double bill #35

In this double bill of analogue films, process is offered as a means to document time-space, to create a record of a site that will necessarily outlast the site itself. 

Beginning in the semi-toxic industrial East Side of Providence, Rhode Island, USA, and featuring the ghostly eyeballs of fashion ads wobbling through a scratchy kryptonite gloss of photochemistry, accompanied by the magnetic tape sounds of The Shirelles and Suicidal Tendencies, Xander Marro’s L’Eye: The Chemical Bath feels like a period piece. This is what a late-night walk through the abandoned costume jewelry district felt like in 2002, haunted by distant noise experiments clattering through open warehouse windows. L’Eye is a spectral document, an embodied moment in space-time.

Process and result are underlined in lau persijn’s film, a collaborative attempt at documenting a natural Belgian marsh on the edge of disappearing. The tactility of L’Eye is also present in the 16mm filmstrip that we see in underneath it flickers—a roll of exposed celluloid is stuffed in a bag and submerged, pulled out of the mud and re-presented so that we can see the earth acting on the image. Process is evidence of place: the camera we hear is the one that records; the microphone in the frame is what allows us to hear.  Lens flares and hand claps and voice notes all tell us to look at this film as a document of place: this is what is.

Of course, film always exists in a present that is forever moving away from the moment of its creation—and, in the case of underneath it flickers, the image of what is may already be what was. As nature is “developed” and paved over with polluting factories and flimsy apartments—structures that will inevitably be abandoned to time and ruin and reclaimed again by a resistant nature, we can also view these two process-based films as two sides of the same coin: L’Eye as the chemical green future of the verdant la friche Josaphat, and vice versa.