Waiting is a word that best illustrates the term “perfect present continuous – the grammar for tense moments in search of perfection.
Coined by independent art curator Nat Muller, the “perfect present continuous is a play on the tense that embodies an action that has started in the past and continues up until now.
By reshuffling the tense to begin with a “perfect, Muller says, a potential for utopia is created, and a possibility of failure is also suggested. The experimental movies presented last Sunday at the Townhouse Gallery were infused with these possibilities, dipped in expectations of the present moment.
The evening began with “Full Moon, a movie directed by Lebanese artist Lamia Joreige, which Muller warns of being “long. Indeed long and ponderous, covering a seemingly interminable repeated trip to Raouché in Lebanon, the piece documents the search of an extraordinary full moon the author had previously witnessed while on the same road.
The journey is fulfilled when the full moon is finally spotted, but nevertheless, it leaves Joreige disappointed. The haunting flavor of that first encounter cannot be recaptured, and the author is told that the poetic scene where the moon looms larger over the horizon than atop is perhaps the most common illusion.
In Oraib Toukan’s “Remind Me to Remember to Forget, the screen is split, much like the mind that wavers between memory and forgetfulness. On the left, the title phrase is snorted in green glitter in Arabic – an image ironically produced to be forgotten – while the right side of the split screen focuses on the chest. Memory becomes “haptic – linked with the body.
The violence of erasure is thus clearly embodied in the wheezing sound as the glitter varnishes accompanied by a heaving in the neck and chest. Contextualizing the film in the wake of Lebanon’s war in 2006, “amnesia, Muller said, becomes a means “for self-protection.
The evening could also easily have been wrapped around Jan de Bruin’s “Waiting for Felipe. Alluding to Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot, the piece centers on two bored policemen who embody all the classic clichés of their profession – looking at the watch, fidgeting, looking left and right, throwing the occasional word, casually entertaining their eyes with the movements of passersby.
Finally, their boredom ends when cars fill in with celebrities and they compose themselves to greet the arrival. That moment of fake composure is in fact the instant that makes them real. Still continuing in the same shot, the camera follows the cars, which are followed by much-ado of other cameras and busybodies, and then returns to the policemen. The two have now noticed the fanfare dying down and slowly relax, and are back to chewing gum, and looking at the watch.
Larissa Sansour’s “SBARA – Arabs spelled backwards – mocks the fake horror-shows made of Arabs in the media. In sequences that tip the hat to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining, a young boy explores the setting of a castle. An antique radio anachronistically blurts modern newscasts about terrorism, the young boy scrawls SBARA at the door behind which a mysterious figure in black lies in a bath tub, raising its hand, and finally sits up, clad in a burqa.
Equally humorous is “An Early Lost Play by Yane Calovski and Fos, where a seemingly naive character documents the evolution in her forms of protest following political turmoil in Denmark. Starting with painting a sign that she was commissioned to draw, the character Tanja herself becomes the figure of protest when she finally walks through streets with theater blood on her face – well-suited, she says, to the world she inhabits.
The naiveté of Tanja’s character is used to calling a spade, well, a spade. Following one protest in which social democrats apologize to Muslims and organize a protest, she says, “But I am not sure they felt better afterwards. Often the character is seen carrying the sign, “All this noise for nothing. Nothing to something.
Expectations prevail in all these films. Time is elongated in one, split and embodied and erased in another. More personal in “Full Moon and “Remind Me – albeit in the backdrop of the Lebanon war – time carries more overt political references in “SBARA and “An Early Lost Play.
Each work approaches time differently – measuring it in dates or breaths or moons, through nostalgia or expectation, but always in search of a fuller moon – perfect, present, continuous.
For information on events at the Townhouse Gallery, visit www.thetownhousegallery.com.
