GREENwichFORUM

04-24-09

James O'Leary and Kristen Kreider

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

‘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