Contemporary Australia: Women

133 ‘If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self?’ While a threadbare favourite of tabloid talk shows, this is a question that taps into our collective fear of missed opportunities and unresolved regrets, and is a reminder that time is ticking by. We make sense of this underlying disquiet by increasingly surrounding ourselves with mementos of people and places we cherish, selectively archiving our lives through photos, diaries and home movies. As time passes, however, these images begin to merge into haunting apparitions of our increasingly younger selves, allowing our history to converge with day-to-day life; a ghostly pathway coexisting simultaneously between past and present. French philosopher Jacques Derrida first speculated on this concept of past ‘spectres’ or ‘ghosts’ existing in the future in a lecture delivered in 1993 regarding the state of Marxist ideology in a post-Communist era. An ephemeral and abstract concept coined by the philosopher as ‘hauntology’, it suggests that the present exists only with respect to the past: ghostly figures that are ‘neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive’, the present concurrently haunted by the past and the future. 1 A point simplified by Swiss neurologist Édouard Claparède as: ‘It is impossible to feel emotion as past.’ 2 Working with audiovisual samples, Soda_Jerk (a collaboration between Dan and Dominique Angeloro) extrapolate this theory in an ongoing series of works collectively titled ‘The Dark Matter Cycle’. Drawing on cinematic archives, these works investigate the intersection of recorded media, lived history and the passing of time. They do this by manipulating and reassembling film fragments from individual actor filmographies to create personal confrontations between the aging star and their younger celluloid selves. These speculative narratives both draw upon and distort our understanding of the original film footage, stripping back the original narratives and characterisations to create a clearer focus on the actor themselves, as they appear to grapple with time, aging and death. As Soda_Jerk explain: Moving ever further from the moment of registration, film cannot escape the weight of the future on its record of the past. Time manifests in the body of the actors as they age on screen, and their image continues to cling to the present long after they have passed away. Each work in ‘The Dark Matter Cycle’ mobilises the conceptual framework of time travel to stage encounters between older and younger versions of a particular screen personality. Collectively these speculative fictions trace an alternative history of cinema, charting the way that the future impacts on the recorded past as it moves — and we move with it — through time. 3 The previous two iterations in ‘The Dark Matter Cycle’ focused on the confluence between individual timelines from child star to troubled adult — In The Phoenix Portal 2005 a young River Phoenix teleports from his boyhood role in the Explorers 1985 to his mature self in My Own Private Idaho 1991. In After the Rainbow 2009 a young Judy Garland is swept away by a tornado from the Wizard of Oz 1939 to be confronted by her melancholic adult personality from The Judy Garland Show 1962. The Time that Remains 2012 instead draws upon the intertwined lives of two quintessential icons of the silver screen — Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Both famed for playing strong independent characters, the intensity of their desire to reinvent and survive in an industry with little interested in actresses beyond 40 was matched only by their bitter off-screen rivalry. Plagued with similar personal and professional setbacks throughout their lifetimes they would star together on screen only once in the celebrated What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962, an experience that both successfully reignited their mid-career ambitions and cemented their life-long feud. The Time that Remains acknowledges these parallel experiences by incorporating cinematic footage from TheLetter 1940, Possessed 1947, Sudden Fear 1952, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? , Strait‑Jacket 1964 and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964. It also reaches beyond the historical and narrative nature of their relationship to instead represent the essence of the women themselves. By presenting each actress separately in a synchronised two-channel video installation we see both Davis and Crawford’s struggles side-by-side in personal isolation, haunted by the Soda_Jerk Dan Angeloro Australia b.1977 Dominique Angeloro Australia b.1979 The Time that Remains (still) 2012 2-channel digital video, 16:9, black and white, sound, 11:00 mins Soda_Jerk Soda_Jerk Ghosts of the reel