Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 January

This posting continues from a survey of Elizabeth Price's place amongst the nominees for The Turner Prize 2012

As a starting-point (although it was the last of a triptych of films, shown virtually seamlessly), Elizabeth Price took material relating to a fire at Woolworths in Central Manchester (in 1979), and then built up her own vision to prepare for coming to narrate the events, sometimes using reporting speech, sometimes – as the film developed – giving us directly what seemed to be original audio.

Price’s work did so many things that were admirable – the following are in no particular order, and not an exhaustive list :

* Using different audio techniques, from a single beat that emphasized a visual (or a change of visual)* to processed sound

* Mixing styles of depiction, with, when showing stills, often a stereoscopic presentation (later, with footage of burning, this technique had a different effect)

* Risking an authoritative description of church architecture, which might have felt patronizing, and softening it by showing (apparent) source-material for the propositions argued for

* Not holding back from continuing the imagery from the second, dance-movement-related film, into the beginning of the third, when those who seemed to have been contemporary eye-witnesses to the fire from the exterior were saying what they had seen

* Partly in line with the lecture feel of (the opening of) the first film, using graphic design to show, in three dimensions, the feature being described, and integrating it with the appearance of text, and using coloured key-words

* A sure touch in matching the visuals to the audio, particularly in the central film, and in the transition to it, with the first suggestion that, whereas what has gone before has not been untruthful, it has shown material whose tone and style are being subverted

* Moving into the second film, Price blurs what has been precise and clear in giving detail about parcloses and misericords**, giving us sometimes tantalizing moving fragments of dancers or singers, and no longer allowing us the luxury of clearly reading the text that she employs

* This approach, coupled with the slightly crazy message about a definite movement of the right wrist, is all part of signalling that what went before was for a purpose, and that purpose is no longer served by the adjuncts of the lecture theatre (albeit at the behest of a lecturer disinclined to dwell too long on some feature or explanation)

* In the third film, after the initial eye-witness comments, it promptly moved to another level, with on-screen lettering to label the event, and shots of fire-fighters standing down their equipment (including a paced shot of a fireman winding up a compressed fire-hose)

* The stereoscopic device returned to pair slightly non-synchronized clips of flames, with the effect that the comparison between the right-hand (advanced) and left-hand (normal) images showed the change in the effect of the combustion over time, and hence intensified one’s appreciation of the destructiveness of the process of burning


Afterwards, seeing the video- and sound-editing software, on an Apple platform, that Price runs***, I found it evident that she manipulates her material with a skill that makes it look like ease.

The first film in the present work (from 2011 ?) appears to be one on which Price has since built. As the mini-feature also revealed, she says it can take her one or two years of continuing to work even on a video that she has exhibited (she tended to refer to works as ‘videos’) before she considers it finished, so I imagine it likely, if I am right, that the film Choir took a yet different one again when it was envisaged within a larger whole.

At some point, the submerged rhyme choir / fire that underlies the triptych must have occurred to Price, although it need by no means have been the first thing that, for her, linked the Woolworths event and the earlier film. That rhyme catches one up, because, if one knows that the work’s full title is The Woolworths Choir of 1979, the expectation is that a choir of real singers fits in somewhere, and so it catches one up****.

Whatever Price’s starting-point for transmuting CHOIR to be the first of three parts, it was clearly, at heart, the sense of confinement of the furniture store at Woolworths, a rectangular enclosure with similarities to the ecclesiastical space that has become the choir of a church or cathedral, which was the place where the fire started. No greater suggestion of similarity than that is made, save by the title, and Price eschews any comparison between the living physical fire that we see, as already described, in the clips that she has used.

This is Price’s greatest strength as an artist, save only to the skill with which she edits and manipulates her material resources, seen and heard : that she knows when too little is enough so that the work, speaking in its own terms, does so with her voice and stamp of authority.


Questions on Epiphany II via a comment



End-notes

* I detected influences that may have been assimilated, ranging from Beckettt’s radio plays with a score, such as Words and Music, to his work for t.v., Quad Parts I and II, to the films of John Smith.

** Price did not deviate into giving too much detail here (just as she could have done, if she had wanted to explain the term rood-screen).

*** In the mini-feature, which each of the nominees had.

**** Not, one imagines, gruesomely by the victims’ screams, though we learn that cups were being thrown down into the street (perhaps to draw attention to a plight that was being thought ignored).


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