Talks by Kristen Kieder and James O'Leary

Apr 24 2009

James O'Leary and Kristen Kreider

Gorchakov’s Wish performance stills (2008-09)
kreider+o’leary

Constructing Atmospheres:
A Phenomenology of the Film Image and Its Relation to Place
Kristen Kreider / James O’Leary
Royal Holloway, University of London / Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London

Author biography

Dr. Kristen Kreider is a practicing poet and artist whose research develops a ‘material poetics’ at the crossover between poetry, fine art and spatial practice (Toward a Material Poetics: Sign, Subject, Site – PhD completed 2008, Slade School of Fine Art & Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL). She is currently a Lecturer in Creative Writing [Poetry] at Royal Holloway, University of London. .

James O’Leary is a practicing architect and artist whose research explores the overlapping boundaries of time-based, visual and spatial practices. He graduated with distinction from the Masters programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, graduating from Unit 14 – the Interactive Architecture Workshop. He is currently Principal Lecturer in Spatial Design at Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London.

> kreider+o’leary operate at the edges of disciplinary boundaries to integrate visual, spatial and poetic practices through performance, installation and time-based media. They have exhibited work in the UK as well as internationally in Japan (ArtX Toyama, 2006), Ireland (European Capital of Culture, Cork 2005) and Croatia (Art Radionica Lazareti, 2005).

Abstract

The ‘film-image’ – drawing together Eastern and Western poetics of image-making; embodying the material specificity of film – ultimately generates a particular experience of place for its recipient. We argue this point with specific reference to Andrey Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983), shot on-location at St. Catherine’s pool in Bagno Vignoi, Italy. The pool is a natural geo-thermal spring which generates an active surface of water and steam, the atmospherics and materiality of which are harnassed by Tarkovsky when shooting scenes from the film. The pool becomes a means to evoke the subjective psychological state of the protagonist, the poet Gorchakov. Meanwhile Tarkovsky’s syntactics of the long-shot instill in the viewer a contemplative state from which to observe, over a prolonged time, the pool as film-image – as worldly ‘fact.’

Bridging Eastern and Western poetics of image-making, Tarkovsky theorises the film-image in his collection of writings on art and film Sculpting in Time (1986). Tarkovsky approaches the film-image first through a discussion of the image in poetry, with specific reference to Japanese Haiku. We look at the particular relationship that the haiku has to time and place before turning to how this translates into Tarkovsky’s theory and practice of the film-image.

Tarkovsky theorises the film-image in particular relation to time. In this paper we position his argument in relation to discussions in phenomenology and film-theory to suggest that, imbued with a sense of time, the film-image also gives rise to a corporeal understanding of place for both the film-maker and recipient of the film-image – and we liken this embodied act of cognition to one engendered by certain architectural experiences. We then turn to a specific scene from Nostalghia in order to appreciate that the film-image is, in fact, a ‘constructed atmosphere’: one that bears a naturalistic and poetic – material and symbolic – relation to place; one that therefore cultivates and embodied and imagined occupation of place.

In presenting our ideas, we shall also draw from our own artistic practice and, specifically, a project entitled ‘Gorchakov’s Wish’ generated while in residence at Bagno Vignoni. This situated filmic and poetic project embodies our relation to the psychological space of Nostalgia as well as the material and immaterial elements of St. Catherine’s pool, constructing a further immersive environment through video and sound that extends a phenomenological understanding of the film-image and its relation to place through art practice.

‘The dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame.’ – Andrei Tarkovsky

‘Gorchakov’s Wish’ (2008) is inspired by a single extended shot from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1980 film Nostalghia, recorded on location in the Tuscan hillside village of Bagno Vignoni, Italy, at Santa Caterina Pool. The pool, a natural thermal spring and site of religious importance, infuses Tarkovsky’s film-image with an atmospheric combination of hot pool steam and cool morning sunlight that, in the context of the filmic narrative, suggests a mental space of isolation in a physically demarcated ‘sacred’ space.

The shot we are concerned with, one of the most celebrated single extended takes in the history of Cinema, follows Gorchakov as he walks the length of the emptied pool carrying a lighted candle. This peripatetic ritual and resulting cinematic scene creates an elemental ‘scape’ of steam, stone and fire that we have taken as a ‘site’ for two performance works:

∑ The first performance entailed a temporary occupation of the Santa Caterina Pool in Bagno Vignoni, Italy in order to re-enact the shot;
∑ The second performance, incorporating material and footage from the first, worked within the temporal constraints of Tarkovsky shot to enact an allegorical translation of it in the Triangle Space (Chelsea) where the live acts of performance (actor/director), projection and reception generated a real-time immersive filmic experience.

The accompanying images relate to this ongoing investigation of the phenomenology of the film-image and its relation to place.

kreider+o’leary (www.unnameable.org)
2009

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Events in architecture, art, literature and ‘nature’ that can better effect our views of the environment and eco crisis of today..x..more

GREENwichFORUM

Talks by Kristen Kieder and James O'Leary

Apr 24 2009

James O'Leary and Kristen Kreider

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