Tuer, Dot

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OCAD University Open Research RepositoryFaculty of Art1989 Reviews: Mary Mary: Anna Gronau, YYZ, TorontoTuer, Dot Suggested citation: Tuer, Dot (1989) Reviews: Mary Mary: Anna Gronau, YYZ, Toronto. C Magazine, 22. p. 69. ISSN 1193-8625 Available at http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/957/Open Research is a publicly accessible, curated repository for the preservation and dissemination of scholarly and creative output of the OCAD University community. Material in Open Research is open access and made available via the consent of the author and/or rights holder on a non-exclusive basis. MARY M RY nna Gr nau y z orono s lot of Indian land wa · ·urren­dercd in treatie . From what I understand n w, a lot of Indian people consider it not a surrender but a !1f1. The thing about colonic i that the whole idea of a colony pre,uppose a particular attitude tooards land. It' an ownable com­modll}. not imply the support for huma n beings, for human life. omc peopl can take it away from other pe pie, own it more and have more right to it than omeone el e. I guess what I keep thinking i that the "immigrant elf" for you and me maybe i an image of our amb1\alence. The pla e that we occupy is contradictatory in o man} ways. Anna Gronau /11 A Diferem Voice. 19 6The examination of the elf and it image� of ambivalence are often conceptu­alized in We ten o iety as an inten ely per onal odde y. Psychoanaly i i the a ourcd paradigm of cro -examination. Through it di cour e, the fiction of a uni­fied consciou ne i decon tructed and the " elf' redefined through binary opposition of identification and de ire, of presence and ab en c, of a ma culine ego and a feminine other. The cultural imerative and ethno­centric as umption that underlie the e ?ichotomie , however, are more rarely interrogated. Gronau' tenuou call for the necessity of uch an interrogation in the quotation above anticipat the motif of " elr' and "pla e" that are explored a ite of complexity and contradiction in her new �Im Mary. Mary. Mapping from the "talk­i�g cure" a context for the "!", the compul­ton to repeat the self into exi tence i cen-t�a� to the con truction of an inten e ubjec­tiv11 in Gronau' new film. Jt i al o the Object of critical crutiny. For in Mary, �a,y, the elu ive proces of ifting memo­ne to locate the " elf' train again t the containment of disourse; autobiography ie�gaged to reveal the paradox of hi toricald1s1 ation. : I got a phone call. The footage wa · found. I looked at it but I wa di -appoint d. M: It wa exactly a I rememered it. A: It mu t have been a creen memory. You have to de ide if thi i a film Anna Gronau; May Ma, 1989; 16mm, colour, sound; 55.5 min. Photo: courtesy the artist or a dream. M: ( cream·) 'If that there King wa to wake,' added Tweedledum, 'you'd go out-bang!-ju t like a candle.' 'I houldn't!' Alice exclaimed indig­nantly. 'Beside , if l'm only a ort of thing in hi dream, what are you I hould like to know?' ( creams) 'Ditto' aid Tweedledum. 'Ditto, Ditto', cried Tweedledee. Thi encounter between Anna, a the dire tor of the film, and Mary, a the cen­tral character of her cript, occur early in the film at a cene hot at the Toronto Zoo. During the verbal exchange, the camera pan lowly etween Anna and Mary, epa­rated by an underground aquarium window who e errie light bounce hadow off their ace . When Mary cream the "ditto " of a Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the camera retun to the place from which Anna wa peaking. She ha vani hed, leaving Mary tanding alone, a large polar bear float behind her, u pended in the water and entrapped ehind the glass of the underwa­ter tank. At thi moment, Mary i tran -ormed from a character to a cipher of the filmmaker' imagination; a mirror of her phy ical ab ence. She become the object of a ubjective tran Ference, a cinematic double occupying a ite of ab urd symme­try where remembrance of the pa t inter­twine with image on the creen, where dream of the living and th d ad ecome the di juncture etween "pla e" and " elf." I dreamt l wa at Bay Hou e ro make the film. It wa very early morning and I wa walking through th hou e with my camera. 69 I went down the Lair , and I wa truck by the tillne s and the erenity. Everything in the hou e eemed e pecially "in place," a though it wa all there ju t for me. A an object of tran erence, the place from which Mary eak and dream i an apartment in oronto; a location of retreat where the i olated proce of writing the film' cript i recreated. A a cipher of the filmmaker' imagination, the place of which Mary speak and dream i an an old hou e on a bay on Lake Ontario in Prin e Edward County; a repo itory of childhood fanta y and family hi tory. The Bay Hou e, with it garden of "green gra buzzing and poplar twinkling" become the " creen memory" of the film; a recuring motif where the pa t and pre ent will finally meet. In the fir t cene of the film, the cam­era trace a path toward the front door of the old hou e, looming on the horizon-a black and white mirage, ominou and ilent, emptied of people and of context. The econd image of the Bay Hou e i conjured like a gho t from the archival footage of which Mary and nna have po­ken. Two women, dre ed in Victorian white dre e , emerge from the door and walk in the garden. The fold of their dre s­e wirling in th wind, their grainy, dreamy movements are caught in the mem­ory that uper- film evoke . The e women clearly belong to thi place; their bodi move with ea e and confidence. ever dabble in autobiography. Unles you want a perfect world that erectly exclude you. Mary' movement are le ure, le certain. She fall out of the ed in her apart­ment. She rifle through bo k a if looking for omething elusive, unwritten. Her an wering ma hine relay me age , but he ee no-one. She de not po e the pa t, th ugh the past ha egun to po e her. Fragment of Victorian novel echo in her head, revererate a voice-overs in the film. A erie of tatements, tracing her prce of intenal interr gati n, apear a text on top of the film' image : Four et of thirteen propo ition , they become a hou e of card he i building; a recon truc­t ion of the Bay Hou e that haunt her dream . A he deal , from a hufned hi to­ry, the la t thirteen card of her game of olitaire, Mary leave the apartment and drive towards the Bay Hou e. ln thi , the la t, cene of the film, Mary retrace the camera's path at the eginning of the film, following the long and twi ted road that lea to the front door of the " creen mem­oy." Oening the door to the Bay Hou e, he di cover in ide that everything, ju t like in her dream, i "in place." Wandering from room to room, it i Mary who eem out of place, an intruder from the pre ent confronting the leepy phantom of the pa t. And a the camera hift it point of view from in ide the hou e to the ilent garden overlooking the lake, the creen i once again emptied of eople and of con­text. Ea ier to deflect re pon ibility-omewhere el e. Long ago. White lie . White man' hi tory le on . perfect world that perfectly exclude you. It is in this final glimp e of the Bay Hou e and the secret garden of Mary' childhood fanta ie , that the dealt ard reveal le of the " elf' and "place" than the non- en e of a birthright, intertwining chance and de tiny. In Mary, Mar , the ob e ive earch or a lcation of the " elf' i not imply a psycho-analytical prce of elf-realization, but a more dra tic ymp­tom of ultural di location. The card that Mary ha een dealt tell not only her tory, but the tory of colonialization. The Bay Hou e in which she eek a hi tory of er-onal memory i al o a hou e of occupa­tion; built on the land that the Iroquoi igned away in a treaty in 1797. And a the collective memorie of native oppre . ion collide with her recollecti ns of her family an e tor ; her birthright ecome a birth of dislocation. And a a location where her 'right ' are the right of the oppre or, reali-ation rupture certainty. An amorphou relati ity fom1 . The movement backward through hi ·tory i not to claim the privilege of a cultural hertitage, but to implicat one' birthright into a ca ual brutality. Dot Tuer PHrLIP MONK Struggles with the Image YYZ Publication oronto In the preface to rruggle 1 ith theImage, Monk ugge t that hi work a a curator, far from di placing the critical pro­gram put in place by writing, repre ent a practical 'demonstration' of the local hi tory for which that writing ha argued. Moreover, a the organization of the e e ay indicate , thi move toward the prac­tical, the demon trable, would e con onant with a trajectory already at work in the writing it elf (from general peculation to local repre entation). It would e intere t­ing to a k how the term of thi hi tory have altered in the pa age from critic to curator, fr m private voice to public repre-entative. The ta k I undertake here i how­ever, a more circum cried one. Re tricting my elf to the e ay , I wi h merely to ug­ge t that their progre i in no imple en e a movement from general to particular, the­oy to pra tice. Far from repre enting the application of a politics elaborated in the early work , the appeal to the 'local' that characterize Monk' later e ay come to buttre an entirely different theory or model of community. The final effect of thi revi ·ion i , I would uggest, a uturing over of that gap, that moment of violence or difference, that the early writing repre-ent a on tituitive of any community project. Monk ' analy i of a violence endemic to the ocial relation is of cour e indebted to a reading of Heg I that ha dominated 70 French thinking ince the lecture �lexander Kojeve. What Kojeve e mp�r 1zed wa the truggle for recognition thaiground the cial relation, a truggle that i , for Hegel, re olved in the developmen1a1 hi tory of The Phenomenology. (The n0r. mativizing tendencie of the Hegelian . y ten wo�ld reduce 'violence' to a mere moment m a progre who e telo would e a tran parency of ubject to ubje t). One way of getting at the point of the French revi ion of Hegel is through the work of Rene Girard, a thinker who tand a the in pi ration or the econd of Monk' essay . For Girard, there can e no definitive over­coming of the violent indifferentiation that found the community relation becau.e uch an aufhebung will alway require recour e to a repre entation that i itself violent. The model for this violence would e the pharmakos or caegoat figure who acilitate in her or hi exclu ion, the difer­entiation and exchange of identitie ncces-ary to the con titution of any community. Thi violence of the image, preci. ely that violence entailed in the becoming image of the other, i given a pecifically exual inflection in the third of Monk's es ay , "Breach of Promi e". But thi xu­al inflection i perhap le ignificant than the hi torical one that accompanie it: for what di tingui he the work in que tion here (Pica so' Desmoiselles), what marks it exemplary modernity, i the way it refuse any totalizing indentiication of self and other, image and viewer, the way, in other word , that it recognize violence at the very origin of the ocial: The pa age of one image to the other, from The Entombment to The Demoisel/es, i a narrative tran formation: from the pre ence of promi e to it ab ence. On my ide, the narrative i the repre enta­t ion of fascination-putting it drive in motion. To repre ent the 'breach'  between the two image -the breach and the pace between-i to regi ter the gap between me and them. Repre entation leave an ab ence in it origin. But, and herein lie the paradox to which Monk' work ince antly retun·, to "repre­ent thi 'breach' i already to have forgot­ten it; difference itself will not be identi­fied. TL i for thi eason that there can e no imple pa age from The Entombment to Les Desmoiselles, only an endles acilla­tion etween a death that i at once lo and exhaltation and the compen ations of narra­tive: The breach of promi e i a break­ing of the ymbolic: the brea h trand me in the gap between the e two image . In hi econd chapter, Monk e tend the term· of the analysi de cried above. 

Reviews: Mary Mary: Anna Gronau, YYZ, Toronto

http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/957/1/Tuer_Mary_C_1989.pdf

Reviews: Mary Mary: Anna Gronau, YYZ, Toronto

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