Short Sighted
Film and Video in Venice
Words: Holly Willis
While the fashionable response to this year's Venice Biennale has been to bemoan its lack of focus, there's plenty to please those looking for moving images, as long as you have the energy to find them. Some highlights include:
In the Italian Pavilion, Tacita Dean's rich, meditative film portrait of Italian artist Mario Merz allows the gentle fading light and lush, organic textures surrounding him to point to his mortality. Shot on 16mm, the eight-minute piece is also actually shown with a real movie projector!
In the Israeli Pavilion Michal Rovner continues to explore the movement of groups of people; in her best installation, all four walls of a room bristle with the movement of tiny people in rows marching inexorably from one wall to the next. The images initially look like barbed wire, and once you realize that the black figures are people, the full realization of human futility descends heavily.
The Nordic Pavilion features three video projections by Finland's Liisa Lounila, who shoots with a handmade 360-degree pinhole camera and then transfers the still images to video, creating amazingly beautiful stuttering shots of people caught mid-action.
Jonas Dahlberg's "Untitled / Vertical Sliding," in the Italian Pavilion, is a large projection piece in which the strangely empty hallways of an uncanny building slide upward, showing floor after floor, creating a sense of unending space as well as a strange curiosity about each slightly surreal set of hallways and closed doors.
Perhaps one of the most beautiful pieces, however, was a portrait by Andy Warhol of Marcel Duchamp from Warhol's screen test series. Improperly framed on a wide-screen monitor, the black-and-white film nevertheless captures the tenuous evanescence of life in the play of textures, grain and emotion on Duchamp's wise and playful face. What more could you ask for?
