Clare Langan's post-apocalyptic trilogy of films, Forty Below,
1999, Too Dark for Night, 2001 and Glass hour, 2002,
individually and collectively offer us visions of a future in which
the forces of nature appear to have overwhelmed the human hold on
the planet. The causes of environmental catastrophe are never specified,
but there is no doubting the fact of catastrophe. In the most recent
film, Glass hour, a hapless, vulnerable figure is glimpsed
moving through a simmering, volcanic landscape. There is no straightforward
linear narrative, but a cumulative, compelling sense of a huge, industrialised
environment being engulfed by a vast lava flow. All this is conveyed
in the form of shots of molten, seething terrain, of abandoned and
crumbling factory installations - and of what looks like a domestic
structure bursting spontaneously into flame as the lava approaches.
In an unobtrusive way, a resonant image of a vacated, destroyed or
disintegrating domestic space is at the heart of each work, most explicitly
in the central film Too Dark for Night. Here the unidentified
protagonist journeys purposefully across the desert towards a house
in a deserted settlement, a town that has, we learn, already been
engulfed by advancing sands. Shots of a grove of petrified trees reinforce
the fact of calamity. A sequence of images provides an inventory of
a home hurriedly abandoned and now invaded by sand. This inventory
stands as a general portrait of domesticity, of refuge, of a lost
sense of belonging in the landscape.
Each film details the consequences
of a different kind of catastrophe. Forty Below plunges us
into a world that is both drowned and frozen. In Too Dark for Night desertification has overwhelmed the human presence. Glass hour posits not so much a volcano, perhaps, as a vast lava outflow of the
kind that has engulfed huge tracts of the earth's surface in the past.
In the context of an increasing awareness of the destructive effect
of human activities on the biosphere, it is not unreasonable to draw
a cautionary ecological inference from Langan's trilogy, not least
because of its many references to industrial activity. But, while
such a line of interpretation is certainly left open, the work itself
is never anything other than ambiguous in this respect. As other observers
of her work have noted, her films "are pervaded by a sense of uncertainty."
Often it is not clear "what is real and what unreal."
The dreamlike
structure and striking optical qualities of the films do a great deal
to bolster a sense of their subjectivity, blurring the boundaries
between real and unreal. All are dreamlike in their lack of linearity
and, it could be argued, their logical implausibility. In each an
individual, unnamed protagonist, without visible resources, is completely
alone in extremely hostile terrain, moving through a bizarre, vacated
world with an impunity that could be interpreted as detachment or
indifference. The plight of the protagonist, alone in a post-apocalyptic
world, recalls various literary and cinematic narratives, but there
is no attempt to emulate such narratives. The usual function of the
cinematic protagonist is to avert disaster or make good its effects,
but Langan's protagonist is an oddly passive witness and, for much
of the time a flickering, insubstantial presence who fades quietly
into the background, who might not even be there at all.
Optically
the films are extraordinary, and not only because of the choice of
extreme, exceptional locations in Ireland, Iceland and Namib Desert.
Frame for frame and film by film, it is hard to think of more compelling,
eerily beautiful evocations of a strange, hallucinatory imaginative
world. The audaciously distorted, strongly coloured, sinuously mobile
surfaces of the images are a result of Langan's practice of devising
customised, hand-painted filters during shooting. This means that the
distortions of form and colour are never subsequent enhancements but
are integral to the original filmed image. She pushes the photographic
process and format to extreme lengths, making remarkable, pulsing,
lens-shaped images that verge on abstraction.
It was inevitable and appropriate that the trilogy's iconographic template,
the theme of a human figure rendered insignificant in the face of
the scale and power of nature, would be measured against the Romantic
model, of which Casper David Friedrich's The Wanderer Above a Sea
of Mists is a prototypical pictorial example. And Langan can plausibly
be identified as a post-industrial romantic given the sublime mingling
of dread and beauty, the unmistakable exhilaration that accompanies
an intimation of the destructive force of nature, that is surely evident
in her films. Her own statement, that her work is about "man's brief
fragile existence in the face of the apparently limitless force of
nature" is consistent with this view.
Besides viewing her work in relation to Romanticism, however, there
are also certain links between it and that of a number of Irish painters,
not only in terms of the obvious, though perhaps superficial correspondence
with the apocalyptic vision of Francis Danby in The Opening of
the Sixth Seal, but also, less obviously, with the mid-twentieth
century generation of landscape painters. The work of Patrick Collins,
Camille Souter and Sean McSweeney, to take some of the most notable
exemplars, generally invites such epithets as lyrical, poetic, romantic,
and even spiritual.
All of which is true. Certainly with the benefit
of hindsight, however, one can also see something tougher there, something
that has to do with their common penchant for dealing with landscapes
characterised by transience, loss and impoverishment. There are historical,
as well as personal historical reasons for the sense of dispossession
and alienation that comes through in many paintings of the Irish landscape,
in contrast to the character of landscape painting in Britain, to
take an obvious and pertinent example. This is not necessarily to
argue that Langan is a natural successor to that generation of artists,
but to suggest that there are links between her work and theirs, and
the links are interesting and relevant.
It is self-evident that her
trilogy is concerned with a post-apocalyptic world, but it would be
a mistake to presume that it cannot equally be concerned with the
everyday world of here and now. Most immediately, it addresses our
relationship to what might be described as the world as the Kantian
thing-in-itself, a congeries of materials, forces and processes distinct
from and, as Langan's films forcefully conclude, blankly indifferent
to our sensory perceptions of it. And indifferent, of course, to our
cognitive efforts and emotional states.
Behind the distorting screen
of appearance, which is of course all we know in Langan's films, the
world may well dismiss us and our preoccupations. There is a paradox
between the considerable visual and aural beauty of each film and the
way each pointedly and firmly refuses us a foothold. Each initially
seems to propose a quest, a purposeful protagonist, but in each case
the implied promise of eventual comfort is broken, the idea of a destination
comes to nothing. The various romantic responses of an identification
with nature, subservience to divine will or some other transcendental
experience, that allow a degree of comfort, are effectively precluded.
We are offered glimpses of recognisable, perhaps even promising worlds
that, it transpires, were never and can never be ours. Or, if we regard
the images as translated versions of our own world, the implication
is that there is something ultimately deceptive about its apparent
familiarity.
The presence of a rootless, itinerant human subject poses
the question of how one might find a place in this world, but the implicit
answer is always that there is no place for us. In Rainer Maria Rilke's
words:
...the cunning animals
realise at once
that we aren't especially
at home
in the deciphered world.
The world is deciphered by means
of our efforts to make it familiar to ourselves. We do so through
different symbolic systems of knowledge and belief, some empirically
or logically based, others based on revelation, instinct or aspirations,
all variously consistent or inconsistent with the facts, with the
thing-in-itself. But from our immediate point of view, such systems
possess the common appeal of making intelligible what would otherwise
be hopelessly alien, making an amenable, imagined work from an indecipherable
one. No matter how fine the mesh of the symbolic net we cast, however,
sometimes the inescapable otherness and coldness of the world is likely
to slip through. This might take the form of, in Schopenhauer's formulation,
an overwhelming blankness. It often seems that Langan's films take
the world close to this state of unredeemed blankness. For in them,
as Rilke, again, put it:
...there is no remaining,
no place to stay.
© Aidan Dunne / Clare Langan |
