Still Life with Pear

Still Life with Pear takes a subversive position towards the illusion inherent in the film-image, its apparent transparency to representation, but rather than dealing with this by countering with strategies of foregrounding the actual materiality of the film-strip, the narrative construct is subverted within the film with a counter-narrative. The film begins with a “classic” framed still life of fruit on a neutral ground, and a series of instructions to move the camera around the still life. In itself this initial plan would already have subverted the initial illusion of the deep space of the still life and all its classic connotations from fine arts painting and history, by exposing the set-up of lights, table, the “back “ of the still life etc. However the subversive plan is itself subverted during the filming with a separate counter narrative in which the filmmaker sometimes follows, and sometimes contradicts, the instructions on the soundtrack, and adds his own spoken description of what he actually does. The stability of the shot is disrupted each time with a violent movement of the camera position. The central section begins with a switching on of the ceiling light and someone eats a piece of the still life, before switching off the ceiling light. The film begins again, but now the initial subversion of the shooting plan with its instructions to move the camera, with the arbitrary decisions by the film-maker to accept or countermand those instructions spoken over the original instructions, are subverted yet again with the introduction of a second actor who eats the still life, reducing it to a pile of discarded waste. In many ways this film, although presenting a strategy for filming as a part of the film text, and subverting first that strategy, and then the original visual focus of that mise en scene – the historical referent of fine art still life images- as the social context of food and fruit, deeply reinforces the inviolability of the image as a carrier of visual authenticity. Our sense of the film image as an adequate and neutral, incontrovertible, referent for the actual world we inhabit, is reinforced by the documentary recording of the multiple subversions. These are all revealed as essentially narrative subversions, within the meta-narrative of film as an unmediated transparent and neutral method of recording the natural world, a simple tool. Later on the notion of the film image as an ideologically (and therefore politically coded) representation of our world view, a supposedly correct and unremarkable rendering of the way things are (or the way we think things are) led me to try and find ways to bring this aspect to the foreground as a counter-element in my film and video work.