“Post-mortem” video installation
MEETING AT A DEATH POINT (ABOUT “POST-MORTEM” VIDEO INSTALLATION)
To be honest, the film “Savage Nights” by Ceril Collard, that made a storm in France in its time, doesn‘t inspire me at all when taking it beyond its creator‘s biography context. But once I look at this film story through the prism of the relations between Collard – the personage and Collard – the author I at once find it flickering with the numerous fireflies–nuances that make it full of sense and complete. When I see the personage of Collard on the screen, I can‘t perceive him without a relation to his individual fate, and the identity of the basic intrigues of the both fates – real and cinematographic – increases much the dramatism of the story. This is just the case when the frame of dramatical everyday life, in which the story is set, enriches the film text essentially.
Here is the intrigue. Ceril Collard is both the author of the film and its main hero. As the story is developing the main hero gets to know that he is ill with AIDS. Under the sign of this event all further events of the film take place, taking on “automatically” a ting of drama. When starting the “Savage Nights” shootings, Collard is already aware of that he is HIV- positive. His death overtakes him when the film is already out of production. The awareness of that he is “programmed” to the premature death leaves traces of fatality both on the author‘s and personage‘s biographies. At a moment, when the personage gets to know about the death‘s approaching, the author already knows about it. At the end of the film the personage doesn‘t die, we leave him while he is waiting for his death. The author, who is waiting for the death, also leaves him in this waiting. When “Savage Nights” have been brought to light, the author is still alive.
When we got the idea of the work “Post-mortem”, the death of Ceril Collard was a fait accompli. What we tried to do was to finish this story by crossing the fates of the real author and his cinematographic alter ego.
Video installation “Post-mortem” is a hospital cart hanged on the scaffold, onto which the video monitor is placed. On the monitor there is a looped episode of the “Savage Nights” where the dramatism of the situation reaches the extreme point – being plunged into a suggestive music, the main personage appearently realizes the death‘s approaching and lapses into hysterics.
Let the personage die together with the author, we say, while placing the desparately resisting film hero onto the real hospital cart hanged on between floor and seeling, between ground and sky, on the half way to the other world.
We set him out to the final journey. The exhausted personage falls silent, allows the friends to calm him down, to take him away. He resigns himself, he disappears in the dark, but then appears again, again and again, and again writhes in hysterics, loop after loop, swearing and never dying.
Having met each other in the death point, our heroes disperse.