As Jonas Mekas tells of the premiere of Warhol’s film Empire –a single static shot of the Empire state building held for eight hours without camera movement or cut–the crowds were at a near riot. “We want our money back, we came to see a movie. This movie doesn’t move”. And this was at the Cinematheque! “Oh what a blind eye” opined Mekas of the surly crowd. Thereafter, over the next couple of decades, contemporary artists working in film returned to this territory of time and duration in film again and again: in the 1970’s Michael Snow looped through 360° degree pans for 24 hours in making La Region Centrale; in the 1980’s Chantal Ackerman contracted Jeanne Dielman to perform domestic kitchen work in real time, and in 1993 Douglas Gordon extruded a 24 hour Psycho from Hitchcock’s original.

The problem, or perhaps it is the element of cinema that is problematised, with all this work is the act of narration: how to tell. If you are going to tell –as well as show– with film, well how are you going to do that? This is a question Burt Barr muses upon in his economically installed current show at Sikkemma Jenkins.

It was a while, in terms of film history, before filmmakers decided they had to tell as well as show. But once the narrative ploy did get hitched to cinema it has been a tough divorce to push through.  (Something to do with the children? Hollywood’s much loved 18-25 year old demographic I mean).  Avant-garde film has been peppered with assaults upon narration both in principle and per specific techniques of classical narration from the get go. In the era of contemporary art Warhol, by making a fetish of “I have nothing to say”, tried to situate narration’s absence within a nexus of banality. Alas for him his provocative titles and subjects rebelled and thus, Taylor Mead’s Ass, Blowjob, Empire et al, despite Warhol’s slight of hand, are all situated in a discourse of and upon cinema and the fateful fact that its material does actually move.

Barr does not use the evocative titles or subjects of Warhol. Relatively straightforward descriptors: The ship, The Arrows, Soap Suds expose the quietude of the un-narrated world. Barr’s films –single frame, tightly cropped, all but devoid of movement within the shots, are close-ups of the objects named in the title. They all tippy toe, as a body, toward the territory of photo-riddles.  These are images that do not render banality because they are all party to a dialogue about murder.

Photography, it has been said, stops the flow of life, and thus, is flirting with death. If this is the case, in Barr’s dallying films of the everyday it is the terminus of narrative, its final closure, not its absence, that is being played out.  The riddle is, if you will, if photography killed painting, did cinema kill off the still photograph? And is Barr killing off cinema with slow-slow motion film? If yes, it is because of the simple and almost invisible fact that Barr’s images do move.

The image merely shown, and not narrated, is as pure vision: the thing seen and known. And because Barr’s films are ‘nearly still images’ when one is reminded that they are not, still images that is, by a returning flicker of movement, movement itself becomes the stain on perfect visibility. Movement is the murder of plenary sight and knowledge, and all that goes in train with that.

That Barr’s almost-photos do move provokes a conundrum about what is next and how it will be shown: will there be something or not? Not, for 50 minutes and 51 seconds in most cases, is Barr’s answer. These film want to tell us something it seems but can do no more than show. There is not here an absence of narration, rather narration is foreclosed.

Black and white film is the insistent choice of Barr. Black and white “are the only two colors I need” he has said. Importantly black and white film evokes time past. It is how our memories of that past, unknown to us through personal experience, have been born and then tamed. But the film world, the black and white film world that Barr deliberately chooses, has always seemed half-dead, half-alive to some. Writing in 1896 having just viewed the Lumier’s cinematograph Maxim Gorky penned, “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. … It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre…. It seems as if these people have died and their shadows have been condemned to play cards in silence unto eternity.  Their smiles are lifeless… This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim”

Barr has in his film work what we might call a sustained curiosity about movement. It, movement, is eviscerated from the otherwise narrative flow forward of the film, but it is frequently returned to us the viewer as the spinning, the rotating motor movement of a turning lawn sprinkler, and with probably more punch, a sink drain hole.   As is well known, the fascination with things that turn about themselves is a characteristically autistic means of engaging the world. The autistic child (see Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress) directs a recondite stare toward the spinning wheel, the turntable, the fan etc.  And this too has something to say about death. Or perhaps more accurately a refusal to engage with living –which has its own teleological conclusion.

Most glibly murderous are Barr’s traffic arrows. Immediately present as the diacritical marks of the American road, they point in either direction with no logic available to render a choice. Neither one nor the other makes a difference. The  immobilized, frozen viewer (driver?) staring endlessly until a decision is made by narrative force or, in fact, by Barr after 50 minutes and 51 seconds. Cut! Either it is the perfect conceptual fence to sit upon because the film has movement, but it does not move toward its ineluctable end. It could  loop on forever. Or it is the perfect road movie: Kerouac stalled somewhere in Kansas.

Burt Barr

Sikkema Jenkins

May21-July2