John Divola: Patricia Faure Gallery,
Santa Monica, California
Continuity haunts cinema and its representation
of the physical world. Join together any two shots, and temporal and spatial
relations are created. As the original sin of the film medium that no
edited assemblage can ever completely escape, continuity recalls our cognitive
predisposition to perceive meaningful relationships between discrete phenomena.
Unlike the smooth progression of practical activities in life, cinematic
scenes and the photographic images of which they are composed lack the
subjective gyroscope of personal memory. Siegfried Kracauer tellingly
observes:
Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of
affairs nor its entire temporal course. Compared to photography, memory’s
records are full of gaps . . . Photography grasps what is given as a spatial
(or temporal) continuum; memory images retain what is given only insofar
as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to
either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory images are at odds
with photographic representation. From the latter’s perspective,
memory images appear to be fragments but only because photography does
not encompass the meaning to which they refer and in relation to which
they cease to be fragments. Similarly, from the perspective of memory,
photography appears as a jumble that consists partly of garbage. 1
Devoid of the meaning of a subjective memory fragment, narrative cinema
depends heavily on the construction of a well-ordered spatial and temporal
continuum. A cigarette should not grow longer in the fourth shot of a
scene. Whatever does not advance the story is eliminated from a film;
the logic of continuity replaces that of chance and personal memory. Details
must be standardized across shots. In the words of one agent of cinematic
law and order:
The cameraman must film series of shots that match visually and technically.
Action must match across straight cuts; exposure, lighting, color and
other technicalities must match from shot to shot. Unexplained gaps in
continuity or technical variations will distract the audience and destroy
the illusion necessary for effective presentation. While editorial and
technical cheating can repair some mismatching, the cameraman should deliver
visually perfect scenes, regardless of the number of shots required.2
Composed of 48 set stills from Warner Brothers films produced in the 1930s,
the photographs in John Divola’s thoughtful exhibition “Hallways
and Evidence of Aggression” at the Patricia Faure Gallery were originally
produced by anonymous studio photographers on 8 x 10 negatives later contact
printed in the Warner Brothers darkroom. These found images have been
rescued from oblivion by the artist, who began his collection years ago.
A striking practical illustration of what Walter Benjamin calls “redemptive
criticism,” Divola’s exhibition is a poignant reminder of the
centrality of Hollywood cinema in the creation of 20th century visual
culture. Dark corridors, ornate light fixtures, and art deco furniture
constitute the most prevalent signature of its 1930s incarnation. Largely
ignored by archives, curators, and the movie studios, the sketches and
photographs produced as the aides-memoire of classical cinema remain scattered
(but safe) in dusty boxes and closets across Los Angeles, fortunate beneficiaries
of the passions and obsessions of private collectors.
Mute witnesses to earlier moments of human presence and movement, these
photographs delineate a temporally intermediate phase between the staged
event and its final cinematic form. Each exposure conveys the impression
of being produced by the last person on the set, an ultimate record produced
before the lights were extinguished. Testaments to the production by the
studio system of carefully lit (empty) spaces, they encourage us to imagine
the actors that once inhabited them and the plots of the films listed
on slates at the bottom corner of each image.
Of the two pieces exhibited, hallways most readily evokes the artistic
legacy of conceptual art, especially the photographs of Bernd and Hilla
Becher, whose repetitive images of water towers and gas tanks bespeak
an interest in typology and how we process different images of a single
object type. Divola’s choice of displaying these photographs as a
multiple series underscores both their generic quality and individual
variations in lighting and subject matter.
Yet unlike the scenes depicted on postcards, the corridors included in
hallways possess an uncanny ability to insinuate our former bodily presence
in these spaces, not merely our having seen them previously, but the suggestion
that they once surrounded our bodies as we walked through them. But where?
In a film, or in real life? These set stills blur such a distinction by
reminding us how cinema projects the body into space no less than the
film strip onto the screen. Recalling both obscure Hollywood films of
the 1930s and our memory fragments of buildings and institutional environments,
the hallways evoke a tension between the stasis of photographic representation
and the fluid dynamism of memory and spatial passage.
The 36 photographs of corridors displayed in three horizontal rows of
gray wooden frames depict interiors of police stations, hospitals, office
buildings, private apartments, and ocean liners. Photographed in long
shot, they are flawless specimens of an industrial image-making practice,
an instrumental photography destined only for the eyes of set builders,
cameramen, and continuity experts entrusted with reconstructing a set
for additional shooting.
Some photographs, such as those of the sets for Michael Curtiz’s
The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) designed by Polish-born art director
Anton Grot, recall the geometrically dynamic architecture of German expressionist
cinema. Most of the hallways project an ordinariness that becomes striking
only when captured photographically. They permit us to oscillate between
viewing them as commonplace yet mysteriously complicit in the visual style
of the period, an opulent splendor that might well have cheered those
who viewed Warner films between waiting in the bread lines of Depression-era
America.
In evidence of Aggression 12 photographs of interiors depict film sets
in the aftermath of violent confrontations. A lamp, disheveled books,
and the broken legs of a table litter the floor in one scene. Menacing
axes and a broken-down door appear in another. Perhaps the most compelling
of the series is the image from Larceny Lane (1931) depicting a hole in
a wall beneath a mirror in which the profile of an unidentified man is
visible.
Offering the titillating pleasure of viewing the cinematic scene in an
impure state, contaminated by debris, these stills are pornographic records
of spatial desecration. Littered with cigarette butts and empty bottles,
a deserted bedroom is transformed from a totally controlled environment
into a setting of pure spatial contingency accessible to photographic
documentation. From the standpoint of our memory images of the cinema
of the 1930s, these images reveal both the jumble of photography and film
production. Even violence, they appear to suggest, cannot escape the strictures
of continuity and the spatio-temporal continuum.
Writing of the visual culture of Weimar Germany, a period conterminous
with the Warner Brothers film sets depicted in “Hallways and Evidence
of Aggression,” Kracauer grasped the social project of photography
as banishing the fear of death (our own or that of others). He writes:
For the world itself has taken on a “photographic face,” it
can be photographed because it strives to be absorbed into the spatial
continuum which yields to snapshots. The camera can also capture the figures
of beautiful girls and young gentlemen. The world that devours them is
a sign of the fear of death. What the photographs by their sheer accumulation
attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel
of every memory image. In the illustrated magazines the world has become
a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely
eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutches of death, in reality it
has succumbed to it.3
The photographs in Divola’s exhibition stage a momentary truce between
our fragmentary memory images of spaces (physical and cinematic) and the
surface coherence obtained by the spatial and temporal continuum of photography.
Drawing sustenance from the perilous act of remembering, no less than
the distractions of the Hollywood cinema, they confront the fear of death
with a smile and radiate a melancholy beauty.
1. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927) in The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Thomas
Y. Levin, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 50-51.
2. Joseph V. Mascelli, The Five C’s of Cinematography (Hollywood:
Cine/Grafic Publications, 1965), 158.
3. Kracauer, “Photography,” 59.Edward Dimendberg
Los Angeles, California
1995