Recently Elwes has been working on a series called
War Stories, which are based on the testament of WW2 veterans.
In
1997 Elwes began this series with The Liaison Officer, a 45-minute film
that was inspired by her father's obituary, which described a man that she
hardly recognised. The work is structured in three sections. 'Part One:
Exposition' opens with a long one-take shot of the artist's hands,
rummaging through the objects that belonged to her father: a watch,
hairbrush, cigarette lighter, golf tees, war medals and eyeglasses. The
artist speaks in French, interspersed with English, in conversation with
someone while she examines her father's life as a decorated career
soldier.
In 'Part Two: Training in Scotland' Elwes interviews Paul Robineau, a
former French SAS colleague of her father, who describes their training in
Scotland during the second world war. This section is shot in a mirror,
which grows steamy because Robineau is shaving as he speaks. The viewer
sees the artist moving in and out of the shot while she converses with him
in French. Here subtitles are introduced and play an important role:
instead of directly translating their conversation, they relate Elwes'
personal response to the conversation. The artist subverts the notion of
the subtitle, which she writes "are often inaccurate and biased to the
point of censorship."
'Part Three: Operation Lost A Reconstruction' takes place in France,
where Elwes and others reconstruct her father's dangerous SAS mission.
Elwes again uses subtitles and adds clips of found footage in sepia
tones.The sense of chasing fictions with fictions heightens the artist's
frustration in recovering only the bare bones of her father's tale. Elwes'
quest for answers is not fulfilled as the witnesses' memories are
resistant to scrutiny; hence, the story is underscored by the artist's own
need to recover a part of her lost parent.
For the artist the video is an investigation of identity within a blood
relationship, in this case father and daughter. It is also a vehicle for
cross identification between the female author and the masculine subject.
An intensely autobiographical piece, The Liaison Officer relates to
earlier work including Sleep and With Child. While these videos
interrogated her feelings around pregnancy and motherhood, The Liaison
Officer examines her role as daughter. For Elwes, an artist steeped in
feminist enquiry, the changing roles of mother, wife and daughter are
rooted in her work. This examination of the personal, which is
inextricably linked to the political, is an ongoing concern in her work.
The second work in the War Stories series, The Boy Scout Soldier, tells
the story of Roger Hourdin, a parachutist. Like The Liaison Officer, it
questions the notions of documentary and investigates masculine themes.
Elwes is planning to conclude the trilogy with Scars, a video that will
feature Paul Robineau, who appears in Part Two of The Liaison Officer.
Here, Robineau retraces the map of his military past through the scars on
his body, each with a violent story to tell.
