All three films were realised while I did a one week residency
at John Moores University in Liverpool in April 2002. Basically
they come out of an interest in montage and detournement. Also,
remember, I've long been interested in how little you can do
with something to make a work. Also, of course, I share the
avant-garde obsession with "boredom" (not punk rhetoric
about it, I'm into the real thing, which is actually rather
interesting) and this obviously predates Warhol. Another
thing that kicked me off on my desire to do these films
(it took several years from idea to realisation) was seeing
the Hollywood remake of Godard's "Breathless"
- I wanted to show how you can really push the remake concept,
which Hollywood just doesn't know how to do.
"Has The Litigation Already Started?"
Approx. 70 mins.
This is a loose remake of Maurice Lemaitre's "Has
The Film Already Started?" mainly using copyright notices
from DVDs which are made to dance before the audience's eyes with
bits of the 1922 Nosferatu cut in. Nosferatu
was supressed by Bram Stoker's window for infringing the copyright
on Dracula. The soundtrack consists of different realisations
of a piece I did called "The Bethnal Green Variations:
Turning Silence Into Noise (Cage Caged)" which was created
specifically to stimulate debate around the issues of plagiarism
and copyright. The piece was realised on 31 July 1999 by placing
a beat box programmed to repeat play Wayne Marshall's version
of John Cage's 4´ 33´´ on a windowsill of
my flat on the Avebury Estate in Bethnal Green. I had the window
open so that the noises of the inner city drifted in (youths
arguing and later a thunder storm), and I recorded the results
with a Sony MZ-R50. 4´ 33´´ is, of course,
the famous silent piece for which the pianist sits at his instrument
without playing a note. Rather than taking the little sound
that was on the Wayne Marshall CD (silence being notoriously
difficult to record) directly from it in digital form, I wanted
to drown this out with the noises of the city. In a way I was
invoking Cheap Imitation, the piece of deconstruction Cage did
to bypass the extortionate fee demanded for use of Satie's Socrate.
I recorded 32 versions of 4´ 33´´ being drowned
out by urban noise with the intention of superimposing them
over each other. In the event I've created different montages
from this recording for the soundtrack of my film. Obviously,
I did this with Cage and published my intention to commercially
realise it (with a little help from Combined Arts at the Arts
Council of England) before the court case about 4' 33'' this
autumn involving Wombles producer Mike Batt. As well as my anti-realisation
of 4'33'', the film also incorporates the sound of the audience's
movements into the soundtrack a la 4'33'' but actually
Lemaitre did this quite intentionally in the film I'm remaking
well before Cage (and even Debord).
"Screams in Favour of de Sade"
Approx 90 mins.
English language colour remake of Guy Debord's avant-garde classic
from 1952. Like the original this film has no images, but whereas
Debord's consisted of black with silence and white with dialogue
in French, mine has black with silence and TV colour bars with
dialogue in English. The original dialogue is translated and in
a number of places also rewritten. However, while
Debord had five voices reading his script, I have one voice
with an additional spoken indication of which voice is speaking
The periods of blackness and silence in Debord's film are strictly
adhered to, with the final twenty four minutes being entirely
black and silent. Although Debord never explained his original
film in this way, I believe his intention was to transform cinema
in theatre, turning the audience into actors rather than treating
them as passive spectators. If this is the case, then it should
matter little to viewers whether they watch Debord's original
or my remake, what's important is what happens amongst the audience,
not what is on screen (which in a classical gesture of avant-garde
iconoclasm is essentially nothing).
"The Golem"
Running time approx 100 mins.
This is Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 silent with the intertitles
taken out and replaced with those from Paul Wegener's silent
version of "Der Golem". There are fewer intertitles
in The Golem than October, which enables me to use repetition
to good effect. This piece was partially inspired by my liking
for Rene Vienet's "Can Dialectic Break Bricks?" in
which a Hong Kong kung fu film of the seventies was redubbed
to give the story a revolutionary spin. However, I'm also aware
that Debord theorised the most effective forms of detournement
as being those that showed their contempt for all existing forms
of sense and culture, whereas those that simply inverted pre-existing
messages (in Vienet's case Hong Kong cinema's obsession with
Manchu against Ming conflicts) are somewhat weak. So if this
detournement of October is a homage to Vienet, it is simultaneously
a critique of him - and even more obviously a critique of the
reactionary anti-working class politics of the bolsheviks.
A blazing rock soundtrack by Finnish punk act The Dolphins has
been dubbed onto my detournement of "October" - although
it is also my intention that at some screenings very different
live realisations for the sound might be achieved (which is
why I used a live recording of The Dolphins on the dubbed soundtrack).
Stewart
Home, 2002
