Clare Langan's bleak but beautiful vision proposes the fragility of civilisation
in the face of the indifferent might of nature. Issues of sublimity, memory
and aloneness enrich her pieces but this intellectual engagement is only
the after-shock to the affective tremors of our first encounter.
Darkness frames this new film from Clare Langan and sand pervades its
every frame. Her location has moved from the eerie greens and blues of
water and ice in the previous Forty Below to the browns and sepia of the
desert. The opening sequence plays the graininess of the medium against
graininess of sand, subject and method become one. Langan's mise en scéne
is not the creation of post production manipulations but of self-made
filters attached to the camera lens during the actual filming. Prisms
and gels contort the subject into a vision distinct from and equal to
the high tech enhancements of special effects in commercial cinema. The
soundtrack, which moulds the emotional shape of a film scene, is predominantly
the wind, the agent that also forms the shapeliness of the desert dunes.
Langan sets out with this sympathetic relationship of medium and subject
to offer a simple narrative structure that meditates on memory and death.
The figure in this film is a cypher, a device to provide scale to the
immensity of the location and deliver us its poignant centre. The exterior
scenes set the severity and isolation of the individual in relation to
this hostile environment. Sky and sun and heat are not permitted and only
wind and sand are featured. We are familiar with this scene, the lost
protagonist wandering in the desert. But this desert is not a confined
entity, it is a moving and encompassing organism as suffocating and as
deadly as the ice and water of its predecessor.
We first are introduced to its indifferent malevolence when our guide
encounters the petrified forest, black trees submerged in arid sand, the
weaker flora succumbing to a stronger adversary. Then onwards through
buried railway tracks to urban devastation, the central post-apocalyptic
scene of domesticity engulfed by the sands of time over time. A meditation
on the frailty of our human existence, the transitory character of memory
and the ephemeral nature of beauty itself.
This is Langan's second film in a trilogy and the tones struck may be
described as Romantic. Though it keeps the components of its nineteenth
century antecedents it reverses them in a terrifying way. Frederich's
Alps and Bierstatdt's Rockies provided the grand vistas for the thrill
of the sublime. The artists choose them as perceptual vehicles in which
to convey the sense of awe. Langan's nature is in an altogether different
category. It is malevolent and active, the Gaia goddess that revenges
the neglect and exploitation wielded upon her over the past century. She
is indifferent to our perception and invades the very platforms from which
we once so safely appreciated her might.
Patrick T. Murphy,
Director of the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin
© Patrick T. Murphy / Clare Langan |
