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1. The irst screen shows a lone cowboy exploring
various American landscapes, from the dessert, mountain, and then on a seaside.
2. The second screen shows a deserted-looking
town, empty from inhabitants except for one moment in the ilm when a helicopter lands
and a team of American troopers barges into the space, moving further from the camera until
they disappear amid the town’s buildings.
3. The third screen shows a group of cowboys
slouching around a ire while talking about gun, law, violence, contemporary American politics,
and auteurist ilm in a self-relexive manner.
4. The fourth screen shows a juxtaposition of
interior and exterior space of a town illed with inhabitants. A travelling performer unloads his
cart outside a saloon where people hang out, play card, drink, and later watch a vaudeville
performance. Later, the scene inside the saloon is broken by the presence of a assistant to
director and a cameraman giving instruction for the casts. The camera dolly up to follow the casts
walk out the ilm set, revealing the diferent lighting setup, from the darkened ilm set to the
broad daylight where the other ilm crews work.
5. The ifth screen shows a woman standing in
front of her house, forever waiting. The camera portrays her through various angles. Later,
a combined movement of dollies up and a backward move of a property reveals that the
woman and the house are merely a property set by camera and its tracking rails.
In American Night, the images that form the imagined western are visually showed at least
in two manners, irst as a conined space of movement and second, as tableaux-vivant or
painting-like scenes. What is the implication of such imposition?
Rather than a background for action, the space in this ilm is the action. It contains movements
and igures that deine the space. The space is a static site that contains movement, thus
creating an experience of immobile mobility. The igures move across the space, explore it or
even disappear amidst it. However, the space remains still. This notion of moving in a circle
conined by space is best represented by the lone cowboy igure. While he keeps moving
around the landscapes, almost like testing the boundaries of the space he inhabits, he
eventually meets the border.
Fig 1. The lone cowboy meet the sea, captured from Rosefeldt’s vimeo page
http:vimeo.com54721000
In a painting-like shot composition that brings a recollection of German Romantic artist
Caspar David Fiedrich’s painting, Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog 1818, the lone cowboy and
his horse encounter a true frontier, a seaside. This idea of human and spatial limitation
is diferent from the traditional western’s notion of the frontier as a threshold between
the civilized and the savage. Rather, in this scene, Rosefeldt proposes an alternative idea
about frontier as a limit between human and nature, in which humans’ mobility is limited
by the space they inhabit. The tableaux-vivant manner that brings a painting-like reading of
the image emphasises this notion of stillness. Like a frozen moment, it is simultaneously
motioned and motionless.
The West as a spatial representation in American Night thus could be understood
irstly regarding its form as a site of movement; a still site that contains a loop or
circle movement. Secondly, it is a space that is constructed through the use of Western
genre’s iconography to represent the idea of myth. It is no coincidence that myth is also
part of Western genre discourses that we will further discuss later.
In his 1969 article, Jim Kitses exclaims “ A western is a western is a western” to point
out how the term Western as a ilm genre can be pejoratively understood as a cliché, a
repetitive practice that after some time has established its iconic quality. Iconic, a term he
borrows from art history connotes “an image that both records and carries a conceptual
and emotional weight drawn from a deined symbolic ield, a tradition” “Authorship and
Genre: Notes on the Western” 67. The iconicity of Western genre in Kitses’s
term is the basis of how American Night establishes a contract with its spectator. Since
the images are widely familiar and already carry meanings that are also recognizable,
the spectator is positioned in a space of recognition and deception, especially by the
ilm’s mode that simultaneously conirms and betrays the expectation formed by the
genre tradition. In this sense, while the ilm’s self-relexivity could be seen as a break out
of a convention, the reason that strategy could work is also because the convention
has already established. Put it another way, American Night sets up an agreement with its
spectator through the recognition of Western genre iconographies.
3. American Night as Cinema of Exhibitions
I was there with another spectator and we were both alternately changing our position,
from sitting, standing, to wandering from one screen to another.
To sum up the experience, it was a combination of familiarity and unfamiliarity. An experience
of ‘strolling’ while watching the artwork that is not motivated by a camerawork or a subject
on screen is unfamiliar, likewise the visible
projector on the loor. However, the dark room is familiar as a space of ilm viewing associated
with the cinema, as well as the images on screen. A lonely cowboy, a deserted-looking
town, a crowded saloon, a group of cowboys camping, and a woman standing in front of
a house, waiting. It was a familiar world of the West, a repetitive image that we closely
associate with a cliché notion of western genre.
In the four pages genealogical tree of expanded cinema, the writers of Expanded Cinema:
Art, Performance, Film deine a practice they
term as ‘cinema of exhibitions’. They suggests that this practice tends to use a gallery “as a
context for on the one hand, deconstructing the identity process inscribed in iconic works
of classical cinema, and on the other, for
exhibiting the processes of ilm production as a form of media displacement” Curtis, Rees,
Whites, and Ball 9.
American Night its well within this deinition.
Experimenting with the idea of myth of the West, American Night deconstructs
the western genre that is groomed within the classical Hollywood cinema tradition.
The ilm’s ideological position in criticizing American frontier policies is illustrated
through the myth of America par excellence. In a scene on one of the screens, a group of
American troops lands on an empty deserted- looking town hunting for God-knows-what.
They enter the town, march into it, and then blend into the buildings before at last
disappear from view. This besiege act is a striking reminder of contemporary American
policy in sending their troops to capture the so-called terrorists in a desolate wasteland of
Middle East.
This imagery of a wasteland on one screen and
Fig 2. American Night ilm installation in BFI 10
Sptember-6 November 2010 from Max Wigram gallery http:www.maxwigram.comartistsjulian-rosefeldt
American Night as exhibited in British Film Institute in 2010 is part of my lingering
memory of travelling experience. It was my irst visit to London and in fact, it was my irst
experience of travelling abroad. Upon entering the exhibition space, inside the darkened BFI
Southbank gallery, I was already a traveler ready to take a journey through a new terrain
of moving image. Hence, my recollection of experiencing American Night is tangled and
melded with my travelling memory, forming a narrative of journey and discovery.
I remember that the gallery was illed with ive wide-screen installation indicated by the Fig 2
above, creating a panorama-like juxtaposition.
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a stunning nature of various landscape that the lone cowboy riding through on another
screen form a contradictory spatial image of the West. In his study Virgin Land, Henry
Nash Smith traces how the West as symbol has functioned in America’s history and
consciousness through its spatial imagery. “Is the West a garden of natural dignity and
innocence ofering refuge from decadence of civilization? Or is it a treacherous desert
stubbornly resisting the gradual sweep of agrarian progress and community values?”
qtd. in “Authorship and Genre: Notes on the Western 58.
This ideological tension within the western tradition’s spatial coniguration is part of
the mythical West. On one hand, the West is a myth that is constructed through the
reconciliation of its contradictory nature since this contradiction allows “a wide
range of intervention, choice, spectacle and experiment” “Authorship and Genre: Notes
on the Western” 64. On the other hand, it is also a myth that constructs a certain idea
about America particularly in regard to the notion of homeland and the nature of
frontier as a myth of barrier, the threshold between the insider and the outsider, the
civilized and the uncivilized, the lawful and the outlaw. As Kitses has put it, “Its greatest
strength has been this very pervasiveness and repetition... It is only because the western has
been everywhere before us for so long that it ‘works’ ” “Authorship and Genre: Notes on
the Western” 65.
Deconstructing western genre as iconic work through self-relexivity thus creates a sense of
media displacement as a state of asynchronous or an out-of-place impression. The title
American Night is a reference to another ilm
La Nuit Americaine Trufaut, 1973, a ilm
about the process of ilm production and also a reference towards a lighting technique
commonly used in western ilm that enables a night scene shot in a broad daylight. This
reference towards ilm production process is illustrated by the presence of ilm crews,
camera track, and an overall portrayal of the ilm setting as a ilm set.
The sense of displacement not only works spatially, but also temporally. The reference
towards Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Jean- Luc Godard, or even 50 Cents is a temporal
distortion that interrupts the conventional
time setting of western ilm world in a far- away period of American past.
A sense of displacement also comes from the way we experience the exhibition space.
The fact that the spectator could move freely within the conined space of the gallery
enables a certain degree of distance navigation and negotiation. We could come closer to
the screen and focusing on one screen after another or we could sit in a distance and watch
it altogether. This experience of movement creates uncertainty since there is no single
way to experience the artwork. The spectator thus experiences a sense of displacement that
came from the fact that the distance between her and the artwork is liable to change.
Understanding American Night as cinema of exhibition thus illuminates the notion of space
while experiencing the artwork in two levels. In the irst level, we experience a textual space
where we make meanings within a conined space of ilmic text. In the second level, we
experience this textual space in its exhibition space where the moving bodily experience
creates uncertainty of placing the artwork within a distance from her body. In other
words, we could say that its exhibition design has positioned the spectator to experience a
sense of displacement.
4. Spatiovisual Art and Intersubjective Spectatorship
