excerpt
False Moves (Hold in Mind)
Masha Tupitsyn
(excerpts, p. 21-27)
What image lies in an image? What images lie in people? In an
age when we act like movies and movies act like us, when the
reciprocity is total, it is impossible to know what came first, as
a movie is the sum total of many movies, and people are the
sum total of many movies.
There are fourteen images presented in the first series of
Philippe Terrier-Hermann's The American Tetralogy. Hold in Mind
features a trio of young, Hollywood-looking leads that consists
of two men and one woman. The trio is also a love triangle, one
that we have come to know well through cinema, in particular
European cinema, which has always been less invested in the
traditional two-person couple. In the photographs, a narrative
of jealousy and ambiguous sexual tension is performed and
imitated for the camera. Desire is purely mimetic. The three
leads are living (or visiting) in a Hollywood house in the hills,
maybe Laurel Canyon. But it's unclear which couple is the real
couple, or if a couple even exists in this story. Mostly, the duos take turns rotating around the house, moving into focus and
out of focus, in close-up and far away, until the three leads
finally converge into an explicit triangle at a pool by the end of
the series. In each picture, the characters sign the coded tensions,
desires, and configurations of cinema without actually
embodying them.
(...)
In 21st century consumer culture, we have outworn our use for
titles and categories such as actor or model, for delineations
like life or movie, real or fake, as we are all actors and models
now, and most things are fake. The same, too, is true of origins.
Whether something comes from real life or a movie is no longer
the point. It is also impossible to ascertain for a generation
steeped in referentiality, reflexivity, and a torrent of media. It
is more like we are channeling ourselves by channeling others.
From movies and media we pirate and download facial expressions,
emotions, and desires that have been copied from us, from our “life screens” and “screen lives.” These chains of psycho-
mimetic exchange trivialize and standardize our subjective
heritage, making life a brand.
The second half of Hold in Mind features a kind of sub-plot. One
film still depicts a car accident. The victim who has been hit, a
black woman with an afro dressed like Pam Grier's Foxy Brown,
and riding a skateboard, appears in the next “scene” as a guest
of honor at a hot tub party. The people who hit her with their
car are also there. Everyone is laughing. The woman is fine.
The woman sitting on her left, a kind of cinematic apparition
is a throw back to old Hollywood. Dressed in 30s wear, she
could be Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond. The final image
in the series features a man floating face down in a pool. He is
appears to be dead, or at the very least, he is acting dead. The
word acting is key here, as acting and staging – contrivance – are
the modality par excellence of 21st century culture. He is dead
in this image, or dead for this image, which is reminiscent of
William Holden's screenwriter Joe Gillis in Billy Wilder's great
Hollywood parable, Sunset Boulevard. The image that opens
Sunset Boulevard is the image that closes Hold in Mind, and with
it, we seem to be back to the original love triangle, which has
an unexplained and abrupt noir ending.
With all of its cinematic echoes, allusions, and shorthand; its
time-warps and tropes, Hold in Mind makes clear that we have
seen what it means to feel everything. We have watched what
it looks like to be a person acting like a person: to be sad, to
be angry, to be beautiful, to be in love, to be jealous, to be
rich, to be poor, to live in Los Angeles, to live in New York, to
be bored, to be young, to be carefree and caught off guard, to
be a woman, to be blonde, to be a man, to be white, to be a
body, to be a face. A face on the screen. A face for the screen.
Everything is in quotes here. The transition from the car accident
to the adoption of a victim into a party is an interesting alternate narrative to the series, for it demonstrates that glamor,
and apparently glamor alone, is able to trump (and erase)
even a crime. The potential break or interruption the car accident
offers to the contrived glamour of the Hollywood narrative,
to the industry of image, as well as the Hollywood lifestyle,
is quickly subsumed into another narrative. Into more fantasy
and fiction. Both the victim and the accident are glossed
over and appropriated the way images are appropriated and
glossy, and therefore not only are difference and alterity instantly
commodifiable, they are immediately recognizable. Real
life is seduced into and by the loop of simulacra and consumer
culture, which reduces and reproduces everything into
endless scenes.
It is precisely because of these once iconic, and now hackneyed,
depictions, in fact, that we often do the things we do, are the
people we are, and move to the cities we move to. We do it not
simply to live the way people live in those films, in the roles
those cities play on film, or the roles we play in those cinematic
cities, which is its own fantasy and construction, as Thom
Andersen explains in Los Angeles Plays Itself, but to look like
the people in those films. This is what Terrier-Hermann's film
stills in The American Tetralogy – pictures based on an “imagined”
movie, a premise only plausible and intelligible, if we possess a
collective cinematic epistemology – show us. Movies, photographs,
and advertising have taught us not only what it means to
live, but what it looks like to live, for we do not so much have
inner lives anymore, as outer ones.
(...)
In a culture that constantly emphasizes a movie's – and now a
life's – extra-cinematic narratives; that is, what one hears, says,
reads, and believes about a visual medium, rather than what
one simply sees, it becomes clear that images are not only shaped by the screens that transmit them, but by the viewers
who inhabit, reproduce, and alter those screens. For what does
verisimilitude mean in an artifice-obsessed, affected world that
is oversaturated with images? Further, what is reality and its
representation in a world where “realism” and identity have
proven to be nothing more than reflexive constructs?
If Hollywood is the global cultural capital, then the characters
in Hold in Mind are staging scenes in which they merely pretend
to be living, acting out life for the camera inside of them. These
characters pretend to be upset, pretend to be happy, pretend to
be lovers, pretend to kiss – with one eye always on the camera.
They pretend not to notice the camera, or be in a world that
doesn't always have a camera on its mind and a camera in its
pocket. A world in which everything and everyone is an a priori
photograph, all the time. In the digital age, in the post-cinematic
age, we are always prepared to be in the pictures we want
to turn out like.
The fourteen “scenes” in Hold in Mind work from the outside in,
not the inside out. Therefore, if there is a de facto “interaction”
and a de facto “place” in the film frames of Terrier-Hermann's Hold in Mind, as well as the series as a whole, it lies more in the
semantic tetralogy of representation itself. That is: between
people-as-images in relation to places-as-images, and conversely,
images-as-people in relation to images-as-places. This is
the schematic quartet at the heart of Terrier-Hermann's The American Tetralogy.
In his a statement about the project, Terrier-Hermann explains:
“I'm interested in understanding how the overproduction (and
flood) of television and film images emerging from this specific
territory, transformed every single place into an everlasting
set. How this mental transformation conditions our reading
of an image? How it influences our way of existing?” Thus, it
can also be concluded, that our overproduction of images, or what Terrier-Hermann refers to as a false iconography, and I
refer to as false moves, has transformed not just every place
into an ever-lasting set, but every person. Culture has always
lived in and through people. But more and more, it is images
that either connect or disconnect us. Images that form social
ties. Images that take up our time. Images that teach us how to
live and think. And because images have become an enormous
part of what it means to exist, cinematic history – the history of
images – is also personal history.
