Exhibition February-May 1996

With no one quite so sure when the first movie camera cranked, the centenary of moving pictures seems to be dragging on forever. To that end, as one of the grandest, most imaginative contributions in the particular debate so far: Spellbound.

Subtitled ‘Art and Film’, this Hayward Gallery show (and its lavish catalogue) gives artists and filmmakers the space and time to make the (un)obvious connections between disciplines. Here and there you have to think that they’re separate – Ridley Scott's video installation flashes up pages of script and production ephemera from Alien and Blade Runner and gives you a sore neck for little reward. A useful piece of TV, maybe, but art it ain’t. As his recent features have evidenced, the once visionary Ridley, bless him, looks to have hitched a fast ride on the wrong boat.

It's all ups and down, of course, as if we expected any different. Paula Rego’s pastel re-imaginings of Disney as exaggerated kitchen sink are beautifully done, instinctive, intellectually rigorous, and not a little dull. Steve McQueen’s moody black and white short Stage – in which a black man and white woman almost meet – is attractive but sterile. And yet, while Boyd Webb’s pop-corn love story might be less ambitious, it's also funny and, bizarrely, quite touching.

Apocalypse Now, Fiona Banner’s contribution, sees the entire narrative structure of Coppola’s masterpiece pencilled by hand across a cinema screen-sized sheet of paper tacked to the wall. From a distance, from far enough away not to be able to make out the individual words, is to see the film. To get close, as Linda Ruth Williams writes in her useful essay: ‘captures the frozen quality of all narrative moments, the narrative being paradoxically present simultaneously . . . Nothing, except everything, is privileged.’ To continue writing (Banner’s also ‘done’ Lawrence of Arabia and Top Gun) would be to milk a smart idea, but there is no denying the force (and whimsy) of the end result.

‘Backstage is more interesting than front stage . . . Seeing how things work is also a kind of metaphor for looking inside the brain.’ The Jesus Works And Store, veteran Eduardo Paolozzi’s installation, collects together dozens of would-be film props – figures, wooden guns, electrical circuits – for use in ‘an indescribable film’. It deliberately recalls memories of other films, and in and of itself is impressive, but allied to Peter Greenaway’s epic installation (later) it comes across as mere rehearsal.

To enter Spellbound is to be introduced immediately to Douglas Gordon’s astonishing, atavistic 24 Hour Psycho. It’s actually very simple: normal cinema film is projected at 24 frames a second (TV at 25, but we won’t go into that); Gordon has slowed Hitchcock’s classic down to just 2. Why? Why indeed, when you realise it now lives up to its billing of an excruciating 24 hours. To see a masterpiece of coiled suspense dissected at such extraordinary length is to see the film anew. Martin Balsam dying on the stairs and, of course, the shower scene, are robbed of their shock choreography, becoming exercises in extended formalism and composition. Other sequences, often uneventful and expositionary, are re-imagined with their own internal logic and tension; what Gordon calls ‘micro-narrative’. 

I suppose new enfant pathetic of British art Damien Hirst had to be invited and typically takes the easy way out, making a short film and coming over all post-modern (lazy?) by frying bugs on one of those bug-frying grills. Hanging Around casts for the ubiquitous Keith Allen a string of realities only when he is present; a logic it then spectacularly fails to follow through. It’s awful. It’s not so much the bad acting (ironic, no doubt), the dreadful direction, the slack writing, nor even the banal 70s TV look so much as Hirst’s grating attempts to shock with pernicious would-be video nasty gore, nudity and drug abuse. The audience leaves having squandered several hundred minutes of its collective life in the drowning valleys of Hirst’s tiresome ego. The working title was apparently Is Mr Death In – an anagram of Damien Hirst. So, he points out in the catalogue, is ‘near mid-shit’.

Terry Gilliam’s Road To Monkey Heaven looks initially like some warmed-over Brazil. It’s all grey filing cabinets floor to ceiling, the walls on either side flickering with a distorted 12 Monkeys. Only when the cabinets are opened is his method revealed – notebooks from the film; test screening reaction sheets; telephones that can be picked up; snatches of the film; yourself on mini-TVs. Gilliam is brilliantly melding his two great passions in this strange room – surrealism and bureaucracy. The baroque flights of his prolific imagination stamped, filed and labelled: Birth of a Notion, Ships in the Night, Vox Populying Bastards, et al.

Gilliam is the uneasy visionary who tries with such valiant folly to lash Hollywood to his esoteric American genius, albeit one that has lived here long enough to develop an irony gland. In the end, then, this is the true twin of Greenaway’s exhibit – disassembling the structured chaos of the Hollywood film and packing it away in neat little boxes. It looks fantastic and it makes you laugh. You want blood?

Sharing top floor with Hirst and the coffee shop is the show-stealing Peter Greenaway – and not just because his is biggest and loudest. Sure, it dominates, booming its ingenious, cluttered soundtrack throughout the gallery (resounding through the closed doors of the Hirst screening; it can only help) but, like the Gilliam, it’s the sheer naked, unambiguous ambition paraded here that sticks. Greenaway has never been British, never been embarrassed to shoot for the moon, and In The Dark is no shrinking violet.

Greenaway’s installation deconstructs film to its constituent parts – script, props, sound, actors, audience – and displays them in a sort of MFI Greenaway flat pack. Each day a new set of newspapers (text/script) are added to the racks; each day has its own set of props from the vast trestles of ephemera stretched across the room; and the five glass boxes at the far end have a daily exchange of their human cargo (actors who have played adulterers, the day I was there). A sophisticated lighting rig and that ominous, omnipresent soundtrack complete the effect. It looks like a Peter Greenaway film, it sounds like a Peter Greenaway film; it feels like living inside of the perfect Peter Greenaway film. It’s big, it’s unapologetically intellectual, and, like the Gilliam, it’s very funny. Hirst and Scott must look at this and those filing cabinets from Hell and weep.

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