Real thing, wrong place
Nigel Ryan examines the spaces carved out in video works by Amal El-Kenawy and Sherif El-Azma
There is a point at which accessibility to means of production is in danger of becoming as much a liability as an advantage and no more so, perhaps, than in the relative ease with which artists have determined to step behind the camera. The temporal narrative holds obvious attractions, though they are not so sufficiently obvious to explain why the making of films should have become the artistic equivalent of the pre- pubescent desire to fly airplanes, or drive racing cars, or be a pop star. But having acquired camera a film will be made: the camera is the sine qua non and everyone, just everyone, has a tale to tell. Tell it they will, all too often as unmediated self- dramatisation: while that may well be a first step on the road to somewhere it is a step often better taken in private. That is the downside. The Room, a performance piece by Amal El-Kenawy, and Television Pilot for an Egyptian Air Hostess Soap Opera, by Sherif El-Azma, both of which were shown last week as part of Windows, the curiously mismatched event intended to mark 'the rehabilitation of the new space at Townhouse", represent the upside. Both, incidentally, will appear in Beirut, in November, as part of Ashkal Alwan's Forum on Cultural Practices in the Region, Ashkal Alwan having partly financed the production of Television Pilot, something inexplicably ignored in publicity for the Cairo event.
Television Pilot for an Egyptian Air Hostess Soap Opera hardly trips off the tongue: as unwieldy as it is prosaically self-deflating the title ascribes intentions seemingly abandoned at some point in the process of making. The soap opera is in any case a genre too easy to deconstruct to make of that deconstruction much beyond pastiche and this is too edgy, far too edgy a film to be neatly packaged within the boundaries of a by now hackneyed re-jiggling of representational codes: if it begins with that promise, and the opening scenes of trainee air hostesses certainly indicate this as a possible direction, the detachment necessary for the pursuit of such an ironic exercise turns quickly into something far less programmatic, and considerably more interesting.
It is an uncomfortable film, the corporate blandness of the sets -- the office of an airline company in which the hostesses are being trained by Menha El-Batraoui in Reichkomissar/mother superior mode, the business class section of an airliner -- assume the claustrophobic quality their very blandness is intended to mitigate. These are spaces within which the characters, the aspirant Egyptian air hostesses, are at once dislocated and constrained, allowed to be themselves while unconsciously projecting images of those selves they would not readily recognise, a discrepancy that may well be born of process -- Television Pilot originated in a series of improvisations -- but which comes to constitute one of the film's more disturbing registers not least because, whatever the improvised origins there is an undertow less, perhaps, of misogyny -- though it hardly just happened that the majority of the characters are women -- than of restrained cruelty. Within such spaces there may well be no place to go -- you cannot, after all, exit an airplane just as an air hostess cannot afford to have a bleeding nose, or be rude to passengers. But equally there is no place, either beneath the trainer's unrelenting gaze, or in the cabin, for aggression to hide, not even a metaphoric carpet beneath which to sweep the less savoury aspects of the characters involved.
The declamatory neutrality of setting is eventually anything but neutral, steadily imposing itself as a credible alternative to the neon-lit laboratory, to which end El-Azma works with rather than against his medium: video does not lend itself readily to the atmospherics of chiaroscuro; it flattens; is better at outline than depth though a great many practitioners seem perversely determined to play to its weaknesses rather than strengths. Not so here, where any straining after nuance is baldly illuminated, while the easy comfort of shadow is spurned. What constitutes a stylistic hit on the visual level becomes a more difficult proposition, however, when applied to characterisation, where the insistence on playing along with the actors becomes an exercise in playing to type.
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From top: Television Pilot for an Egyptian Air Hostess Soap Opera, Sherif El-Azma; The Room, Amal El-Kenawy
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At times Television Pilot appears to be pulling in too many directions simultaneously. The partially explored promise of the title dissipates in a series of tense encounters between the trainees, a nest of occasional vipers whose smiles, in true soap operatic fashion cannot quite conceal the fangs, replete with nods in the direction of class and gender politics, while the introduction of logical inconsistencies within the in flight sequences appears at times a gratuitously tricky subversion of audience expectation rather than the conventions upon which they are based. Yet the occasional moments of langueur that result operate as the space within which the echoes of a disturbing drama resonate: it is the hollow at the heart of the enterprise, a temporal equivalent of white office, white table, and the studied depersonalisation of the corporate venture, less caesura than site of the actual dislocation that emerges as the primary focus of this work. It is in the fractures, the narrative faultlines that signification resides, though these appear at times barely conscious, let alone planned.
The film ends with a smile, the smile of the hostess whose nose bleeds, and who has been given the trainer's address in Paris. A pretty moment, though hardly redemptive: the warnings have in any case already been plastered and this film's ambitions lie well beyond that.
The English sub-titling of the film appeared at times to aspire to the status of sub-plot, a minor criticism though Television Pilot for an Egyptian Air Hostess Soap Opera has a sufficiently dissonant voice to render such superficial additions annoying. The cake hardly required this re-icing.
The Room, a performance piece by Amal El- Kenawy, is far less of a mouthful and slots, generically at least, far more comfortably into the gallery space, though comfortable is not how one would wish to describe a work in which the artist sits on stage, sheathed in white, in a white tiled room. The tiles furnish a grid, fixing the profile of the artist and the white wedding dress next to which she sits slowly, mechanically sewing a heart onto the sleeve. It is a piece of punning that acquires rather more force than mere word play when, next to the room in which she sits a video is projected. The heart here is real, it palpitates and quivers, a piece of offal slowly being stitched onto white cloth by two hands encased in white lace gloves. It is a startling image of the price exacted in the stitching of this organ: it may be being externalised, fixed with sharp needles to be worn as adornment, decorated with pearl headed pins and a white fabric rose, but it works. It is the real thing, in the wrong place, in relentless close up.
The bride stands in a white tiled bathroom, somewhere inside/outside, an ambiguous space, with water pouring from an unseen faucet. A clay tree grows then shrinks back into itself, an amorphous lump of malleable stuff. A white butterfly is trapped against another grid, fixed even as it flutters, no pinning necessary. The legs of a doll hang mid-screen, the body invisible, the mutilation implied only by absence. A white clad figure lies on a bed, overlain by a sheet that might as well be a shroud, to be fixed, as the heart is being fixed, by cruelly pointed lines.
It is a savage lyricism, monochrome except for the heart quivering away as it is stitched to the marital pillow. And at its core lies a singular absence, the absence of the body from which the heart has been removed, to which the plastic legs of the doll are attached. And the presence of the artist on stage, mechanically sewing, complicit in her own removal, de-atomising herself, acts only to underline the coercion that results in this renunciation of the physical, outlining those spaces -- inside/outside, public/private -- in which the corporeal cannot be acknowledged as ruthlessly as the grid in front of which she sews outlines of her own profile.
The Room shocks only in the clarity with which it articulates this dispossession of (female) self, with which it records the costs inherent in such detachment. Television Pilot is an altogether different product: clarity is hardly an issue when the voice that emerges is so dissonant. And if the strategies El-Kenawy and El-Azma adopt in engaging with their worlds are inevitably opposed -- here is where a gendered critique might shed the greatest light -- it is far from being a coincidence that at the heart of both projects, indeed the very point at which they intersect, lies an empty space, the cavity within which meaning reverberates.
