Immolation Triptych (video) at the Centre for Creative Collaboration
2011
‘An image is not a certain meaning … but the entire world reflected as in a drop of water’
– Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
We decided to use our one-week residency at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in London as a means of finalising our work on the project Gorchakov’s Wish. However, after completing the residency and viewing the results, we realised that we actually needed one more layer to add to our final output. (More on that in subsequent posts.) As such, we began to understand the work that we did at the Centre as, in fact, a further development of our live performance ‘Immolation Triptych‘. Indeed, not unlike Fall (An Allegory) I & II, the first of which was performed live and the second performed in-studio specifically for video, the first ‘Immolation Triptych’ — developed in response to all three of the final scenes from Nostalghia – was performed for a live audience, while this further iteration was designed, constructed and performed in order to produce a moving image. We therefore titled this iteration of work ‘Immolation Triptych II’.
To be accurate, we actually produced three moving image sequences, each responding to one of the three final scenes of Tarkovsky’s film.
Sequence 1: Parrhesia
This sequence responds to the scene in Nostalghia where the mathematician and madman Domenico, Gorchakov’s alter ego, dies by his own hand: a harrowing act of self-immolation at the climax of his inflammatory public speech delivered from atop the statue of Marcus Aurelius sitting on a horse in the piazza of Rome’s Capitoline Hill. Parrhesia records Domenico’s speech translated into Irish and performed against the backdrop of a still image of the Duke of Wellington sitting on a horse in front of the Bank of England. (The Latin word parrhesia, refers to the willingness to speak out publically, even to one’s own detriment, as theorised by the philosopher Michel Foucault in a series of lectures collected together in the book Fearless Speech.)
Sequence 2: Allegory of the Five Elements
This sequence responds to the penultimate scene of Nostalghia where the protagonist, the exiled poet Gorchakov, carries the lit candle across the Santa Catarina Pool. Based largely on ‘Fall (An Allegory) II’, this iteration extends that previous work by incorporating and synthesising complementary allegorical ‘logics’ as were developed throughout the course of the project, primarily through the written component of Gorchakov’s Wish. Comprised of image, object, action and text, the sequence is recorded through the signature style of Tarkovsky’s long take and tracking shot.
Sequence 3: Elegy
This sequence responds to the final scene of the film which superimposes two images: one of a ruined cathedral in the Tuscan town of San Galgano and, inside of this, another of a Russian dacha suggesting Gorchakov’s native homeland. Elegy creates a visual analogue of this shot, first, by carefully designing and constructing a film set made up of the bespoke plexiglass box first used in Kino Haiku; a convex mirror reflecting its surroundings; a flat-screen TV displaying footage shot on location at Bagno Vignoni. The construction is then animated through a long-take and tracking shot that, recorded within the tight confines of the black box designed and constructed for Kino Haiku, transforms the spatial construction into a Tarkovskyan film image.
As with previous work, our intention was to engage with the complexity of meaning in Tarkovsky’s originals film images as generated through through: (1) an emphasis on the durational aspects of the film image through the stylistic deployment of a filmic syntax; (2) the choice (and spatial design or manipulation) of a specific filmic location or place; (3) a poetic message derived from a semiotic practice involving language, objects and/or actions. And, informed by all of the iterations of work that we had done thus far in the project, we employed strategies of reconstruction and allegorisation in order to reconfigure and recontextualise the scenes, thereby referencing – and stylistically emulating – but nevertheless detourning the message of Tarkovsky’s original work.
