Really there was never really anything happening although everybody knew everything was happening
GERTRUDE SIGN
It's one of the most unforgettable scenes in Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1965) - a young woman sits in a bar sipping her drink, observing the crowded room and occasionally glancing over at a clock on the wall. Lying at her feet in a handbag is a bomb set to detonate in a few minutes time. The tension is heightened by an Enrico Morricone score but in terms of action, nothing is happening. It is only later in another scene, that we actually see the explosion, yet it is that earlier moment of waiting which carries the burden of the act.
Rosalind Nashashibi thought at one point of intercutting this scene into the film that eventually became Sophie (1999), a study of a young woman working in an office, answering the phone, opening her mail. Both her consideration of Pontecorvo's scene and the decision not to include it reveal a great deal about the development of Nashashibi's work. The scene offered a definite tension and the sense of anticipation was heightened enormously for the audience. Without it, Nashashibi's film retains a certain tension but the viewer's expectation is much less focused. Instead of the drama promised by the bar scene, the emphasis falls on the quality of the image, the movements of the young woman and our attempts to read her expression. Even as we detect a vague urgency in her actions, the physical texture of the film suggests the events are already in the past.
The cutting of the Pontecorvo scene established Nashashibi's own vision - less dramatic and more rooted in the everyday event rather than the adrenalin rush of a war. It marked an acknowledgment that the small, overlooked acts of daily life are just as connected to the larger existential questions, perhaps even more so, as they lack the reassurance and coherence we can find in the framework of an armed struggle.
Recognising the value of this approach, Nashashibi distilled many of these elements the following year in The States of Things (2000). Again filmed in black and white, the work presents us with scenes from a Salvation Army jumble sale. The camera pans across a room of people rummaging through piles of clothes on tables while sales workers carry and sort the stock. Floating over the scratched surface of the film is the voice of Um Kulthoum, a legendary Egyptian diva, singing a love song recorded in the 1920s - In Hali hi Hawaha Agab. The haunting quality of this performance and its middle eastern orchestration lift the images out of their specific context and defamiliarise them. Under the influence of the music the scenes seem as likely to have been filmed in Eastern Europe or in an Arab souk as in Glasgow. Likewise, attempting to date the film becomes impossible. The displacement we experience is partly because of the juxtaposition of such alien elements and partly an effect of Um Kulthoum's performance. Habitually she would attempt to bring her audience to a state of 'tarab', a condition of musical ecstasy. In The Music of the Arabs, Habib Hassan Touma pinpoints the essence of her technique:
The intensity of tarab depends primarily on the voice and performance style of the singer as exemplified by Um Kulthoum. Her performances often only approximately followed the fixed rhythmic-temporal organisation of the melody. She would strip some melodic passages of their strict rhythmic form in order to repeat, vary, and paraphrase individual sections in an improvisatory way or transform the musical material more dramatically within the framework of traditional modal principles. Her presentation thus hovered between that which she performed and that which she created herself. The musical contrast between the familiar and fixed on the one side and the new, freely structured though related on the other creates, in general, a tension whose up and down evokes tarab in the listener. The emphasis of this contrast represents the most striking stylistic element of Um Kulthoum's artistry.
To most western ears this sophisticated performance represents a challenge to the traditional ways of listening. The improvisatory feel of the music and the unusual melodic shifts seem formless and unstructured. The immediate gaps in our understanding that this reveals has a profound effect on our perception of images that under other circumstances may not appear so unfamiliar. Much of this effect is intuitive and spontaneous, springing from the initial confusion of experiencing the film. As we become more accustomed to Um Kulthoum's song, however, a different set of concerns becomes apparent. The States of Things investigates the cultural conditioning that often predetermines our interpretation of images.
Importantly, too, within the larger body of Nashashibi's work, the film explores the relationship between music or sound and an accompanying image. It has long been recognised that there is a seductive quality to a soundtrack which animates scenes through the manipulative use of music. Too often in Hollywood or in music video this knowledge has been used to hack a shortcut to the audience's emotions, bypassing the development of a genuine complex response. Some film-makers though, such as jean-Luc Godard or David Lynch, have chosen to experiment with the dynamics of sound, image and choreography, discovering a broader and more fertile range of dislocations and displacements. In Open Day (2001), Rosalind Nashashibi aligns herself with this alternative tradition as she sets a series of London scenes to musical scores that work at oblique angles to the image on the screen. Reaffirming her commitment to the understated and the everyday, images of a swaying, rattling underground carriage lead us into an instrumental version of Chris lsaak's Wicked Game which soars over pictures of relaxed visitors to the Festival Hall. The plaintive guitar echoes across this backdrop of urbane and seemingly happy people and we become unsure whether the mournful Isaak is overdramatising life or whether those people are masterfully disguising their personal tragedies. Likewise in the closing sequence a group of yoga practitioners stretch and settle into spiritual poses while Bruce Springsteen cries 'deliver me from nowhere'. The raw desolation of the music is compelling while the images on the screen argue that there are ways to help ourselves and that the struggle to find a balance is usually a more banal enterprise.
On another level, Open Day works as a series of episodes of found choreography. The yoga practitioners moving in harmony at the end of the film are the culmination of a sequence of studies of human movement in the city. From the beginning we see pedestrians negotiating walkways, trains swaying through London, and indoor climbers splayed on walls to the sounds of La Bohème. As viewers, our natural instinct is to marry the sound to the image where we can and in Open Day this reveals to us the subtle choreography at play in everyday life, even in the evolving patterns of commuters crossing a street.
This interest in choreography permeates many of Nashashibi's films. In an earlier work - Manners (1999) - she sits at a table opposite a young man. Between them are ranged a diverse series of objects - a coconut, a reading lamp, a knife, a hammer, a ball of paper, a glass and a loaf of bread. As one person picks up an object, their counterpart responds using another of the items. In the rapid exchange of gestures a choreography of manners is revealed and we find ourselves watching a conversation conducted simply through physical actions and reactions. In Three, produced in the same year, Nashashibi takes this exploration further in a filmed tableau where the looks and glances between three characters imply emotional undercurrents and unspoken alliances.
What is particularly striking in both of these earlier films is the primacy of physical movement and gesture over language. Words are stripped away to reveal a more direct communication through body language and the interaction of human, objects and the surrounding environment. The absence of language, or its reduction to background noise in Nashashibi's works, creates a distance from the subjects of her films that allows us to scrutinise and study them in an almost scientific way. This is nowhere more apparent than in the recent works Midwest (2002), Midwest:Field (2002) and Dahiet Al Bareed (District of the Post Office) (2002) where Nashashibi's previous concerns are readdressed through observations of local neighbourhoods. These three films clearly develop the style that was evolving in The States of Things and Open Day but there is now a significant sense of relaxation in the way in which her subjects are observed. In one way, the films are a more sophisticated development of the ideas in the previous works. The soundtrack has become less obvious though it remains just as subversive, while the shots of local people and places seem to linger, allowing them more time to reveal their condition to the viewer. A growing awareness of perspective signals the real advance in these films, however, and Nashashibi demonstrates a willingness to consider this issue in all its complexity.
It may at first seem surprising that one of the paintings she cites as an inspiration for her work is Paolo Ucello's The Hunt in the Forest (1465) but it is an image often referred to as a landmark in the development of perspective in western art. In the picture, courtly huntsmen converge on a deer in a landscape dominated by the geometry of tree trunk verticals and spears pointing to the painting's vanishing point. Art historians tend to focus on the mathematics of the work and its significance in the development of the picture plane, elevating Ucello as one of the founders of a rational concept of vision. The artist, though, has constructed a more ambivalent and resonant image that does not conform so easily to these theories. The uncanny regularity of the trees constantly disorientates the viewer while the much lauded vanishing point is really a dark horizon deep in the forest, suggesting an infinity that is not simply mathematical. Perspective in The Hunt in the Forest is as much about the artist's conception of the scene as it is about geometry.
The tensions between these various forms of perspective are matched by the painting's stylistic contradictions, presenting us with a savage hunt disguised as a courtly entertainment.
The poet Derek Mahon encapsulates this in his commentary on the picture in his poem The Hunt by Night:
But neolithic bush became
The midnight woods
Of nursery walls,
The ancient fears mutated
To play, horses to rocking-horses
Tamed and framed to courtly uses,
...As if our hunt by night,
So very tense,
So long pursued,
In what dark cave begun
And not yet done, were not the great
Adventure we suppose but some elaborate
Spectacle put on for fun
And not for food.
Mahon uncovers the savagery and primal urge that drives the hunt and which lurks in the painting under the artist's attention to local detail. While it may seem an unlikely accompaniment to Rosalind Nashashibi's work, there are many points of contact, not least in the focus on the smaller detail rather than the dramatic central point but also in the awareness that basic animal and human needs persist under the layers of civilised ritual. For Mahon, it is Ucello's perspective on violence and the portrayal of his subjects that is the key to any interpretation of the work, Likewise in another painting that has preoccupied Nashashibi - Edouard Manet's The Execution of Emperor Maximilion (1867-68) - it is the artist's distance from his subject that is compelling. Basing the picture on Goya's characteristically more direct and emotive painting Executions of 3 May (1815), Manet introduces a greater distance from the act of carnage, even to the point of including a bored gallery of onlookers. As a consequence, the painting raises interesting questions about the artist's moral and emotional distance from his subject matter.
These issues clearly inform the films made by Rosalind Nashashibi in Nebraska and East Jerusalem. So many of the scenes in Midwest dwell on people at a loose end, waiting on street corners or passing time in cafes. What is remarkable as we watch these people is how little attention they pay to the artist filming them. There are occasional glances - mostly bored curiosity or territorial defensiveness - but on the whole the artist seems invisible. This skill allows Nashashibi to capture a real sense of time spent outside of the social norms of work and the work ethic. Oddly, it also allows us to reflect on the artist's ability to blend into this environment, becoming as unassuming and aimless as her subjects even as she is working.
The artist's perspective in Midwest is revealed in the choice of subject matter and the way in which it is framed. Movement remains important - the stance of someone leaning against a wall or the gait of someone making their way down a street. Quietly, the film presents the various ethnic groupings that compose the larger society of Omaha, punctuating the scenes with almost motionless studies of parked cars, abandoned buildings or silent streets. It is a city of loiterers and as a film it creates an imaginative space that encourages us to open up to its languid rhythm.
But just as Ucello's painting conceals darker secrets, so too there are uneasy moments in Midwest and in its companion piece, Midwest:Field. Midwest sometimes records people attempting to look important and purposeful as if in denial of their aimless circumstances, while the dereliction of the landscape and the clusters of loitering men occasionally imply the violence that these conditions nurture. In Midwest:Field the leisurely obsession of model airplaning also surfs on a wave of friendly competitiveness and the complex internal dynamics of the men's relationships.
This tension between the slack rhythms of the films and the underlying conflicts becomes even more focused in Nashashibi's next work Dahiet Al Bareed (The District of the Post Office) (2002). Filmed just outside Jerusalem in an area around a military checkpoint, clear areas of confrontation test the issue of perspective, but there is also an additional personal factor as it was the artist's grandfather, Saeb Nashashibi, who designed and developed the buildings in the district in 1956. Initially drawn, like any film-maker, to recording the tanks and soldiers in the area, Nashashibi soon shied away from such an explicit portrayal. Instead, she draws on the insights of Sophie and the Nebraskan films, depicting the low level dramas of life in the no-man's land around the checkpoint - football, a call to prayer or a haircut in the 'Sweet Love Saloon for Men'. This decision takes the film beyond a specific political point to confront the more metaphysical questions of time passing and passing the time.
Space and time remain central to Nashashibi's most recent work too. In Humaniora (2003), she documents the comings and goings around various hospitals while titling the piece after a chapter in The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann. The hospitals she has chosen to depict range from the older Victorian buildings to the more modernist post-war clinics and observing these structures, the changes in society's approach to medical care become apparent. There is a different ethos in the architecture of the earlier buildings, an expression of convalescence rather than the machine-like repair of the body. They embody an attraction to the limitless sense of time that convalescence evokes (perhaps a major factor in the cure...).
Describing the sanatorium in his novel Thomas Mann notes that 'Everything there, including the conception of time, is thought of on a luxurious scale' and something of this filters into Humaniora. The tonic and refreshing experience of time beyond the work ethic and the ticking of the clock are not only observed in the film but embodied in the pace and editing of the piece. In The Magic Mountain, the main character Hans Castorp argues that art and science are one and the same', sharing the same fundamental interest, the interest in humanity'. Certainly Humaniora, like so many of Nashashibi's works, demonstrates this interest and, in its observation of the medical landscape, the film offers its own affirmation of the restorative power of the imaginative time and space it conjures up for us.
Notes
Gertrude Stein, Ida:A Novel, Vintage, 1972, first published 1941.
Habib Hassan Touma, The Music of the Arabs, Portland: Amadeus Press, 1996.
Derek Mahon, The Hunt By Night, in The Hunt by Night, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1982.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Vintage Classics, 1999, first published 1924.
Jo Colston, 'Descending the Magic Mountain: how early clinical trials transformed the treatment of tuberculosis', 1998. http://www.nimr.mrc.ac.uk/MillHillEssays/1998/clintrial.htm
