A theatrical installation
A film, that captures a “lebendes Bild“, a “tableau vivant“, creates a special moment: The tableau, in its cinematic version, reverses the ordinary time-relation: while the film's action is suspended, while the proper time of the fictional characters is halted, “the film“ goes on, film material is spilled, the “umraum“, the space, consumes time, steadily, invisible. In a new, and different way, the film becomes the container of time, that can't be appropriated by the “humans“ inside the picture.
Raúl Ruiz' film from 1978 L’HYPOTHÈSE DU TABLEAU VOLÉ, which is part of the Arsenal archive, is conceived around a series of tableaux vivants. The film is based on texts and theory of the french philosopher Pierre Klossowski, who, himself, performs the lead role in the film. In his theory, Klossowski connects a priority to the image (“I am under the spell of the image“), with an eroticized version of staging and being staged: being in the grip of an unknown person, being suspended between violence and erotic (self-)abandonment, the figures are halted.
For my contribution, I work on a theatrical installation, an actor, a textfilm, archival filmmaterial. Its aim is to reconstruct Klossowski's notion of performance and connect it with questions of a “living presence“, and an idea of an economy, that can be attributed to this “presence“ (as an allusion to Klossowski's famous text “La monnaie vivante“).
And I hope it will finally include some consideration of the ambivalence of any concept of time that it takes to bring to life things to look at: for example the sea of time stored – as films – in the Arsenal archive. What substance is needed, to reanimate this stored factuality as film?
