On Ocean Without A Shore

If you can you really ought to visit Melbourne's NGV and spend some time with Bill Viola's 'Ocean Without A Shore'.

Those familiar with Viola will recognise some of the the themes, the transience of life and the intensity of the human, and the format, a triptych of video screens in a darkened room.  However the 'Ocean' is deep and moves profundly.

It's important to know that the piece was first staged in The Church of The Oratorio of San Gallo in Venice, at Bienalle, and that the format, three screens, placed here, on plinths set against the walls of a self contained room, were originally set on the altars of that medieval building.  Each screen is as tall as a man and the three are set at right angles from one another, watching from the space in front we can see all three.

On each screen, in an ongoing loop of ninety minutes, we see one figure at a time in the far distance, grey against a grainy black that slowly approach us.  As they draw nearer we start to recognise features, traits and begin to attribute speculative attributes to them, we are drawn in by their slow passage to the foreground and curious about their story, their reticence.  Almost lifesize now, we notice that the grisaille figure is separated from us by a dividing veil, a thin constant curtain of water, as the figure reaches through, brushes against the water, they also break through a wall of light, the effect is prismatic, sparkling, electric.  Once through the curtain, in part or whole, the figures, people now, appear in full colour, high definition.  Each reacts differently, some are elated, others hesitant, some overcome on contact with the world of light an colour.  Each stays a while and then, leaving nothing but an unanswered question of a story they pass back through the curtain and recede into the distance.  As this happens on one screen we realise we are at a different point in a journey on another, or that we are in the presence of two people or alone in the space again, the synchronicities and interactions make us wonder if they are designed or coincidental, if the people who look out from the screens are aware of one another or even us.

The cumulative effect is moving and, at once manages to be both hypnotic and stimulating.  It is an intensely humane experience that manages to be both direct and subtle.

Viola cites a number of sources of inspiration for the work, the title coming from the Andalusian Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi.  He also explains that the people represent ghosts or spirits with the curtain of light and water the threshold between this world and another.  If this is one explanation the power of the work rests in the way it can support so many interpretations.  Perhaps it's fitting that a work so humane and layered should be inspired by one living in Andalucia's convivencia, when Christian, Jew and Muslim lived in more or less harmonic accord to create some of the most remarkable and humane art and literature the world has seen.

Personally I felt I was experiencing a meditation on the individual and his contact with the world around him, between the conscious and subconscious, between the personal and the other.  The effect of each figure breaking through the wall is for them appear to step through the plane of the picture and into our space, their presence is almost physical.  Once through the plane each person is framed from mid though upwards, only a little higher than us, as a result we might be looking through a portal into another room, the other world left behind.  Sometimes two people are 'on our side' and we might read a flicker of recognition, a need to communicate, or perhaps just our own need to place a narrative on these souls as we watch them in their moment in the sun.  And that might be the core of the power of the piece, Viola gives us the raw sodden vulnerability of normal looking people but not their story, we reach out to them and realise that to be human is to need to share out stories.

The occasional Viola piece suffers from an actorly earnestness on the part of the participants, that's happily absent here, the performances, such as there are, are all restrained the emotion crackles in between their presence and our own, it doesn't need to be telegraphed.  Instead there is an aching need for contact, a realisation that although now in our space we are still, essentially, alone unless we reach out.

This might be the best of Viola's work for many years, 'Five Angels For The Millennium" was literally sublime but one suspected it relied on scale for much of its affect, "The Passions" was marred by the odd piece of hammy gurning whilst "The Tristan Project" veered a little toward the pop video fireworks.  In "Ocean Without A Shore" Viola shows his mastery of space, form and content and creates something pregnant with meaning and emotion.  

Sitting in the room I was reminded of both the transcendent magnetism of some of Rothko and the bare naked humanism of Rembrandts portraits, through different means Viola reminds us that there is more, and that we find it as we cross the gap between ourselves and other people.

On Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona...

In 'Stardust Memories' a fan tells Woody Allen's character he loves his films "particularly the early funny ones".  I wonder if one day we'll be talking about the 'older weirder ones'.

After 'Matchpoint' I was expecting another cynical exercise in cloth eared dialogue, European tourism agency chic and Scarlett Johanssen pouting and I wasn't entirely disappointed.

The response to 'Matchpoint' was astounding, a film without chararcters, with unintentionally comical dialogue and a creakingly contrived plot was hailed a 'return to form'.  The, paying, cinemagoers I watched it with guffawed in places where I'm sure Woody hadn't meant us to...  some even stayed until the end and caught the trite and fashionably cynical ending.

This new film at least throws off that misanthropy but manages to be quite cringeingly bad in its own variety of ways.  The new dilemma for Woody Allen seems to be a desire to make light, entertaining movies that still retain some of the intellectual and cultural weight he could bring to the world of the seventies.  What this delivers us is middlebrow travelogues where the only laughs come from the predictable plotting.

As evidence I give you the third person narrative voiceover.  Nothing is more characterisitic of the literary form, and this of Allen's high minded view of his work, but then neither is anything more redolent of a film who's action or characters are failing to tell us what they ought.  The first few minutes of 'Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona' is genuinely strange.  We are introduced to Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johanssen) two American tourists in Barcelona for a month prior to the former's wedding.  What's extraordinary is a narrative voice over that tells us exactly what's happening on screen and what we ought to think of the characters in such a way that we sit expecting to either meet the narrator, have our expectations turned on their heads or perhaps watch an ironic counterpoint to the narrative develop.  Of course nothing of the sort happens.  The narrative's there to point out all the things a clunky script and one-dimensional characters can't.  

Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz (of whom you'll never hear a bad word in this blog) once acted together in the Spanish comedy 'Jamon, Jamon' and thankfully that's what they bring to 'Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona'.  As the seducer of the two Americans and his ex-wife the couple are pantomime Latin artists ("He's a painter.  remember?  He had that feiry relationship with that beautiful woman who was nuts?") and, more than once, you wonder if they're struggling to keep straight faces amidst the histrionics.

Whilst Vicky is placed at the moral centre of the film, ostensibly the plot is about her wrestling with a passion for Juan Antonio (Bardem) in the face of impending marriage, the film undermines itself through cliche.  The choices Vicky is asked to make seem slight and meaningless once we meet her crass and insensitive and crashingly corporate (which is innately bad in Allen's lexicon) husband to be.  Similarly Cristina's feckless faux-hemian slips into an affair and then a lesbian tryst and out again with such vagueness that we can't really be bothered to care.

Allen once made films that were funny as they negotiated a neurotic, liberated, complex culture he understood and was a part of.  What's clear here is that he really doesn't know who or where these characters are.  In lieu of insight he gives us cliches, he gives us portentous dialogue instead of subtext and the picturesque instead of the observational.  Now we have cliches and stereotypes that Hallmark movies might be ashamed of wrapped up in the trappings of middlebrow lifestyle porn, surely the old man's infatuation with Scarlett in the hills of Tuscany can't be too far off.

'Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona' is at heart a fantasy.  On one level a fantasy of love in glamorous upper-middle class bohemia, on another of Woody Allen still being able to make relevant and penetrating films.  It fails as both.