“Prompted by three different scenes: the church San Nicolo dei Mendicoli in Dorsoduro, the house of the executioner on Calle de la Testa in Cannaregio, and Palazzo Bembo itself, consider movement and form through new and old media mechanisms in live, documented and post-produced events.”
FuneREEL Scenes
Venice is a stage space. It is self-replicating and self-defeating. A melancholy resides in its reel spaces, its filmic histories. Death in Venice (1971) is an ode to artful decline, the ideal and decay, desire and restraint. The city itself acts as a metaphor for civilization’s slippage; as Venice slides into the sea, the material effects of global warming shape the city’s mood. As filmed form, we can see Venice’s light effects captured in sequential frames that conjure a variety of narratives in film stock (and now in pixels) that prompt and elicit specific emotions from the audience. The transition from analogue to digital in the moving image perhaps points to a wider malaise in which humanity sinks from the indexical form into Baudrillard’s soup of pure simulation.
As well as being one of the most filmed cities, in which the subject of the city subsumes the characters of the stories, it is surely one of the most symbolically over-determined cities in the world. For all its intersecting histories and claims to real and imagined power, the church, state and merchant wealth allowed for the proliferation of coded spaces, practices and objects – many of which remain arcane to the everyday observer. Film can reveal our hidden sign systems in exposition, narrative and in our want to identify with character, while mimicking our understanding of time. It can also distort and loop time to expose repressed fears, desires and emotions. The film Don’t Look Now (1974) picks up on these effects and uses the ephemerality and techniques of film to conjure not just the human form as ghost, but the city itself as apparition, a fleeting form in time.
venetian shards 