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The most widely held critical definition
of film has been grounded in the idea that this photographic medium records
reality on celluloid. This definition derives from the way still photography
was first understood after its invention in the nineteenth century: it appeared
to achieve the long-sought goal of reproducing the real world. As a result,
photography –and, later, film– seemed to release the traditional
arts of painting and sculpture from the burden of mimesis.
Leandro Katz, in his film installation The Judas Window, asks if the photographic
process, whether still or motion picture, is truly mimetic. By placing film
in unexpected relationships with other media and materials, he mixes different, often
contradictory, modes of discourse. Thus his film –presenting, for
example, a shot of the moon undercut with enigmatic phrases such as “A
Cinematographic Rain” and “The Urge to Save” –is
viewed within an environment of sculptural objects, including a large parasol
covered with colored Xeroxed pages from four classic adventure stories,
among them Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and a multi-sided
black canvas construction, windowless but illuminated from within, modeled
on the famous Black Maria studio, in which Thomas Edison produced his first
films, in the late nineteenth century. Other elements in the installation
include a wall projection of a detail from an intricate Mayan carving of
a foot which illuminates an actual footprint in a sandbox on the floor;
a display case holding a collection of twenty-six shells belonging to a
mysterious species of tree snails found in the Florida Everglades, each
signifying one letter of the alphabet and together composing a linguistic
code; and several cages with live crickets. These diverse elements require
different –perhaps mutually exclusive– modes of comprehension,
and demonstrate how problematic mimesis can be. The installation thus becomes
a complex text about epistemology, film, and the history of cultural forms
–an archeological site at which to unearth the hidden premises of
understanding and perception.
Two precedents, one a work of literature, the other the tradition of film
installation as an art form, inform Leandro Katz's project. The literary
text is Impressions d'Afrique (1910),
by the French author and playwright Raymond Roussel. Roussel's influential
text is an extraordinary catalogue of descriptions of objects and devices,
people and events, held together by a loose plot. Its structure is based
on an elaborate system of word games and associations that establishes a
compelling narrative. So too in Katz's installation the viewer joins and
links the various elements into a network of associations that implies a
possible narrative.
As for Katz's sources within the film medium, during the 1960s and 1970s
artists began to remove film from the traditional theater setting and place
it in a gallery or another environment. They have produced films designed
to be projected into steam or onto different surfaces and within specially
constructed environments, to be viewed with live dancing or other performances,
or in conjunction with sculptural structures. All of these varied forms
and processes, as in The Judas Window, cause us to reevaluate the nature
of film: it does not present an unchanging segment of reality, viewed and
interpreted exclusively within the confines of the screen; rather, film
is a temporal, flexible, moving-image medium that can be read in different
ways, depending on its physical placement and aesthetic context.
–lohn
G. Hanhardt©1982, Curator. Whitney Museum of American Art - Film and
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