Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
In his fascinating DVD commentary for "Timecode," Figgis talks frankly about how there are times when you just can't take in what's going on in his four-screen film, even when, occasionally, he keeps one screen on a subject long enough that you're effectively only watching three, as when a woman eavesdrops for several minutes on her lover. The point is, you don't need to. This very incompleteness, this partialness, creates its own tension, which becomes part of the story, as it does in "24," where absence of information is a theme.
What starts as necessity becomes a skill, even a pleasure: There's an unnamed satisfaction in stretching this newfound ability to navigate through images. We're actually hungry to use this ability, to feed it with something more substantive than frenzied Web animations and stock tickers. We crave stories. The single-channel film is the visual art form of the gaze; multichannel is the art form of the glimpse.
It's an art form increasingly found in galleries and museums, where more artists than I can possibly list here have been creating multiscreen environments and multichannel works, many entirely narrative in nature. The French artist Pierre Huyghe created a double-screen piece that parallels excerpts from Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon" with his own film of the actual bank robber, now 30 years older, reenacting the crime with actors on a set. Cecilia Dougherty's "Gone" uses a double screen to reinterpret the story of the gay son in the PBS vérité series "An American Family."
The Iranian artist Shirin Neshat frequently uses two screens facing each other to vividly convey the rigid divisions in gender between Iranian men on one screen and Iranian women on another. Doug Aitken used three rooms with multiple screens to evoke a lonely man's walk through a Los Angeles night. Sam Taylor-Wood's seven-screen piece "Party" peels away the dynamics of a cocktail party by filming one with seven cameras in real time. Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Gary Hill and other video artists have long used multiple monitors to fracture time and images.
The last time people were chopping up images like this was way back in the '60s, when sex and drugs were good for you. In what came to be called "expanded cinema," underground filmmakers put projectors on light shows and threw images around galleries. In 1957, Jordan Belson and Henry Jacobs began massive multiprojector shows on the ceiling of a San Francisco planetarium. In 1959, Charles and Ray Eames (best known for the Eames chair) put a seven-screen display called "Glimpses of the USA" together to show America to Nikita Khrushchev, who loved its seven simultaneous images of Marilyn Monroe blowing kisses. The Eameses made a six-screen presentation called "House of Science" the next year, and then the incredible 17-screen "Think" for the IBM pavilion at the New York World's Fair of 1964.
Superimposition became -- and remains -- the quintessential way to show an LSD trip. Andy Warhol's films began to split in 1965; the most famous of these was "Chelsea Girls," where he paired up reels -- some color, some black-and-white -- he'd been shooting of his friends in New York. That became the first commercially released double-screen film.
This visual adventuring culminated in the screen-drenched pavilions of another World's Fair, Montreal's Expo '67: One pavilion had two 70-foot screens placed vertically facing each other, Francis Thompson's six-screen "We Are Young" played in another and the Czechoslovak pavilion featured 130 continuously changing images. Both Fleischer, a studio veteran by that time, and Jewison went to Expo '67 and were inspired by the visual vocabulary they encountered there. Which is why the two greatest split-screen movies -- theirs -- came out in 1968. (And why the fracturing frames of "24" can trace their lineage from Hopkins' love of "The Boston Strangler" straight back to expanded cinema.)
Mysteriously, while video and film artists continued to use multiple projectors and monitors from that point on, in Hollywood, split screen went from cutting edge -- in movies like "Charley" and "The Andromeda Strain" -- to passé in about two minutes. "Wicked, Wicked," a 1973 film directed by Richard L. Bare, used split screen -- dubbed "Duovision" -- in its entirety. Deemed a bomb, it never made it to video. But despite its clumsy writing and acting, "Wicked, Wicked" is well worth watching for its exploration of reasons to divide a story's screen: fantasy vs. reality, memory vs. present, truth vs. lies, hope vs. fear and -- since it's the story of a peeping Tom -- watcher vs. watched, stalker vs. stalked.
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