Steffani Jemison, Personal, 2014. © Steffani Jemison 2014.
A. Will Brown: Your videos Maniac Chase (2009) and Escaped Lunatic (2010–2011) reference two historic films from the early 20th century by the same name.
When did you see the original films, and what about the originals interested you?
Steffani Jemison: I encountered the original films when I first surveyed the history of cinema, about ten years ago. “Chase” films of this type are especially interesting to film historians because they mark an important step in the emergence of narrative cinema, investing in character, causality, and multi-shot construction in increasingly complex ways. I found these films hypnotic and was immediately interested in the friction between narration and contingency in these works. They presented the illusion of balance and resolution alongside the potential for instability. I was also interested in the ways these early films refused to offer psychological access to the protagonist. A series of actions or effects or predicates are presented without a subject or cause.
AWB: Are there more films in the works that are inspired by historic films?
SJ: No. (Not yet!)
AWB: In Maniac Chase, Escaped Lunatic, and Personal (2014), the landscape or cityscape plays an important role. When choosing a landscape (or a cityscape), what do you look for? When making a new film or video work, do you find the location first, or does the idea dictate the location?
SJ: All three of these works were shot within a few blocks of home. The series became a way of checking in as I moved across the country, always beginning from a similar set of parameters but allowing the community and the conditions to shape the work. When making this work, I think about landscape—the way that the natural world is organized and aestheticized into an image that can be pictured—as well as setting, the historical and physical and social context of a narrative.
AWB: In all three works—Maniac Chase, Escaped Lunatic, and Personal—there are minute changes that take place in the actors’ movements. One man jumps higher than the other, a second step on a boundary line is slower than the first, a fence swings with varying intensity as runners push it open. Do these gestures, arrived at by chance, come to evoke a physical and visual behavioral language that is unique to people repeating, reliving, ever circling redundant patterns of living and moving through space? These works, as a comment on the effort to create change through repetition of the same, are incredibly pointed, and incite feelings of frustration. Are these instances of visual tautology, repeated ever further, issued in order to convey a frustration with the cyclical, often invisible-in-everything-but-name politics of social change?
SJ: I’m very interested in how few models our culture offers for understanding and describing change. These models are often narrative and teleological; change is oriented in a particular direction. These narrative metaphors—like progress and development—are politically complicated, at best.
I’m interested in other ways of thinking about difference and similarity, especially when mapped against the passage of time. The work springs less from a frustration with the pace of social progress than with a frustration that we don’t have a more robust vocabulary for articulating and describing change generally. The political implications of this problem are especially acute. For example, how do black Americans articulate rage at the ways that our bodies are criminalized and vulnerable without addressing the admonition that “progress” has been made. Our horizon begins here and now and looks forward. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin quotes Lotze, who describes the “freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.” Benjamin continues, “Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us.” Our horizon begins in the present and extends into the future, but the tyranny of “progress” judges us according to the standards of a past that can only be accessed through a contemporary, ideological lens.
AWB: How concerned are you with the aesthetic quality of the movements of your actors? At moments they are quite fluid and dance-like, and at others they are stilted. Is this deliberately so?
SJ: The aesthetic qualities of the actors’ movements are very important to me. What movements are necessary or economical, and what are excessive, decorative, rhetorical, or contingent? This makes it possible to ask, What is the difference between one movement and another? When they are placed side by side, what exceeds? When one is subtracted from the other, what remains? Is this remainder communicative, or does it impede communication? It rests in suspension between the performer and the spectator, clarifying or coloring or blocking.
AWB: Your films have an amazing capacity to disorder time through a subtle choreography of repetitive and near repetitive movement. What interests you about duration, and re-organizing time and space?
SJ: When speaking about repetition in music, psychologist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis noted that repetition makes a sequence “seem less like an objective presentation of content and more like a kind of tug that’s pulling you along,” and later describes music as something you listen “along with” rather than “to.”
Although she’s describing a phenomenon that seems unique to sound, visual repetition can produce similar effects. It orders and disorders time. I think a lot about how the relation between experience and time is shaped by metaphors like narrative, and how it can be disrupted through simple interventions like reversal and repetition. I’m also interested in the ways that repetitive actions are often pathologized; they are unresolved and unresolvable.
AWB: Do you work with trained actors? Or in the case of Maniac Chase and Escaped Lunatic, trained athletes or dancers?
SJ: I often work with aspiring actors, although I sometimes also use family members, friends, or athletes who have no interest in acting. Maniac Chase included some aspiring actors and some friends. The performers in Escaped Lunatic are all amateur parkour practitioners who practice regularly. The performers in Personal are aspiring professional actors, none of whom are making a living from their work as performers. It’s important that the performers are attuned to their bodies. It sometimes requires several days of shooting with one or multiple performers to achieve the movement I’m looking for.
AWB: Sound also plays I subtle yet integral role in these three works, what are some key nuances for you in working with sound and how do you use it to convey specific ideas?
SJ: Sound is most important as a way of indicating the passage and direction of time, distinguishing between “event” and “background,” and creating a kind of ambient environment within which the work can be encountered. It’s important that the world of the videos feels continuous with the real world.
AWB: There are reflexive moments in the films in which the viewer can hear you breathing, offering directives to the actors or moving the camera. What is important for you about including these moments in the final works?
SJ: The process of making—framing attention, directing traffic, transforming an everyday view into an important one, answering questions, observing—is always a meaningful part of the experience. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the experience of eliciting, staging, shaping, and witnessing the actors’ performances at the moment of their unfolding is as important to my own practice as the videos that result.
AWB: The final few minutes of Escaped Lunatic are visually disorienting, as the camera is in constant unsteady motion, as though it is in a washing machine or it has become a gyroscope. I appreciate how that breaks up time and space even further for the viewer. How do you see this section functioning, and did you have to experiment a great deal to find the effect worked the way you wanted it to?
SJ: Escaped Lunatic is mostly structured symmetrically: four performers in each shot run in a single direction, then they run in the other direction, with the moment that they run under the bridge as the center. At the end, the camera begins to move, first by following performers with a panning motion, followed by an over-the-shoulder shot in which the camera follows just behind the performer, followed finally by a long take in which the performer himself holds the camera as he runs (this causes the unsteady motion you describe). The camera movement enables the camera to enter into closer and closer proximity to the performer.
AWB: The works deal with a politics of movement in and out of architectural space that can be profoundly dehumanizing. What are some of the ideas you are conveying in the work in relation to new and old urban architecture, and the boundaries it creates?
SJ: People use urban architecture in ways that often defy the architects’ intentions. I first became interested in parkour for that reason: like skateboarding or graffiti, it offers an aestheticized alternative use for structures such as walls, rails, bollards, and staircases.
A. Will Brown
Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Art