James Benning - RUHR

 

Still from RUHR, James Benning 2010


I saw RUHR by James Benning on Saturday as part of the London Film Festival.

Comprising seven fixed frame composition that range in length from seven minutes to one hour, the film is primarily an exercise (as Benning himself proclaims) in looking and listening. The footage is all shot in the heavily industrialized region of Ruhr in Germany; however, these images could be of anywhere in the world, as the intention here is not really about place, but about the viewers relationship to observing place.

Watching the film, which at times can be challenging, (as you are watching the same scene/object/setting for up to one hour with very little change taking place) is what I can only describe as what it might be like to watch the world with your eyes closed. To explain what I mean by this it is first necessary to consider the way the philosopher Henri Bergson chose to talk not of things or appearances, but rather to speak everything in the world as ‘images’ and how images can be both matter and perceptions at the same time (see Bergson: Matter and Memory). Therefore, as I watched RUHR the line from the first page of Matter and Memory came to mind, ‘Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are open to them, unperceived when they are closed.’ What I experienced in RHUR felt like what it might be like to see what happens in the world when my eyes are closed, in other words to perceive (to see) without perception. For Bergson perception serves action; that is, unable to take in all sensory information in the world, perception filters images that make up the external world; meaning that the images that do not concern our needs and actions pass right by us. What I see or perceive in the images on the screen in RHUR is that which is present, but without potentiality for action - in other words that which perception normally filters out.

A different way of thinking about the seven fixed framed composition that make up RUHR is to consider them as 'animated photographs'. Animated photography was the name frequently given to very early films in the period 1895 - 1906. These films normally lasted from anything from 20 seconds to 3 minutes and were fixed frame (the camera did not move) and the action, which was usually of a simple city scene, unfolded gradually in front of the camera. The movement that was witnessed by those early audiences often seemed to take place as if by magic. In these films, which were also referred to as living pictures, the movement was not the big movement that cinema would soon be so proud of as it demonstrated it’s array of techniques; instead, these were the detailed movements of smoke drifting out of a factory chimney (just as smoke drifts out of the coke quenching tower in RUHR) or leaves blowing down the road (just as in watching RUHR attention falls on the subtle rustling of a leaf blowing in The Matenastraße Tunnel). Animated photographs did not yet have the techniques of pan, zoom, edit and montage that came with the 'movement-image'. Another comparison between RUHR and animated photographs could be seen as both having durational equivalence between the time taken to film and the time taken to play back the film to audience. In many ways RUHR could be compared to animated photograph; however a big difference is technology and its ability for manipulation. Benning made it very clear in the Q&A that followed the screening that in this film small manipulations had taken place to give a truer feel of the place being portrayed. Elsewhere he has stated ‘sometimes irregular events give a false sense of reality and by removing them the truth becomes more apparent; but of course any truth is only the perception of the viewer ...’ What that perception might be brings us back to my starting point ...

Ideas / thoughts on Traversal: A work in progess part two

I have been thinking about the work of Tacita Dean and how it relates to some of the concerns I am interested to explore in the project Traversal. While researching Dean’s work recently, I came across a number of short texts she has written that are included in the final section of a book published by Phaidon. The text that I found most interesting and perhaps most enlightening about her practice is entitled Tristan da Cunha. In it Dean writes of her fantasy of visiting the most remote island in the world, which is apparently Tristan da Cunha, to be left there for a year without any form of communication with the outside world, apart from the mail boat which appears once a year. She re-tells a dream, where she had the realisation that when the mail boat arrived, it would also be the same boat that would mark the end of her year and facilitate her return home; this thought of leaving panicked her and she felt disappointed at the letters she could not send or receive – of all the news she could not get.

Not only is the journey (so far) an unrealised fantasy, but also a fantasy of a world where you can get lost; as Dean explains, even Tristan da Cunha has a satellite public phone and the governor now has email. So time moves relentlessly on for this remote and distant land too. It is clear to see from the text that Dean hungers for these spaces where one can dream of becoming lost, where linear time has little meaning and the past and the future are all somehow present in the now. In conclusion Dean writes, ‘So I realize, suddenly, what is at the heart of this draw to the Earth’s edges – to the desert and to the sea, or to the ice at the bottom of the world, or the volcano risen out of the ocean. In these places, we are not bound by the rules of human time; we can be free of a history that cannot mark a surface in constant flux like that of the sea or the or the shifting dunes of the desert, or one brutalized by weather or extremity. In these places, we can imagine millennia; we can image prehistory and can see the future.’

Accompanying the text are reproductions of an old postcard and photograph, both images of an unstated location or date, both have German words painted in white across them indicating aspects of what is pictured.


Tacita Dean, Himmel/See, 2005.


Tacita Dean, Luft/Immergrune/Sandboden, 2005.

For me Dean’s fascination with time resonates with Henri Bergson concept of durée (duration): the dynamic movement of passing yet continuing time, in other words time that is not divisible into past and future, but is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is this concept of durée that is in my mind when I consider some of the still images from Traversal.


Sam Nightingale, Untitled (Traversal series)