Barbara Sternberg
by Mike Zyrd
Stan
Brakhage has called the main formal trope of Transitions "eidetic-beseeming
superimpositions." Expanded upon, this phrase summarizes some of the
complexities of Barbara Sternberg's film oeuvre. Multi-layered sound and image
tracks, through superimposition and split-screen optical printing, and a number
of mixed sound sources, create spatial juxtapositions and a temporal
simultaneity of experience for the viewer. We are removed from the simple
linearity of clock time and set in the far more complex and enigmatic realm of
experience that founds the life of the imagination.
The
complex texture of Sternberg's films is nevertheless consistently characterized
by a unity and economy that avoids the episodic and often technique-obsessed
tendencies of weaker "experimental" films attempting to portray a
"personal vision." It is this same unity and economy that accounts
for the "eidetic" state evoked in the viewer by her films. For if the
eidetic refers to that region of visual memory so accurate and detailed that it
manifests itself as a kind of intense, singular epiphany, then we understand
how Sternberg's images are so quietly insistent.
It
is, however, another quality of the unity of Sternberg's films which forces Brakhage to qualify them as "eidetic-beseeming."
The sense of time at work in her films is extremely fluid, at once rhythmic and
outside the flow of time. It is as if the experience of these images and sounds
pulls us out of the everyday into a different stream of consciousness. This
fluidity works against the singular immediacy of the eidetic; one remembers
watching a Sternberg film almost as if it were a loop. In an artist's
statement, Sternberg names her areas of concern as 'time, motion, repetition,
perception of reality, memory." Narrative, with its linear movement and
mechanisms of build-up and climax, is undercut in favour
of a structure of accumulation (playing on our memory of the film's images as
they unwind before us during projection) and restrained closure (both Transitions and Opus 40 end with the images that begin them). We can perhaps best
approach her films by understanding them as sites and occasions for
contemplation, often shot through with anxiety, but laced with moments of
tenuous beauty.
Transitions (1982) is the most obviously
dream-like of Sternberg's films. It centres, as its
lone visual text tells us, on the "purgatory" between sleeping and
waking, that intersection of the conscious and the unconscious most vivid for
the insomniac. Superimposition is indeed the main device, allowing for a
delicate but dense layering (sometimes up to four superimpositions at once)
over the recurring image of a woman, dressed in white, laying
down, and sitting up on a bed. This stream of the film is looped, and manipulated,
sometimes superimposed over itself, with what could be called a nervous
rhythm-in subtle contrast to the gentler motion of accompanying shots like a
track past a snowscape, train tracks, waves at sea.
Some images are disturbing, like the sudden intercuts
to a swarm of bees-the most obviously surreal image of the film.
This
urge to mimic the suspended time of insomnia is underscored by the sound track.
It begins with the sound of wind, growing progressively louder, then fading to silence, followed in turn by a growing host
of women's whispering voices. These voices, like a number of different ripples
on a pool, in turn amplify and cancel each other out; their quality as sound is
as important as the weight that the meaning of the words
carry. We catch snippets of sentences, some cast as a refrain
("I've got to go to bed"; "change, change'"), some shooting
through with resonant clarity ("When I dream there are no gaps").
These musings are alternately quotidien and
philosophical, here at times too literal ("Time-is it reality or in the
mind?") but fascinating for the conceit that a mediation on time can
inspire a loss of our ability to order and control our experience of time.
Opus 40 (1979) is, as Sternberg
says, "about repetition" or, as a quotation in the film from Gertrude
Stein's The Making of Americans
suggests, it is about "such a way of seeing, feeling, hearing,
repeating." In some ways a more straightforward film than Transitions, it is at the same time more
systematic and mesmerizing. The film was shot on Super-8 stock at the
Enterprise Foundry in
Here
the main device is matte optical printing which divides the screen into two
horizontal layers. Both layers depict the same worker repeating the same actions,
but obviously shot at different camera distances; this repetition is not a
loop-a reprinted section of film-but a document of a "real" loop, a
function of the cycle of real labour. Sternberg's own
work in the construction of her film parallels the labour
of the foundry. Repetition in Opus 40
is not a mechanical function of the film apparatus (photographic reproduction,
the strict metric course of film projection at twenty-four frames per second);
rather, it is subject to the varied and ineffable rhythms of human work in
Sternberg's optical printing and editing. What becomes interesting is how much
surprise and refinement of vision arises out of a meditation on the regularity
and predictability of repetition.
Sternberg
further plays off the central device of the split screen by introducing
variations like a second optical printing (twice as hazy, and in fast motion)
and the introduction of filters to vary colour. This
catalogue of image variations is complemented by a similarly complex sound
track. Sound, long a stumbling block for experimental filmmakers, too often
seems tacked onto the image track to fill the "uncomfortable"
silence. Sternberg, however, always sets the image track before working on
sound. Both tracks have an integrity of their own and
the intersections between the image and sound tracks in the final film are more
organically complementary or contrapuntal. Opus
40 weaves the wild sound of
the factory (industrial noise, interviews with workers-both mixed with a strong
sense of rhythm and evocative of the space of the images) with a woman's voice
reading Gertrude Stein. A workman's words, stated with a familiar maritime lilt
("You start with a pattern and that's what you get out of it") echoes
Stein ("All the meaning there is in repeating. ..a
whole history of each one"). Once more, time is composed of both
duration-the pattern, the process of any history-and the moment-an impacted
simultaneity of experience where every process seems condensed into the
instant. Just as every product of the factory contains the history of its
making, so this film, as we watch it, reveals the distillation of its levels of
time.
Sternberg's
latest film, Tending toward the
Horizontal (1988) continues her exploration of time in an even more
enigmatic and finally disquieting way. Part of the tension comes from the
increased separation of sound and image tracks; Sternberg has divided the labour of the film between herself and French-Canadian poet
France Daigle, who reads, in cyclical series, excerpts from three stories, and
letters addressed to Sternberg. The sound track is assertive in its spareness, consisting solely of alternating sections of
reading
and
silence; the cool, descriptive quality of Daigle's stories suits the mood of
alienation, which pervades the film.
Daigle's
three stories have as their central figures a seabird, a male figure ("man
or boy''), and a woman. The bird searches for land but is confident in its
instinct; the male figure is placed on a hill or mountain, surrounded, in the
fiction, by descriptions of the geography of the Old Testament-he seems
alienated from the landscape by the chronicle of its human history; the woman
sits in a library reading, obsessively, "words that are not her
own"-she is alienated from language. Each story describes a state of
being; none has a narrative progression or resolution. Their enigma instead
sketches a set of antinomies: between humanity and nature, between the intimacy
of the personal and the inertia of the social and historical.
The
resonance of Sternberg's images in Tending
toward the Horizontal further explores these conflicts. The bulk of the
film consists of shots of buildings: catalogue entries of a city's domestic and
business architecture arranged by street. The steady, long- to medium-shot
objectivity of these shots contrasts with a group of intercut
sections that feature extreme close-ups, often accompanied by erratic camera
movement, filters, light flares, optical printing, and superimpositions. Though
often more recognizable as patterns of light and colour,
we occasionally glimpse an arm, a couple embracing, leaves, water. The
introduction of these sections of almost chaotic intensity literalizes the
conflict of social institutional structures and the intimacy of the personal,
always tightly linked to vision In Sternberg's films.
Sternberg
is not, however, setting up a simple dichotomy between humanity and nature. We
differentiate the graceful although sometimes sinister tracking shots of
domestic architecture-row houses, bungalows, and low-rises-from the static,
angular shots of office buildings that often appear in either a state of
construction or demolition. Another beautifully composed shot shows the outline
of a demolished house now traced in discoloured brick
against a tall square office building. Like the trace left by light in a
photograph, the record of that domestic enclosure is testimony to a moment in
the past, and to its loss, its absence in the present. Tending toward the Horizontal, through the elaboration of its
central metaphor of urban architecture, gently but urgently evokes the
encroachment of the hard, linear structures of mechanized society on the
personal.
Fumiko Kiyooka's A Place with Many Rooms (1987) continues the tradition within the
film avant-garde of an exploration of the "geography of the body" and
makes the inevitably political decision to include the male body in that
exploration. Kiyooka films a man and a woman in the
desert, the camera largely still in its contemplation of their sleeping bodies.
These tableaux are interrupted by dream-like sequences of the woman performing
a dance, the man running, the two walking in extreme long-shot in the valley
floor. The integration of the human body into the landscape is made striking by
Kiyooka's breathtaking use of muted but highly
textured colour; the effect is to circumvent the
familiar power relations coded into most social representations of the body
(almost always female) to release a freer sense of the erotic and aesthetic
qualities of the human body, both male and female.
Mike
Zryd
(catalogue essay for "Recent Work From The Canadian Avant-Garde", edited by Catherine Jonasson
and Jim Shedden, Art Gallery of Ontario 1988)