print   back The time in movement (Des temps de mouvements) Raymond Bellour on the installation What I'm Looking For for the Catalogue Estados da Imagem, Instantes e Intervalos States of the Image. Instants and Intervals curated by Raymond Bellour & Sergio Mah LisboaPhoto2005 with Chantal Ackerman Jean-Louis Boissier Dara Birnbaum David Claerbout James Coleman Pedro Costa Masaki Fujihata Yervant Gianikian/Angela Ricci Lucchi Thierry Kuntzel Shelly Silver Michael Snow Jeff Wall The time in movement You are a film or video artist. You decide to compose a film, made up exclusively of photographs. You are yourself the author of these photographs. You accompany them with a commentary, which attaches to the singular experience from which these photographs emerge, divulging your inner detours, while simultaneously seeking to reflect a vertigo on which the film insists. You choose a female voice for this commentary, a truly evocative voice, personal and invested, which colors everything with its affect. When you do all this, you find yourself seized by the power of these things in the inexhaustible space that has opened up in the twenty years that separates two films, which intersect without resembling each other, marrying their respective qualities of fiction and witnessing: La Jetée and Sans Soleil by Chris Marker. You know this. You can't help thinking it. "He writes." "He writes from Japan." And the most beautiful present that you knew to give yourself, and that strikes your audience (to whom you are then offering it), is that you have succeeded to create the conditions of extreme liberty from this obliged inter-dependence, that belongs to the reality (of art). The curious visitors to the Internet dating site www.personals.salon.com can come across the large shot of a closed eye that serves as self-portrait of 100thofasecond, the username that Shelly Silver gave herself in order to enter the community. The film, the resulting video that we watch ­ like a nearly private spectator sitting in an armchair facing a monitor ­ this film is above all an experience of the speed at which this eye, taken over by the camera, opens and shuts to pick up signals of the reality in the faces and bodies that it has become obsessed with. In the already lengthy history of films composed of photographs, What I'm Looking For seems to have the particular feature of being given the subject of the re-creation of a movement, of movements that correspond to real-life perceptions of a reality that the photo arrests on principle in its instantaneous abstraction . Being obsessed by time, wishing to stop time, this is what Shelly Silver (or her narrator) confesses to straight away. But she wants, above all, to take from time what she already stole from it in reinventing, with her montage, the virtualities of all its possible facets. It is, of course, a chimera: no language, made up of images, is able to render the hypothetical life of a body. But it can try. And it can succeed at perturbing us if it reaches visual hypotheses that become similarly-weighted perceptive creations. Many images of this film follow each other in a simple way: whether it's the relationship between a detail and its context, or vice versa; or whether it is sequences of (more or less) rapid takes that translate into an immersion in street scenes, in crowds, effecting a sort of defoliation. Quickly: two Asian children; then a woman that is advancing with her back to us in a strange robe. Extreme accelerations are produced, according to very varied forms ­ and it would be a bit vain to want to seize them in words. But these moments, which multiply themselves, have the common quality of producing movements which approach (without using the force of power or wanting to conform) the movement of cinema and its illusion of life. In one of the most disturbing section, a long-ish part towards the end of the film, a mouth appears that flickers from one shot, or photograph, to the next, and as much as these units of images are brief, they mime an expression, making it look as though something is being spoken. One even hallucinates (wouldn't this be fitting?) that there are two mouths there and that it's a sketch of the dialogue that would have taken place at that moment. It doesn't matter that it's real or not. The thing that counts is that such an impression makes an echo of the two main forces that mold this film. Firstly, a passion for the encounter with the other, which also animated the previous work of Shelly Silver (from Meet the People to suicide by way of Former East/Former West or 37 Stories About Leaving Home). Whatever it is, here, in the street, flying towards the other with images or, in a more elaborate fashion, striking up a baiting dialogue on the Net, it continues in the reality of an encounter (with the surprises, the dangers and the agitation that one imagines). Next, we retain a relatively unique way of standing there between perception and hallucination, as though between mechanical recording and mental imagery, and this duality has the same explicit proportions which delimit cinema and photography. The end of the film is, in this way, exemplary: the images surge in floods, scanning various darknesses, as though surging from these darknesses; images that are steady, miming the physical reality of an imaginary film with this bombardment of light and forms, animating the projection (from which we seize the internal principal) of an intermittent parade of images on an interior screen. Raymond Bellour, Paris 2005 Translation: Natasha S. Randall page top