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Mayhem
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How many, how many, how many?
In Abigail Child’s diverse and prodigious artistic
career, Mayhem represents one, very
specific type of exploration. Coming at the spectator like a violent cut-up, it
mixes her filmed images from New York’s Lower Eastside in 1985 and 1986 with
various old movie samples, plus a soundtrack comprised of audio fragments (also
sampled) alternated with improvisations from a gang including Christian Marclay
and Shelley Hirsch.
It has the rawness and insider-vibe of an “art school confidential”
exercise in mimicry and playful subversion (notwithstanding the fact that Child
was already long out of school!) – but taken all the way: an over-15-minute
montage sequence that rarely eases off in its blistering intensity.
When I first saw Mayhem as a stand-alone 16mm show in the Melbourne avant-garde scene of the late
1980s, I was forcibly impressed by its speed and transgressive energy. Today,
it has been recontextualised by Child as part 6 of a series titled Is This What You Were Born For? bridging
work from 1981 to 1989, and presented that way on UbuWeb and in some screening
situations.
Back then, Mayhem had a lot to do with what many people, in art conclaves all over the world,
were doing during that decade: re-mix in its rougher, scratchier, pre-digital
forms, bits of film glued or spliced together, and their more-or-less
accompanying sounds likewise hacked apart. Plenty of clicks, pops, flares, smears,
semi-loops, discrepancies. The forms-in-flight are jagged, never cohesive;
gestures are caught as they exit the screen, music jerks into and out of its
aural life.
At the same time, Mayhem,
with its unifying tone of black-and-white footage, has a particular content or
target in mind: not one story, but a story of all stories, at least in the
large family of film noir. Not a film but, in this sense, cinema – at least, some primal essence
or effect of cinema.
These are not the slick spectres of noir nostalgia (I can hardly identify a
single frame lifted from elsewhere), but rather the grubby end of the genre,
its detritus. More Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Touch of Evil (1958) than The Maltese Falcon (1941) or The Lady from Shanghai (1948). Even more like the degraded telemovie thrillers of the ‘80s, which we
may hear filtered on the soundtrack. Tom Gunning, in his fine introduction to
Child’s 2005 book This Is Called Moving:
A Critical Poetics of Film (University of Alabama Press) describes Mayhem as “amazingly dirty – in the best sense. It leaves
stains on my consciousness” – the result of a cinema-distillation that
“yield[s] a final grimy residue”.
It's a magma of noir filled with abstract snippets of doors closing, people running down
corridors and stairwells, cars burning off down streets, torture scenes, fatal
looks. Plus some flipping of positive film stock into negative; and some
subtitled “continental” shots. It’s all encapsulated, early on, in the
recurring motif of slats of light and darkness as cast through Venetian blinds,
onto torsos, eyes, arms: a visual cliché already done to death in a thousand Old
Hollywood pastiches, music videos and TV ads (not to mention a million student
films), but here taken to a new, experimental extreme, slicing up frames and
figures alike, spreading blindness as much as insight in its flickering,
shuddering mania.
Maureen Turim, in a perceptive analysis, asserts: “Mayhem strews the shards of a broken
order into a new configuration” (Women’s
Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, Duke University Press, 2007, p.
274). The mayhem signalled in the title is a double disorder: it’s the Gothic
menace of ever-present threat (posed mainly by men to women, although there are
many queer shifts of costume and act here); and it's the joyful release of
playful destruction, Chytilová-Daisies-style,
turning all the tables over and around.
The occasional murmur or whisper or snatch of spoken
words – everything from old audio samples to Child’s performers giggling
uncontrollably before the dubbing screen – consolidates this double sense: the détourned, ironic commentary of a “Why
do you ask?” battles it out with the more hysterical and helpless cry of “How
many, how many, how many?”.
Slowly, the centre of this montage appears to shift. Noir edges into more graphic sex (it’s a
drag/queer kissing jamboree, a bit like Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures [1963] with more stylish ‘80s posing; Diane Torr
is among the players) – and then into outright porn, thanks to an old Japanese
reel (a masked bandit surprises two lesbians in flagrante delicto) that plays out with less visual interruptions
(but more extravagant music-track switching) for around the last two and a half
minutes of the piece.
The footage is washed out, barely visible in spots;
only the essential, animalistic motions survive the general degradation. From essence of cinema we transit to death of cinema, “film found on the
scrapheap” as at the end of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967).
That’s the way the scraps go in this avant-garde
efflorescence of panicked energy: they can fall together to make a new
impression, or they can be relegated back to oblivion. Abigail Child, in Mayhem’s montage, catches and stretches
out the eternal split-second of pregnant pause between this act of creation and
this shrug of devastation. Very 1980s – and very now.
Mayhem can be viewed at: http://ubu.com/film/child_mayhem.html
© Adrian Martin March 2018 |
