes on the simplistic binary thinking that “mass” is “popular and good,” while “small” is “elitist and bad.” The jury is still out (and the book not even published) on Long Tail theory, but perhaps the best rule of thumb is that some works are made for an audience of three or four, while others for three or four million. Just because an artist might sell to a few collectors a work that is only viewed by a few thousand people over 10 years doesn’t mean that the work is not economically viable or unseen. It’s a niche market, that’s all. If you want a larger market, you have to change a lot more than the medium.

Then again, we could all be wrong, and video artists do resemble the lone survivor of 28 Days Later.

After spending the last 6 years (in part) building blogs for others, I decided to start my own. Since I unfashionably favor working with editors, I’m skeptical about blogs in general as a form of writing and dialogue, but am willing to give it a tentative try. Let’s see…