79 | 2002

ALLAN SEKULA

TITANIC's wake

Early in 1997, I photographed the Mexican film set for Titanic: this was part of an earlier project called Dead Letter Office, a title owed obliquely to Herman Meville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby’s mysterious refusal to work may have begun with his job as a post office clerk sorting undeliverable mail. Re-reading the story, I suddenly imagined that it was difficult and even spiritually challenging to send a letter the short distance from Tijuana to San Diego, even if Hollywood movie-making had crossed the line.
Seeking to profit from lower Mexican wages, Twentieth Century Fox built the set next to the poor fishing village of Popotla, on the Baja California coast about forty miles south of the US border. The production facility features the largest freshwater filming tank in the world, bigger even than the one used in Malta to film Popeye. The neighboring village, just to the south of the walls and guard towers of the set, has no running water. Efflux from the filming tanks has lowered the salinity of the coastal tide pools, damaging the traditional mussel-gathering livelihood of the villagers.
The lugubrious arrogance of Titanic intrigues me. Is it a symptom of something larger? We peer morbidly into the vortex of industrialism’s early nose-dive into the abyss. The film absolves us of any obligation to remember the disasters that followed. Quick as a wink, cartoon-like, the angel of history is flattened between a wall of steel and a wall of ice. It’s an easy, premature way to mourn a bloody century.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 79/2002, pp. 5–16.

CONSTANZE RUHM

Isaac Julian: Spaces of Translation: Speaking One Language, Understanding Another... A Coversation with Contanze Ruhm

Isaac Julien: One of the crucial things to remember from this period that was an entirely different film culture, is the fact that there was the beginning of Channel4 in 1981, and of a very strong independent film cultural movement. A number of film collectives emerged, like Sankofa, the collective I was a founding member of, or the Black Audio Film Collective, the Ceddo Workshop… We were trying to establish an independent Black British film culture. At this particular time a number of riots took place in mainland Britain, and slowly society realized that there were far too many voices excluded from the main bastions of British broadcast, and that there should be a space for a sort of politics of representation. This was the beginning of a different British film culture which was also part of a conversation with the visual arts – across practices, across disciplines. There were journals like Third Text, some of the debates taking place in photography at that time informed our film practice, there was 10/8 magazine which was very important, where you had people like Victor Burgin, Mita Tabrizian, also black photographers like Ingrid Lewis and people like David Lewis and Rotini Fani Kayode. A film like »Looking for Langston« (1989) is very much in dialogue with black and white photography, and is influenced by photographers from New York like Van Der Zee in the Twenties, and Robert Mapplethorpe in the Eighties… There was a whole interest in imaging and self-imaging.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 79/2002, pp. 17–28.

AXEL ROCH

Faces of Seeing. For a gaze in the temporal in-between of images

It “is possible to embody the gaze”, Jacques Lacan wrote in his Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalysis while reading in great depth the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty for his theoretical construction of the “object a” – the gaze itself. The gaze, then, the being-seen and seeing itself, may be given a mask, a face or a pictorial base. Also in the temporal dimension of eye movements and gazes, “momentariness”.
In the process of decoding writing, be it text or image, the gaze scans what it reads and what it sees in sequence of time. Usually, the iconic image or printed book transfixes the eye of the beholder under the gaze-guiding control of the artist or author. Meaning is prescribed and enacted, single or multiple, and sense is repeatable as identity in reproduction. The free floating of signifiers is often covered over, making it passive “per-reception” instead of active »per-ception« (Lat. capere to seize). But reading and seeing, as the history of art and history show, are in fact also active, somewhere in the in-between of active and passive – interactive.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 79/2002, pp. 41–47.

ROLF SACHSSE

Netz - Bild - Haut

Text feature in Camera Austria International 79/2002, p. 65.

KRYSTIAN WOZNICKI

Aesthetics of Globalisation

Text feature in Camera Austria International 79/2002, pp. 66–67.