Heart of darkness (2000)
The great man of history template (2010)
Play, die, restart. (2018)
A series of feature-length video artworks, that collectively and individually critique ongoing, contemporary filmic representations of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902).
Above:
Stills from Heart of Darkness (2000)
Heart of Darkness
SD video
105 minutes 13 seconds (continuous loop), colour, stereo, 25 fps, PAL
Edition 5 + 2 A.P.
2000
This project features Nicolas Roeg’s 1993 film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness filmed through a kaleidoscope with the original audio left intact. Heart of Darkness was first published in 1902, while Nicolas Roeg’s film adaptation was released in 1993. Conrad’s novel enjoys considerable academic and popular interest in the West and has been credited by leading literary scholars to be: “amoung the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language”. (1) But outside this framework the appeal is considerably less:
"I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question." (2)
By retaining the film’s original audio, the narrative of Conrad’s story (from which the screenplay was created) is kept intact. The kaleidoscope lens however reduces Roeg’s visuals to an ever evolving and shifting colourful pattern, reminiscent of the vague, generic ‘ethnic’ fabric prints popular in tourist markets. The vital visual component of the film has been interrupted for the purpose of questioning Roeg’s decision to shoot a film about colonial Africa on location in Belize in South America. What were the motives behind choosing to make a film in 1993 based on Heart of Darkness and to then decide to film it on the wrong continent?
NOTES –
(1) Gerard, J.; Introduction to Heart fo Darkness; New American Library; New York; 1950; p.9
(2) Achebe, C.; An Image of Africa: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; in Moore-Gilbert, B.; Stanton, G. and Maley, W. (Editors); Postcolonial Criticism; Longman; New York; 1997; p. 121
The Great Man of History Template
Three-channel HD video
Continuous loop, colour, stereo, 25 fps, PAL
Edition 5 + 2 A.P.
2010
“Ice! ...is Civilisation!”
- The Mosquito Coast (1986), dir. by Peter Weir.
The great man of history template is a three-channel video installation consisting of Apocalypse Now, The Mosquito Coast and Lord of the Flies – all rendered through a kaleidoscope as detailed in Heart of Darkness, with the original audio of their source material entirely intact.
This suite of films collectively and individually articulate and unpack popular, Western cultural representations of white males entering, occupying and attempting to coerce contexts variously described as ‘developing’, ‘primary’ and ‘third world’. Also of concern is the threat of danger, disaster and chaos attendant on the historical, colonial archetype of this activity. Though the western canon is strewn with a litany of examples of this subject, the chosen source material in the literary works The Mosquito Coast, Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness – as mediated through the three original motion picture versions – detail the consequences of white males abandoning Western morality – namely liberation, closely followed by moral and social chaos, individual mental collapse and ultimately a gruesome death. A pattern of consequence characterised by the implication that freedom from all societal constraints ends in insanity. Kurtz’s last words “the horror, the horror” – a description of the darkest reaches of the human psyche that Kurtz has made home since he “got off the boat”.
Play, die, restart.
HD Video
118 minutes (endless loop), colour, 24 fps, stereo
Edition 5 + 2 A.P.
2018
Dated modes of colonial-era exploration unfold in Play, die, restart. – a feature-length video that forms the fifth filmic work by the artist in this collection of works that individually, and collectively, corrupt cinematic legacies of Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Play, die, restart. is a re-filming of the 2017 feature film Kong: Skull Island with the visual component of the film corrupted through a fractal lens with the original audio intact. A stated key influence of the film is Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and its second-hand narrative conceit of a journey up-river that of Heart of Darkness. That a film made in 2017 can be based closely on stereotypical narrative tropes from Conrad’s problematic book from over a 100 years ago, is lazy in the extreme. That said film can generate more than US$500m in ticket sales, is tragic.
