The San Francisco International Video Festival
The San Francisco International Video Festival’s third incarnation—like its first two—was characterized by a dizzying variety of viewing venues, a secondary emphasis on video within the context of performance and installation art, numerous film-festival-style tributes, and the decidedly political bent of many of the works screened. Three videotapes received their public premieres—Doug Hall’s The Speech, Tony Labat’s Ñ, and Tony Oursler’s Son of Oil; each directly targets matters of social and political consequence.
Doug Hall’s best-known works are his mid-’70s collaborations with the T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm collectives. Such stunningly orchestrated, made-to-be-documented events as Media Burn, in which a souped-up Cadillac was driven through a wall of flaming television sets, attest to Hall’s longstanding fascination with media presentation as anthropological rite. In The Speech Hall, on camera, conducts a practicum on political speech-making. Sitting between two flags, he intones a deadpan, Boy Scout oath of a litany of the virtues required to enhance a candidate’s image. The gamut is run from the sublime to the ridiculous, from honesty and self-reliance to good health and virility, with Hall providing handy tips for the enactment of each. Honesty is communicated to an audience when “he [the candidate] appears relaxed and in control,” and confidence “allows him to avoid difficult questions while seeming to be a nice guy.” The evangelically oily recitation of such dictums as “Obey the laws of the land, they were made with you in mind,” reminds us how similar are the rhetorical ploys of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell.
Hall’s satiric touch is deftly Swiftian. The Speech is unpretentiously straightforward and free of tendentiousness. The question “Is the ultimate victory one of form over content?” is asked twice on the tape; the elliptical answer, of course, is that they are synonymous.
Cuban-born Tony Labat came to the United States as a teenager. He has used his outsider status to confront the issues of cultural disorientation; his sometimes belligerent humor is tempered, however, by his quick wit, his subtlety, and the seriousness of his concerns. Both for its artistry and its complex texture of ideas, Ñ is a revelation.
The title Ñ (pronounced enn-yay) refers to the Spanish tilde sign over the “n” in written Spanish indicating a fluid pronunciation alien to English speakers. Labat has said in interview that this symbolizes what is “lost or left behind” by the immigrant in North America. Throughout the tape, Ñ is referred to as a “victim of circumstances.”
Structurally Ñ is a nonlinear tapestry, mostly of talking heads. Characters appear and reappear, voicing their yearnings and sometimes their demands. First up is a Norteamericano businessman/bandit, head encased in a stocking, tensely striding through woods. He gruffly announces: “I give you something, you pay. That’s it. This is business.” A meeting of revolutionaries is mentioned and Costa-Gavras–style intrigue suffuses the scene, but never materializes; nor does any semblance of a conventional narrative. Instead we are introduced to a cast of disparate speakers, including a glamorous white news-woman, a black male boat person, a blonde little girl, and miscellaneous urban types both black and white. All but the newswoman are isolated from any social context, making the normally cool, cinema verité technique seem dream-intimate.
Labat’s visual inclinations are abstract. Staccato rhythms are established by repeated quick cuts to shots of the sweat-drenched artist straining at a rowing machine, the galley slave at his labor. Sound is similarly varied to dissociating effect: the newswoman’s crisply spoken dissertation about the miseries of modern existence is truncated mid-stream, contrasting sharply with the romantic reveries of the boat person, which drift off like a dinghy at sea.
Ñ’s conclusion finds several members of this mysterious group on a tropical bluff overlooking the ocean, where they reverently kiss the ground. The liberating expansiveness of this shot, as well as the action, proclaim some sort of paradise found. Labat’s gloss on the myth of America dialectically juxtaposes (and sometimes blends) the poetry of desire and the realities of sociopolitical conditions. It is an elusive—and allusive—coupling.
Tony Oursler is the current wunderkind of video, a maker of tapes whose imagery is manufactured in the manner of such German Expressionist films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the fabricated pictures of such contemporary photographers as Ellen Brooks and Sandy Skoglund. Son of Oil—like the earlier Grand Mal and The Loner—is comprised of state-of-the-art video animation and painted sets. But the fingers and arms with faces limned on them of those tapes have been replaced by actors seen full figure. Otherwise Oursler’s whimsical sensibility operates with its familiar elements intact: the droll, pun-laden narration; the rambling vignette-based structure; the schlocky, Gothic-thriller ambience; the protagonist’s soap-operatic mission; the luscious palette of saturated, sherbety tones, and the flavorful painted sets suggestive of Bad Painting reflected in distorting mirrors.
There is a startling difference, however, between Son of Oil and the previous works. Onto this charming, fairy-tale format Oursler has grafted a cautionary tale of ecological disaster. A picture is painted of an “empire where the sun never sets at a party that never stops.” Not only does an overreliance on oil threaten our consuming lifestyle, but tugs at the social fabric. A voice whispers, “If you kill the president are you as important as the president?”. Big issues are ubiquitous.
Unfortunately, however, hypnotic images and ingeniously crafted effects render issues virtual distractions from the main event. The problem is that Oursler’s tapes are structurally unhinged. Episodes lack connective links and the concomitant possibility of sustained polemic. With The Loner and Grand Mal, loose-knit, psychologically oriented tales redolent of archetype and cliché, this didn’t really matter, because we “knew” the stories and responded to individually memorable sequences and Oursler’s intoxicating atmospherics. Son of Oil’s laudable attempt to formulate a thesis is sabotaged by a structure incapable of supporting one. We’re left with sensibility as a substitute for ideology.
—Robert Atkins
