Jacqueline Goss’ The Observers chronicles a year in the
life of a weather station located at the summit of Mount Washington, New
Hampshire, beginning in deep winter, everything frosted with snow, rendering
the architecture a desolate wedding cake. Teeth are brushed, sit-ups are
performed, tricky knots are tied, a recorder is played (badly). There are
weather charts that look an awful lot like bowling scorecards. A metal box is
found on the mountain during an especially punishing blizzard. It has a
combination lock that refuses to be opened, infusing routine and solitude with
the subtlest promise of mystery. In one scene the station’s sole climatologist
is found doing some leisurely sketching outdoors in mega-mittens and goggles
that cover half her face, which may be an example of Goss’ deadest of deadpan
comic sensibility, which meshes nicely with The
Observers rigorously, well, observational MO.
The Observers screened as part of Images 2012 last Saturday night,
just two nights after John Akomfrah’s The
Nine Muses, which also features a lot of parka and snow and unpeopled
vastness. But Goss’ film is as mercilessly spare as Akomfrah’s is dizzyingly baroque.
It seems driven by the director’s fascination with the impulse to accumulate
data, perhaps for its own sake, the trust that data will always be inherently
important. It made me think of my 92-year-old grandmother, who some years back
started writing down the exact times of the sunrises and sunsets every single
day, without ever explaining to anyone why. She shows me her figures when I
come to visit, that scrawled handwriting that somehow touches me. She never
expects a big reaction, but she seems to want me to know.
More minimalist
still is James Benning’s Two Cabins, which
screened on Tuesday night, and which might just as accurately be called Two Windows for all we’re able to see of
Benning’s reconstructions of dwellings inhabited by Henry David Thoreau and Ted
Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, respectively. Thoreau’s window is vertical,
extended beyond the upper and lower borders of Benning’s fixed frame, the view
of a knoll and jumble of grass, leaves and tree, broken up by horizontal lines,
the whole composition recalling certain Rothkos. As far as sound goes, the
general buzz of forest pervades. Somewhere a dog barks, but only once. A large
vehicle lumbers past—we’re close to a highway? Really? The scene goes on and on
and on and so we watch and watch and watch and soon become aware of the
peculiar coexistence of these feelings: you’re looking out the eye-level window
of a cabin in a sunny wood, alone, at peace, perhaps after a long trip; you’re in
the middle of a city, looking at a raised glowing screen in a big dark room
with people in it. This is a way of being alone with one’s self while sitting amid
a crowd of silent strangers.
Kaczynski’s
window is, by contrast, claustrophobic, a square contained easily by the
parallel framing, the woods beyond resembling a miniature impressionist
painting. I kept thinking of this window as a sphincter—was it because of the
darkened knots in the wooden walls? Thoreau’s cabin feels like freedom and
perspective; Kaczynski’s like entrapment and paranoia. It’s a brilliant
juxtaposition, a space for dreaming of civil disobedience and a space for
planning attacks on civilization, and its duration, 30 minutes in total, feel
just about right to absorb what it has to offer, to slip off into reverie and
then slip right back in, drawn to details, and to that weird effect of stasis
slowly becoming something alive and nearly mobile. A deeply inspired, immersive
work.
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