“OUR GODS, YOUR GHOSTS”
Artist’s statement on KAIROS
The final installment of a research project on Australia’s Arid Zone, Kairos was always intended as a film in the classic sense of the word: an immersive object to embark the viewer on a journey – a “trip” some would argue - in a strange and fragmented universe. The work forms a further investigation in minimal narratives, and takes an ambivalent analytical stance as to the proceedings and perceptions of fiction.
Developed throughout a few field trips in areas directly affected by the colonial intervention, the fiction in Kairos derives directly from a conceptual procedure of translation, of re-signifcation, as by a situationist “détournement” of actual facts and occurrences, places and structures.
The story was devised as an allegory, as a strategy to thwart a number “obstructions” encountered in the research, and as a way to formulate an indirect form a critique on contentious issues (historical and actual) concerning the particular landscape where the work is set. Indeed, it proved particularly difficult to raise issues concerning the impact of the industry on the environment within a community that cherishes its heritage. As an “outsider”, it proved equally difficult to be able to say things about the indigenous culture, which shuns most forms of interaction in a protective reflex from attempts at instrumentalisation and recuperation.
Moreover the narrative premise, thematising time, would allow a layer of philosophical interrogation, and evade all too topical issues. Kairos reflects on the notion of time on different levels, at once diegetically and structurally.
The fiction is set in the aftermath of a traumatic event referred to as the Great Temporal Catastrophe – ironically hinting at a wave of apocalyptic genre films with which the landscape is associate. The film ultimately does not build towards an dramatic point of tension or conflict but rather measures the effects of an event event that is by nature invisible and “unspectacular”.
In true sci-f fashion, the film privileges the construction of a universe over plot, character development or psychologization. This universe is constructed on a simple postulate: the desert expanse represents pure, “raw” time; this raw time is a resource, a precious commodity, which is extracted, processed and distributed - capitalized - by the corporation, CTF (Collective Time Flow).
Conceived as an agency, the films constitutes a set of clues for the viewer to assemble and work with. Its minimalism resides therein that it is a film with blanks and suspensions : a space for the viewer to claim, to interpret, to establish relations within; it is a structure that works as a text. The aim – and challenge - of the project was to leave only the bare mechanics of a narrative: to approach a “zero degree” while preserving the immersive and experiential qualities of cinema.
Following a documentary approach, the story (and even dialogues) derived directly from local “histories”, and originated from various explorations, encounters or testimonies, which were subsequently translated within the fictional framework. All locations were treated as ready-mades, as found objects. No sets were built, or arranged. Except for minor interventions (labeling), all the props were directly related to the place and its history, and are endowed with intrinsic meaning. The narrative elements are metaphorical operators.
For instance: the Catastrophe stands for colonization; CTF alludes to the mining company BHP (which was first set-up in the area); the Verdania radio ad is a straight copy of an ad for the Roxby Downs desert community – a new settlement around the Olympic Dam Mining facility, the world’s largest uranium mine; the extractor is a magnetic flowmeter: a mining tool; The main character’s car is a Ford Falcon: a well known Australian produced sedan as weathered outback car that is an outspoken symbol of colonialism; the “secret” map is an interpretation of an early and incomplete explorer’s map of the area, etc. Furthermore, the character of the “Collector”, the guardian of memory of times before the Catastrophe, is to be an aboriginal Elder. Equally, the main character “Larry Church” acts as an example of an Australian frontier settler: he is unruly and rough, trying t score his own bounty, but ultimately fearful and beholden to the master’s voice (and interests). Even in terms of the driving narrative theme, the film feeds on the widespread "myth" concerning the desert: that is a place where people disappear.
My practice originates “outside” cinema. For Kairos in particular it has been a challenge to retain a quality of “drifting in and out of fiction”, but at the same time to maintain an investigative approach as to the workings of cinema. Consistent with the ground motive of my practice, I tried to play with the viewer’s expectation by triggering associations but deliberately leaving things unspoken and undetermined as I seek to leave an explicit space, a Brechtian “distance”, for reflection and negotiation on the part of the viewer as to create conditions for what I coin “active reading”. For instance the film resists a clear identification with the main character: we never get to know clearly who he is, what his motivations are, nor what he’s actually doing.
In subtly shifting between genre conventions and modalities, the film blurs the distinctions between cinematic categories and representational registers. But more importantly, Kairos aims to subtly question the relationship between fiction and reality, while erasing the clear boundaries between both, echoing the way our mediated reality is informed by and apprehended through fictions.
There’s a political subtext underlying the film, concerning colonization, the demise of the aboriginal cultural identity (to which the landscape is a repository) and the omnipresence and omnipotence of the mining industry in the present-day economic conjuncture. As way to avoid any form of exoticism the questions concerning aboriginal culture are treated entirely “in absentia”, and are manifested by the narrative caesura’s, moments when the narrative is suspended to leave time for “pure” landscape. As a result, it is these moments when the narrative is suspended that form the core of the film.
The cultural importance of landscape as a constitutive element of aboriginal identity needs to be highlighted; it functions factually as a “text” that expresses both natural and cultural history. As such particular environments retain the history and lineage of the. (Hence the choice to pan so insistently on different landscapes). It is also in that sense, that the very alteration of the landscape represents a factual historical “erasure”; in our narrative one of the meanings of Catastrophe.
On another more analytical level, the film reflects on the very principle of mediation, which is mainly re-presented by the “extractor” devices. Conceived as MacGuffins, these interfaces are the ( voluntarily naïve) vehicles of the fiction defining the “new civilization”, an image for our present-day technocratic culture.
The film is punctuated by a question mark, effectuated through a circular twist - the kairotic event? - that turns the film upon itself, in a “mise-en-énigme” to borrow J. Rancière’s expression, questioning the temporal agency of the film and, ultimately, the status of the fiction.
These combined elements make for a hybrid and layered work. Generating from a particular landscape with its ecological, political, economical and cultural context, it looks at cinema from the “outside”. It is as much an allegory on the contemporary sublime, as it is a reflection on fiction.
Kairos is an atypical work whose ambiguity is clearly affirmed: at once sparse, narratively, and opaque, semiotically. It aims to provide an immersive experience, in a way that only cinema can. But reaching beyond the mere cathartic effect of a story, it aims to articulate a number of questions, not just about cinema but about the world we live in.
Alexis Destoop, 2012