[**Images from L to R: Non-place, Other Space (2009), Voices Seen, Images Heard (2009), Micro Narratives, a Visual Poem (2017), and Door GamesWindow Frames: Near Drama (video version, 2012)]
Montage as Critical Strategy: Fragments, Networks, Theory
Linda C.H. Lai
**This action-research is partly supporlted by a gramt from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No.cityU 11404614), "Where Else to Look," a published statement in a film festival catalogue that communicates my method of experimental, alternative image-making to a professioanl and general audience.
Citation on CityU Scholar [...]
original catalogue essay in Korean and English [English version]
(catalogue essay revised and extended)
** EXiS 2017 (14th Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul), 13-20 July 2017. This essay was published in the festival catalogue to accompany a solo screening on my work, Indi-Visual: Linda Lai, at the Korean Film Archive.
I have resisted the split and dichotomy of theory versus making (practice). Theory is making. The practice of theory takes different forms of situated engagement: the knowing subject is also the subject in action, whether she is writing, reading, or deploying any artistic media, in a concrete life-world, in a specific place of a specific moment. Simply because I have multiple subject positions – as a scholar, historian, artist, writer and educator – the domains of these positions, together with modes of enquiry that come with each of them, flow into each other to shape my daily practice. My engagement with the world is necessarily multiple. Theories are important resources -- through theories I share the reasoning and experience of others, and how and why they do what they do. Historical sensibility is an important form of theory.
Theory does not prescribe what I do; but theory leads me to arrive at a certain position and moment of artistic action. Theory emerges in the process of action. I arrive at the theory I make as I arrive at the end of an artistic journey.
Over the years, I have developed a method to create video works that are based on found-footage or video diaries in my own archive. Collecting sights and sounds in a certain existential mindset, and gaining fresh understanding of these documents much later like a researcher, are the rudiments of my experimental documentary position, which maps a double “I” at work. My collecting activities are highly intuitive, much like Surrealist automatism, and yet inevitably shaped by my education and life experiences, whereas the formation of image/sound discourses from video fragments is an important process of discovery and critical intervention. And this is also where my historiographic intention comes in.
Most of my creative works have a visual, auto-ethnographic dimension: through personal visual diaries I observe culture and history as concrete lived experiences and entrenched moments of the everyday. One way or another, my projects aim to reconstruct a lost history of Hong Kong as it resides largely in surviving sight-and-sound and print fragments. The sights and sounds of archival footage preserve something of lived experience, even when it cannot be reduced to neat stories with neat conclusions. The power of found-footage-based, collage-style experimental documentary lies in this direction. Voice Seen, Image Heard (EXiS 2010) and Non-place, Other Space (EXiS 2009) both belong to this category.
Voice Seen, Image Heard – Composing Fragments, Enlivening Gaps
Voice Seen, Image Heard (2009) writes a critical history of everyday culture in the former British colony of Hong Kong, which remains a project of urgency, especially in the post-1997 milieu characterized by the co-option of Hong Kong into the idea of a unified ‘Chinese’ nation.
With my concern with ethnography and found-footage, I notice many of my projects hinge on ways to organize a vast body of material from archival research. My creative methodology turns what is normally ‘post-production’ in ordinary filmmaking into an intense moment of artistic creation that is at once editing (in film/video), collage (in visual art), animation (integrating print, text and video components), compilation (combining found-footage from varied sources) and composition (as in music, especially the crafting of soundscapes based on found sound clips). I have developed this approach into a personal signature in my video works.
From the perspective of cinematic art, my works follow closely thoughts in the history of experimental cinema in the US and Europe, asking as well what experimentation possibly means in my cultural context. I am particularly interested in Early Cinema moments – when cinema’s possibilities were wide open, and before cinematic narrative conventions were formalized. To me, the energies of Early Cinema bear an ethical dimension: the imperative to keep an artistic medium open and alive. In general, my critical and creative works in general have a strong concern for language and micro/meta-narrativity.
At this point, I am working on the next two episodes of a video cycle MEDITATIONS ON A MINOR HISTORY. The first episode, Voices Seen, Images Heard (2009) was shown at EXiS 2010. The two new episodes I’m working on are titled Where Had all the Women Gone? and Wharfs, Docks, or Promenades: the Difficult History of Victoria’s Harbor Front, which carry on my experimentation with a visual history of Hong Kong at the same time testing the limits of visual knowledge.
Non-place ▪ Other Space as experimental, critical visual-ethnography
Non-place ▪ Other Space (2009) is part of my continuous fuelled interest in found footage and compilation works, also an auto-ethnographic practice. I have been a fervent walker of the city as well as a detached collector of sights and sounds. Video-making then is to renew the old images that filled my archive, also to preserve the fragments for their own autonomy and openness for signification. In Walter Benjamin’s light, “the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.”
Non-place ▪ Other Space is also self-consciously engaged in the dialectics of the monumental and the fabric of everyday life in the context of Hong Kong and Macao, two cities whose histories and identities have been co-opted into the grand discourse of Chinese civilization since their handover to Chinese sovereignty.
Non-place ▪ Other Space compiles fragments of the city space in Hong Kong and Macao (1991-2008) to assert the possibility of many spaces and temporal sheets in one single framed discourse. It attempts the states between disappearing and emerging, visible and concealed. “Walking through” is a precarious experience. One penetrates, dives into, emerges and immerses in… In one moment, I see, therefore the video camera records for me; in another moment, the camera sees and retains, then I discover. Automatism leads. Virtual sounds I barely grasp in my mind, and fragments of a voice I have long forgotten, all blended into the placeless other space of non-place. Places and lived moments of disappearance return as the in-between, neither monumental, nor illusionary.
I have discovered much about my ethnographic impulses as I piece together fragments of sights and sounds. Hong Kong is a food-oriented culture; yet to me food is closely tied to death and demise. I meant to be anti-monumental, and looked for ‘history’ in the banal and the everyday. Yet as I review the finished piece, every other minute of the work carries fluttering fragments of a monumental event: Chinese New Year, the Ghost Festival, the 2000 Millennium celebration, China’s hosting the Olympics… Most of the outdoor sites in this work no long exist in current maps of Hong Kong and Macau as a result of ceaseless urban renewal projects; or some scenes have never yet existed as practical, concrete dwellings as they were only impermanent sites of art installations.
[De-/Re-]Constructing My City
Globally circulated typical images of Hong Kong glorify the soaring skyscrapers of the city’s financial and multi-national corporate institutions, or else the skyline of the Victoria Harbor, crowds and traffic jams. To me, Hong Kong cannot be reduced to a handful of images, whereas it is in the act of walking that I discover my metaphor – ceaseless streams and torrents of sensations from eclectic and multifarious sources, sounding or muffled, colliding yet blending. Here and there, huge digital screens scream at crossroads as I sink into the boundless space of my thought world or sudden daydreams. Then at the quick turn of a street corner, a bustling road becomes a forgotten alley carrying on the life of half a century ago. Walking through the city space of Hong Kong to me is real-time experience of rapid succession of details sweeping by and ceaseless transition in and out of broken time zones. In the language of cinema, we call it ‘montage’. More importantly, as my visual research shows, the city of Hong Kong has a precarious history of holding onto its look or preserving its architectural integrity – in the context of a real estate-driven development model.
In working through chaos and disorder, and in piecing together fragments of sights and sounds into an image discourse, I was drawn into a renewed interest in the meaning of editing. Montage is collage. Collage, with its historically subversive connotation, leads me to a method that achieves coherence via incoherence and incongruence. Thus I call my visual grammar that of fragments: an editing approach that liberates individual shots from discourse, and allows each image/sound fragment to take on new tones and voices as it freely cohere with each other.
The sight and sound fragments are pregnant with anecdotal resonance as yet to be made explicit. I’d like to use the pastry ‘napoleon’ (‘thousand-leaf, or millefoglie, or mille-feuille) as an analogy to describe the overall image/sound system resulting from the montage of fragments of varied texture and sensibility in Non-place. The many ‘leafs’ include: art space and art installation, food, small details of monumental moments, water (nature in the urban space), places where food is prepared, disgust (waste, relics, food), demolished place, human body parts, casual conversations, media broadcast, my mother…
Yet one final ‘leaf’ is my diary in the form of poetry. In the midst of the torrents of images and sound signals one finds the subject being of the artist, whose own private story and her relation with her tools could only be articulated in words. Text-image relation in this work is therefore not that of interpretation or supportive elaboration. The written words are not translatable into any visual form; they form an autonomous tier of space of their own, the private, desirous, and reflexive of art-making.
Door Games Window Frames : Near Drama: materializing melodramatic pathos
As a kid growing up in the 1960s, I was more exposed to Hollywood films than Hong Kong (HK) films. It was until when I was a critical thinker as a literature major, then a film/cultural historian, that the overt repetitiveness and formulaic behavior in HK oldies in that period caught my attention. These films were fascinating for two reasons. First, I found it rather difficult to write about these films from an artistic point of view, or else there was the need to rediscover how these melodramas work. I need a new language to make sense of them. Second, on a more primal level, I feel enchanted by the frequent use of big head shots and speechless facial expression. There’s so much in these head shots that you can’t reproduce the richness in words. You can’t just label them ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, ‘surprised’ or ‘fearful’. That’s the magic of the moving image. Then if you imagine yourself re-editing these films to tighten them up, you want to cut out all the door opening-shutting shots and yet – wait a minute – no, it seems some windows and doors are necessary narrative devices for characters’ discovery, and for the story to proceed. In one of the 11 films, I counted 100 door and window-related shots, in a few others 120 to 150, not to mention a local adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. This is how significant – not just my personal obsessions.
The best way to understand what I just said above would be to imagine you were squinting rather than watching these films attentively. By squinting, you may lose the details but you’ll more effectively catch the door-window opening-shutting pattern, frequency of these shots and rhythm they create. You don’t need to really worry about missing the conversation, but every now and then a close shot of a facial would come in like a timely punctuation. You know you should pay attention; a crisis is over or just about to come; you know the drama is now moving on to its next phase, a step closer to the denouement.
In this piece, I have turned door and window movements literally into a propeller of drama. As punctuations as well for emotive shifts, the combinatorial game I play with these clips constructs micro-narratives. The 'near drama' resulting from the combinatorial exercise could be frustrating for not delivering one straightforward story; but my method liberates every segment between the closing and opening of doors and windows to allow them to stand alone to perform its dramatic energy.
This work has 3 chapters -- "Trial & Speculations: spinning the wheel," "Getting Serious" and "Behind the doors, in front of the windows" -- laying out the process of studying door and window devices, at the same time brewing dramaticity without ever arriving at any single stable story.
Door Games Window Frames: Near Drama (2012) fits all three aspects. This work is also an elaboration of an earlier work I did, Door Game (2005, 26 minutes), which is a process of disintegration of ‘near drama’ into postures and fragments, whereby dramaticity is gradually devoured by isolation of image and pure criticism, and images by texts. In Door Games Window Frames (2012), I let go of the role of ‘god’, and allow a computer program to generate the first rough cut based on simple rules that organize visual music from a combinatorial game of 3 windows. With an editing method that favors the fragmentary rather than continuity, almost all my works call attention to the individual visual fragments and their affective power, a conscious statement against mainstream cinema’s dependence on continuity, coherence and wholesomeness, which isn’t really the case of the world we experience.
Micro Narratives, a Visual Poem: video art, a platform of intemedia convergence
It is also my concern how I should understand this work in the context of video art, which I insist cannot be equated with film art. ...
Stretching, playback, fast forward… reordering… cassette tape moment, Pierre Schaefer (?)
Experimentation over Experimental Genre
Experimental film is not a genre, nor the name of a historical moment often called the Avant-garde. I prefer to think about experimentation as a continuous, tactical incentive, and the necessity of all conscientious image-artist to find his/her own mode to be ‘avant-garde’ in specific circumstances.
Medium specificity. In a sense, I don’t think I belong to this group. I cannot go in that direction unless I become a competent programmer, in the case of digital video. At the same time, I am definitely for a more open view on what a medium is and how to define it. I am more engaged with the social, cultural dimension of a medium: with film and video, I think of all the conventions that have defined and delimited filmmaking and videography, I think of the assumed contexts and usages of moving images and wonder whether there are new usages and new contexts. I think a lot about the physicality of the screened image, and how its material condition affects our making and usage.
*Intermedia. I do think a lot about how the formal language and norms of practices of different artistic media may crossbreed and inform one another to create something ‘third’, that is, something in between. For example, in ‘Door Games Window Frames’, I think of what amounts to rhythm in music and methods of open-end composition such as serialism. I asked questions on music to see how it affects my ‘composition’ in image sequencing. I also created a work in which sound and image are of equal status as they are both somewhat representational and yet elliptical and fragmentary.
*Interdisciplinarity. I believe a lot of the experiments I have set up are possible because I rely on resources of other discipline. In more than one or two works, I play the role of a historian, a cultural critic, a visual ethnographer and a poet in the very activities of image maker. A result of this is that I become a very montage-based image-maker, by which ‘analysis’ pushes me in the direction of a fragmentary style demanding a self-conscious theory of editing.
*Enriched perception and stretched cognition. Personally, in a world flooded with images, no experimental moving image work is justifiable work unless it makes us experience the world differently, makes us see more (or less), see better, and see differently. After many film theorists, I support an approach to experimental cinema that provides us with a way of thinking about the world that is only affordable by the moving image.
Taking experimentation as my prime position, my video works have been consistent in three aspects: (1) exploring the temporal aspect of film-video, by playing with narrative time, screen time and conceptual time via micro-/meta-narrative games; (2) to work with found footage, be it mainstream cinema works, personal diaries or found newsreels; and (3) treating experimental video as a form of visual ethnography, i.e. to use visual research and image-making to explore the nature of art practices, everyday culture and history. (July 2017)