New Installation: The Forest

Ori Gersht’s thirteen minute The Forest (2005), screening daily at the Yale Center for British Art in one hour increments (now through December 28th), depicts a series of trees falling unobserved – save for the camera and audio recording equipment – in an undisclosed forested location or set of locations. Gersht modifies the camera location, angle of view, mobility of the apparatus, speed of the celluloid and the accompanying audio throughout, thus confirming the variability of spectatorial experience secured by a single event. That is, we see and hear differently depending on our relationship to the phenomenon: in one spot we might see a particular patterning of shadow, in another a gray light filters the dust produced by the tree’s collapse; from a position low to the ground we see the tentacle-like branches waving in the breeze, whereas a position higher up shows us a second tree being impacted by the falling object. In real time our attention may be more calibrated toward the lighting effects procured, while the use of slow motion cues us into the descending leaves.

Significantly, Gersht controls the relationship between sound and image in a manner incommensurate with visual experience: namely, the camera never searches for the source of an audio cue. We are limited to the static rectangle of the camera frame or to its fluid circular movement through space. There is always a selected sound and image, which are never modified for the presence of one or the other. Consequently, Gersht underscores the precariousness of perceptual experience: if we are not at the right place and the right moment we will necessarily miss components of the experience. The Forest represents the inherent limitations of point-of-view, even as it suggests a multiplicity of perspectives. Gersht’s cubism is revealed to be estranged from nature.

Gersht’s audio recordings, like the visual perspectives selected, also vary from instance to instance: whereas we might be given the thundering fall magnified in one moment, in the next we see the tree falling without a sound, save for the ambient canopy of hissing insects that remains nearly ubiquitous throughout the work. That Gersht reduces and even removes the audio track highlights the necessity of the apparatus in the act of hearing: if our angle of vision allows us to see, then our auditory presence makes it possible to hear.

Hence The Forest seems to confirm one of science’s more famous (perhaps initially counterintuitive) claims: that the tree which falls in the forest with no one to hear in fact does not make a sound. Therefore, Gersht’s work replicates Jean Epstein and his fellow classical film theorist’s claims for the medium’s epistemological possibility: that it can help us to conceptualize realities which our perception would seem to belie. That is, if slow motion and reverse motion aids our understanding of a universe where time is relative, The Forest’s audio manipulations assist us in conceiving of an object falling without sound. If there is no subject present to hear the collapse – be it a human being or a tape recording – then there is no sound.

New Film: Lions for Lambs

With the opportunity to attend a free advanced screening of Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs this evening, and with eighty-eight minutes basically free, I decided to break my self-imposed embargo on this year's countless anti-Iraqi war films and take in a film that conspicuously has received nil Oscar buzz this season. I made the wrong decision. No one will ever have enough time or disposable income to justify a viewing of Lions for Lambs, which I so regrettably did earlier tonight. Hopefully the opportunity to say nasty things publicly about Redford's latest will in some sense make up for the way I spent a portion of this evening, because I assure you just knowing that Lions for Lambs is terrible is no solace whatsoever. There is no joy in having an informed opinion about this movie.

Were I to liken Lions for Lambs to anything in particular, it might be the worst film I saw in 2005, Paul Haggis's permanent blight on the reputation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Crash. Perhaps the comparison follows more from what I believe to be the similar low level of quality exhibited by each film - indeed, while I would call Lions for Lambs the worst film I've seen so far this year, it should be noted nevertheless that I avoid Dane Cook vehicles and films where washed-up African American comedians dress up like their fat grandmothers with even greater steadfastness than I do new war films. Still, this is a film with three implausibly overlapping story lines, very Crash-like (not that this is really the problem with Redford's film) featuring Redford as a college poli-sci professor striving to engage a talented though disaffected frat kid; Tom Cruise as a fictional Republican senator attempting to spin the latest Afghani war offense he has devised to Meryl Streep as a liberal reporter for a fictional all-news network; and one black and one Latino soldier respectively waiting to die on a snow-covered mountain top.

In defense of Crash, which I hope is the last time I ever utter that phrase, or more accurately, Hollywood's reception of Crash, is what I perceive to be the general belief (at least at the time) that Haggis's work in some sense represented the true feelings of the Hollywood elite towards race - however perverse these feelings may be; you know you want to help a woman of another color in a car accident, even though you're an inveterate racist, before you molest her. Lions for Lambs attempts to talk about current events by making them up: again, Cruise's senator concocts the very war strategy that puts the aforesaid racially-other soldiers in peril; amazingly, Streep's reporter attempts to compare the fictional ground operation, and by implication the US's military operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq at present to Vietnam on the basis of this very plan of attack. We are asked to draw parallels, in other words, based on explicit fiction. Whatever one may think about the US's presence on either front, Redford's strategy does not seem a rhetorically sound one.

But of course Redford didn't allow his lack of ideas to get in the way of his making of Lions for Lambs, which before I forget was scripted by Matthew Michael Carnahan, who has a promising future project White Jazz slated for 2009. I would just ask Mr. Carnahan to kindly leave the profession thereafter. Who knows, perhaps the writer's strike will still (mercifully) remain unresolved? We can only hope. Also, it is worth stating that this is a film with remarkably low production values, which is most obvious in the combat scenes that give Lions for Lambs more of the generalized look of a basic cable production. Imagine if G4 TV commissioned a war film.

As for Redford, the director's metronomic shot/reverse-shot technique would have been perfunctory in and of itself, was it not for the horrifying content of these images - and of course I am not talking about the inevitable graphic war injuries. Rather it is the solipsistic presence of Redford's professor and Streep's journalist - and the progressive wisdom they continually impart to us - that really makes Redford's reverse angle close-ups excruciating. This is a film that itself does a great violence by imposing its own vacuousness on the world, even in what would seem to be a relatively short duration. Of course, this is not to say that Redford never lets his technique implore; in a pivotal final scene on the mountain, we have a crescendoing score and slow-motion, lest any of us is unaware of how we are meant to feel. If so, your stupidity truly served you well on this one occasion.