II. Fall (An Allegory)
2009
‘Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.’
– Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
Kreider + O’Leary, Fall (An Allegory) (2009): Concept drawing, ‘stage 4′.
+ Part of the Gorchakov’s Wish series of works.
Having engaged with the place or location of Tarkovsky’s penultimate scene from Nostalghia (1983), we wanted to explore its construction in terms of the action of the shot and, along with this, to engage with its latent symbolism. For this we divided the scene up into constituent parts based upon the actions of the protagonist, Gorchakov, as he attempts to carry the lit candle across the expanse of the Santa Catarina Pool. There were five distinctive points within this sequence:
00 sec – G lights the candle.
35 sec – G touches the wall for the first time and sets out across the pool.
1 min 57 sec – G lights candle/touches wall for second time and sets out across the pool.
5 min 28 sec – G lights candle/ touches wall for the third time and sets out across the pool.
9 min 04 sec – G falls.
This division became the basis for a five-stage drawing sequence and, in turn, a script for performance that ‘translated’ the penultimate scene of Nostalghia into an allegory, bearing in mind Craig Owens’ ‘The Allegorical Impulse’ where he writes: ‘In allegory the image is a heiroglyph; an allegory is a rebus – writing composed of concrete images.’ Fall (An Allegory) can be understood in terms of five word-action-object sequences that, cumulatively, generate a series of images.
Live Performance
We e enacted the live performance of Fall (An Allegory) at The Betsey Trotwood, a pub and performance venue in East London. The backdrop for the performance was a slide sequence of images – scans of the five-stage drawing sequence. The whole of the performance was filmed on DV.
Fall (An Allegory) live performance script
Kreider + O’Leary, Fall (An Allegory): Live performance, set-up.
Kreider + O’Leary, Fall (An Allegory) (2009): Live performance, stills (‘Stages 1-5′).
Performance for Video
After doing the live performance, we decided to turn Fall (An Allegory) into what we called a ‘performance for video’. In doing so, we wanted not only to make more explicit the series of images comprising the allegory, but also to explore first-hand the filmic syntax of the long take and tracking shot – the basis of Tarkovsky’s film image as discussed in Sculpting in Time. Working in the Triangle Space at Chelsea College of Art, we set up five stations along the expanse of the back wall. At each station there was an object or a number of objects as well as a set instructions for actions performed at each station. K. performed the sequence of actions that were filmed, as a tracking shot, by J.
