Emmanuelle Antille: Angels Camp – First Songs
Until September 26; CCA

A mere ten minutes into Emmanuelle Antille’s 80-minute film at CCA, I knew it was going to be a long haul. With very little dialogue, a creaky plot and even creakier floorboards, I was not enthralled. If I had been there for my own pleasure, I would have abandoned ship without further ado. However, as I was there for yours, I sat through the entire 80 minutes of Angels Camp, only to establish that the last quarter of the film was an exact re-run of the video installation I had already endured next door. Rule number one of making movies: don’t show people the end of the film before the start.

Admittedly, art is all about breaking rules, but if you want to tell a good story (which Antille is trying to do), you’d better make very sure that your audience has a reason to stay until the end. Antille plans to draw people into the film by showing them the installation first. Perhaps she thinks that once in the cinema, the lyrical quality of the images and the intensity of the characters will keep the audience transfixed. Unfortunately the cinematography is mundane and the performances stilted.

In the CCA’s accompanying video of the artist in conversation, Antille explains that none of her actors (ie family and friends) are allowed to partake in the editing because they’d just want to make themselves look good. It’s a shame she didn’t apply this rule to herself. Antille has given herself the most romantic parts and the nicest frocks: as the River Girl, she roams about in a nightie trying to be soulful and angelic. She is more convincing in the introductory sequence as a seductive cabaret songstress, demonstrating right from the start that the film’s most successful element is to be its music.

It should be said here that my antipathy to this work is not shared by everyone. Antille is a successful artist, and Angels Camp was Switzerland’s contribution to last year’s Venice Biennale. Following on from earlier small-scale films the artist secured funding for a sizeable crew and for technical equipment, and she has produced a whole raft of products under the banner of Angels Camp.

There’s the sound installation, audible in CCA’s foyer, which is essentially an English version of the film’s few spoken words, ricocheting between speakers. Then there are the photographs of the characters in their own settings – caves, cabins, and cornfields. These are what the film industry would describe as production shots, used for marketing purposes. There is the book of the film, full of pictures and poetry, and also a novel which fleshes out the story.

Then there is the video installation. This comprises four suspended screens, each showing shots from the final section of the film, in which lots of over-excitable young people tear a dead octopus from limb to limb and then feel sad, causing the pretty lady in the nightie to walk soulfully into the river after killing a cute kitten.

Lastly, there’s the CD of the film’s musical soundtrack, the most successful aspect of the whole project. Antille commissioned the Swiss band, Honey for Petzi, to improvise the music live, in front of the film, a little like organists in cinemas of yore. The result is a beautifully melancholic flow of guitar riffs which smoothes the passage of the narrative, and which can’t fail to recall the blue soundtrack of Twin Peaks. Antille optimistically cites as her influences the usual art house selection of directors – Fellini, Antonioni and so on – but she is clearly indebted most of all to David Lynch.

Strangely, she doesn’t mention Lynch, but there is no doubt that Angels Camp gets its best material from Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive. Set in that grey area between dream and reality, it’s got the dead female body, the rivers, the cabins, the lesbians, the mysterious car, and the camped up cabaret interludes, as well as that twangy guitar soundtrack.

Unfortunately it doesn’t have the style, the subtlety or the suspense.

Despite the doomed over-ambitiousness of this project, there is one thing about it which I am glad to see: the return of storytelling. Narrative is making a comeback after many years in the wilderness, discredited first by abstraction and then by deconstruction.

Artists are now cautiously feeling their way back to the beginning, middle and end, and grappling with the problem of how to fit them into a gallery context. Antille’s answer is to break the narrative up into its constituent parts – chronologically and in terms of sound, image, and word – scattering it around the gallery, before piecing it back together in the cinema.

It doesn’t work, but maybe it was worth a try.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 12.09.04