Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Artists’ Moving Image, Isolation and COVID-19, Sept 2020

In the beginning of April 2020, visual artist Daniel Solomons and myself, a film scholar, set out to collaborate to produce something in response to the experience of the lockdown. We departed from a set of video images recorded in London’s Liverpool Street Station in March 2019. From the distance of confinement and the stillness of the worldwide shutdown of passenger transport, the video images of the frantic movement of people in one of London’s biggest train stations had acquired a different dimension. We wrote a text to accompany the images which took as driving force the last words of Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ (2006). The poem evokes an image of quietness and contentment that created various contradictions with the situation that we had been thrown into. We wanted to explore the feeling of seeing mass mobility from the perspective of stillness and belonging to the past as in the present was to be avoided.

Feelings of claustrophobia, numbing paralysis, endless loops of uncertainty, a crisis of care, the lack of any safety nets, governmental or otherwise. This coupled with a newfound stillness, staying local, making do with what is available, nearby and small scale. The pandemic has led us all to question what the practice is and how it can be sustainable when it relies so much on infrastructure and collaboration. What is left when you are stripped bare of the conditions of making, the support systems, the materials, the immediacy of being a body that interacts with and in the world and is now living in a state of suspended animation through a screen. It has tested our patience on all fronts. The restlessness of staying put in one place. The intolerable fixity of staring at a screen. The nightmarish tunnel-vision of an unimaginable future.

Like much of the United Kingdom, arts communities in the South East were largely paralysed during the lockdown in spring 2020 through the temporary closure of venues in Brighton, the Towner Eastbourne, the De La Warr Pavilion Bexhill, Hastings Contemporary and Hastings Museum, and numerous smaller arts, music and theatre venues along the coast. Many gallery staff were on furlough and online content tended to be provided by larger institutions elsewhere, apart from grassroots activities such as Hasting’s Isolation Station broadcast on Facebook. The closure of arts institutions all along the East Sussex Coast and the absence of their habitual signalling felt like an inverse phenomenon and uneasy foreboding. grounded was devised in response to this regional silence and the curators, Claudia Kappenberg and Fiontán Moran reflected on the project for MIRAJ.

In 2015 after I gave a two-week 16-mm Bolex Seminar at the Berlin Film School (dffb) an enthusiastic woman film student wanted to continue to work with the Bolex. So I proposed a Bolex-Workshop for all interested film students, no matter if they study directing, camera, production, editing or scriptwriting. They would work by themselves without a team, without actors, without scriptwriting and without technical devises, only with the silent Bolex camera. Simple and alone. The administration agreed to my idea and twenty students attended the first meeting in March 2015.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, people did not only contend with anxiety stirred up by being community quarantined. While virtually house arrested, concerned citizens have had to cope with and struggle against the government’s relentless authoritarian practices. In this context, the pandemic is a backdrop and a metaphor for a different upheaval.

I am holding an object. It is tinted blue and shaped like a small book. On the cover, a young man holds both hands up to the sky as in a celestial salute. The image is a still from Kevin Jerome Everson’s 2017 film IFO. The object is the catalogue for the 2020 edition of the Courtisane Festival, where a retrospective of Everson’s work ought to have taken place in April 2020. I say ‘ought to’ because the Courtisane Festival – like so many other events in 2020 – was cancelled. The surviving catalogue is a strange object, both a record of something that was and was not.

Back in March 2020, the Costa Rica International Film Festival was the first major local event cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As in many other places over the following weeks, it was just the first of a series of cancellations and postponements that would throw the film and moving image community into disarray. The first response by local artists was, as elsewhere, to share much of their work online for the benefit of an art-hungry audience that saw how little by little most institutions entered a crisis they have not recovered from. In normal times, screenings of new work are somewhat rare in the country, and the local festivals do not prioritize new moving image art.

Natacha Nisic recognized that the conditions of confinement created by the COVID pandemic and lockdown posed a threat to the visibility, exchange and experience of contemporary art, particularly of the work of women artists. Nisic invited women in her global network to contribute to the project and over time the network has expanded. Over 50 artists have now contributed to the publications and they maintain the online project collectively. As well as weekly publications, since the beginning The Crown Letter has hosted a weekly Salon for its contributors, where the artists exchange experiences, ideas and stories. In these times of confinement, where the effects of systemic inequality are felt across the globe, The Crown Letter harnesses the power of artistic exchange, collective energy, support and dialogue. As it approaches its first anniversary, some of the artists gathered at a salon to reflect on what The Crown Letter means to them.

In lockdown as I finished my five-year project, on women experimental filmmakers from the 1970s and 1980s, I have been focusing on this past time that formed me. Watching films by artist/filmmakers that I love has helped to keep my anger at the present at bay. A parallel journey back in time has been playing out on TV via the high-profile voices of Steve McQueen and Russell T. Davis. Steve McQueen’s series, Small Axe pays tribute to the Black communities’ struggles, as the postwar era waned and the aggressively neo-liberal individualist world waxed. The anger and activism from an earlier period presciently planned for a 2020 screening speaks out at us from the TV, coinciding with Black Lives Matter, and begs the question of how exactly have things improved in the last 40 years? By contrast Russell T. Davis’ It’s a Sin, is a more sugar-coated dramatization of the 1980s in its treatment of the trauma of the AIDS generation and the impact of the disease on a small group of young gay men and allies in London. How do these different voices meet, mix and coalesce as both a vision from that era and a memory of that era?

Once while speaking with art students in a class at the Vienna art academy, I listened to their fears for their future and their questions about how to continue, frequently mentioning their parents’ concern; and I thought how helpful it would be if they could experience the nature of the Peloponnese and the imaginative freedom that I associated to filmmaking and Greece. I continue to hope that the Temenos screenings might give a certain number of individuals an experience of freedom that comes from a temporary removal from one’s own environment and immersion in the different scale of time that Markopoulos’s Eniaios provides.

Review of: New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics, and Documentary Theory, Dara Waldron (2018 h/bk, 2020 p/bk)

New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 224 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-50132-249-5, h/bk, £95.00

ISBN 978-1-50132-250-1, p/bk, £28.99

Review of: Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image Installations, Alison Butler (2019)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 178 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-03030-461-4, h/bk, €62.39; eBook, €49.99

Review of: Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia, Jonathan Walley (2020)

New York: Oxford University Press, 576 pp.,

ISBN: 978-0-19093-863-5, h/bk, £81.00

ISBN 978-0-19093-864-2, p/bk, £25.99