Whitechapel Gallery, London; Parasol Unit, London; Tate Britain, London

What is the difference between an art film and an art-house film? You might say it all depends on the work. But a film critic of my acquaintance insists that it has nothing to do with art forms and everything to do with audiences and what they are prepared to endure. What the gallery-goer will watch with credulous reverence, he says, is precisely what no cinema audience would ever accept.

His definition stands to some extent. Not many cinema-goers would tolerate the poor lighting, inaudible soundtracks or low production standards of the art film, leaving aside issues of narrative or plot. Not many would accept the abysmal viewing conditions: no seats, no popcorn, incessant interruptions from other viewers wandering in and out, discussing what’s going on, blocking the projector or letting in the light as they exit through the blackout curtains.

And who would submit to the outrageous demands – six hours, even six days in the case of Stan Douglas – that art films want to make on our time? To experience them in any honourable sense, you are supposed to watch all the way through, but it is a custom more honoured in the breach. I know nobody who has ever made it right through a Stan Douglas epic or stayed around long enough to catch the shower scene in Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho, twitching past at an agonising two frames per second. Has anybody (who wasn’t stoned) ever witnessed more than an hour of it?

But you might argue that the film critic was just being snide and everyone knows the difference. That if you go into a gallery and spy not one but 10 simultaneous projections, some circular, some diptych-form, some pixellated into squares that jostle against one another – as with Kutlug Ataman’s installation fff, at the Whitechapel – then it is obvious that you are in the realm of art.

Yet a curious fact about this highly intelligent Turkish artist is that he has never, to my knowledge, called his work art. This is partly modesty and partly because Ataman works with documentary footage. He interviews people, generally Turkish, sometimes prostitutes or transsexuals, sometimes, as with his tremendous multi-screen installation Kuba, a whole shanty town, about their lives and loves. His treatment of the footage is an attempt to clarify, and at the same time represent, all sorts of human contradictions.

Fff is an abbreviation of “found family footage” – home movies shot in the 50s and 60s by an RAF family near Farnborough. Ataman’s contribution has simply been to select, edit and juxtapose. The result is scored “blind” – that is to say, without the images – by the celebrated composer Michael Nyman. The bride smiles awkwardly on her father’s arm. The blond toddler takes his first steps. Hollyhocks grow tall, bathing beauties parade, the pilot shows off his new car.

At first, it seems that each reel simply represents a cliché of perpetual English summer. And this is abetted by the film, for Super 8 is not just the look of the past, it’s the medium and metaphor of memory. Each scene becomes a double souvenir, evoking family viewings as well as events. But in the gallery, they become mysteries to be studied for clues. One looks in at them from outside.

And a narrative, or at least a pattern, emerges. Children play on pirate ships, adults on cruise ships, both enacting peculiarly violent rituals. The bride’s veil blows awry, the mother pins her down; a child at her mum’s dressing table learns the same lesson at approximately four. The men are in groups, the women alone; so it goes, round and around.

Nyman’s piano music is beautiful, short melodic phrases just escaping sentiment that loop and fade as if played on some wind-up machine. Ataman’s projections circle and return, never quite amounting to a tale. You can see them all at once as a critical mass, examine each in isolation, and yet nothing quite adds up. For what is the shape of a life, this film we can never see from the outside or the very beginning?

Fff is an art film by any standard. Its content could not easily be expressed in another form without loss of nuance and it is as vital to the experience that the viewer should be able to wander about as that there should be no final reel. But artists increasingly want the best of both worlds, the high-budget feature film projected in the gallery space. Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Where Is Where? is a case in point.

Ahtila is Finland’s leading film artist. Her 2002 retrospective at Tate Modern was a revelation of enigmatic dramas that slipped bewilderingly between apparent reality and plausible apparition. You would just be thinking you knew why the marriage had failed, or the woman had died, and suddenly it or she would resurface, often on a screen behind you. Adjust, readjust: the effect was as restless as life, just as you’d never know where you were in time, except always somewhere in the middle.

That’s normal: art films generally run on loop so most audiences have no idea where they come in. But Where Is Where? is being screened on the hour. It has a large cast, including Finland’s most famous actress, multiple locations, and it lasts nearly an hour. It features a hooded figure who’s a dead ringer for Death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

If you don’t know that it turns upon two Algerian boys who kill their European playmate in revenge for the Algerian war, the film is excruciatingly hard to follow. A levitating priest, a nude woman rising out of a Finnish lake, streams of French soldiers rushing through her living room: the locations overlap. Ahtila deploys some heavy omens – gathering twilight, toy guns, the half moon, the roiled sea, though presumably Death is an in-joke. But how can one tell when the artist steers so assiduously clear of tone?

The woman turns out to be a poet trying to come to terms with these atrocities; the same might be said of Ahtila, who appears to be contemplating universal guilt. But perhaps she, too, might have done better with words. The film is so poorly performed, so meaninglessly cut between six screens, the viewer inevitably missing historic footage of the Algerian atrocities (almost a further abuse of the victims), that it wouldn’t even pass my friend’s definition of art films.

In fact, bar the multiple screens, what it reminds me of more than anything is an art-house film, and this is another persistent strain in contemporary art. At Tate Britain, you can see it in one of Laure Prouvost’s dissonant videos, collaging rapid clips with terse texts. The images mount up – snowy streets, anxious horses – as a voiceover intones unrelated sentiments. The language of film is scrambled, the texts decouple image and meaning. It could be an unintentional send-up of either: art film or Cahiers du cinéma.

Resource
Laura Cumming
Observer Sunday 11 April 2010

Kutlug Ataman Bio

Kutlu Ataman’s IMDB

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