Or look at Michel Curran’s 1998 video Footnote where a man with a horn on
his head runs repeatedly into the camera in a rhythmic act of abandonment.
He is at once fairytale and real: a unicorn and a ridiculous man with a horn
on his head. The ritual of his action is absurd and meaningful as Curran’s
film plays with attempts to make a new reality come true through belief and
action. As the horned man hits the camera for the last time he fails to
break though the third wall of the screen and the fantasy collapses as
nothing changes.
The acting out of ritual is played for very different effect in Breda
Beban’s 2003 film Walk of Three Chairs where Beban repeats a ritual she
recalls seeing her grandfather perform. Beban’s contemporary performance
creates a new dynamic as she attempts to sing ‘Who Doesn't Know How to
Suffer Doesn't Know How to Love’ as she travels downstream, making something
new of tradition with her song. In a neat symmetry she imbues the new ritual
she makes with meaning by locating it in a place of significance (the
supposed site of the border between the Balkans and Europe). The resulting
film of the performance is just part of the ritualised call to the universe.
The film becomes part of the performance: at once a record of an incantation
and the incantation itself.
