(This article was originally published in October 1999)

It only takes an instant for an impression to become a vision. -Bill Viola

Prologue

I took a quick pull on my fag, and tossed the rest into the wind. My shoulders hunched, I sauntered along the sidewalk, and as the success and excess of humanity swarmed past me, I suddenly saw myself in a shop window. Alone and in a foreign land, I found myself experiencing the wonder of reflection. I thought: Who am I amidst all of this noise? I'm slightly less than six feet tall. I possess average intellectual abilities, and am of modest circumstance. What am I to make of all of this that I see around me?

Logos

In September of this year I was in the city of San Francisco. Amidst the hustle and bustle I stepped off the street into the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Once inside the gallery I found myself immersed in the video artistry of California artist Bill Viola. Viola is world renowned for his use of film as art. His huge, technically brilliant, installations serve to, among other things, scare the crap out of unsuspecting museumgoers. With his often violent depictions of humanness: for example the installation entitled The Crossing, in which the viewer sees a man consecutively doused in water and then burned in effigy, the vital elements of fire and water combine to create a picture of fin de siecle humanity which questions our basic understanding of self. With Viola's work, the medium is the message. You cannot get away from the film. The size and the noise sear themselves into your memory, and I found myself, even a month later, attempting to grapple with what I saw. Viola's terrifying images of humanity (asleep in barrels of oil The Sleepers), of unsuspecting gallery goers trapped in his works (He Weeps for You) serve a cautionary, yet edifying role. With modern technology we can essentially recreate ourselves on film. Yet, how do we appear when we do so? In Viola's installations we view the fullness of human experience (which is the most powerful role of art in any society). Too often commercial filmmakers tend to recreate on film only those parts of society that reaffirm our ideal vision of self. Commercial filmmaking appeals to our insecurities about beauty, intelligence, and financial success. Viola's vision directly contrasts with Hollywood's idealized vision of humanity (the main purveyor of films in the West). Viola takes the talents of the filmmaker, especially the craft, and turns film on its head until a fuller version of humanity is revealed.

Film is the most powerful and transcendent artistic medium of our times. Across languages and cultures, movie "stars" loom large above us in theatres around the globe. These images come into our lives and serve to affect our understandings of relationships, power, love, war, sin, and redemption, among other things. I've seen movies in countries from Asia to North America, and the same basic theme strikes me —the power of the visual image as it serves, for a brief instance, to comfortably seduce us from our assumptions about who we are. In the intimacy of a theatre (a feeling I recently experienced as I graciously allowed myself to be dragged along to a showing of the Richard Gere/Juli Roberts movie Runaway Bride) we are normally lulled into accepting an idealised understanding of self. Yet, I always find the viewing of a film rewarding. Because it is in those brief instances in even the most hackneyed film, that entertainment transcends its self-understanding and becomes something more. This something more is the ideal in our society we call art, and its challenge is that we constantly rethink our understanding of self. In Runaway Bride, an otherwise banal and trite rehashing of the movie Pretty Woman, one scene (in the hour and a half plus) grabbed me. In the scene, the protagonists embrace after having finally realized they love one another (what other central need is there for another Gere/Roberts movie except to bring it to this inevitable conclusion). As they are madly kissing, suddenly they stop, look into each other's eyes, and say, "No, wait, we should talk first." Then their passion consumes them and they return to the business at hand. It's somewhere amidst this brief realisation of what they are actually doing, this reflection amidst overwhelming passion, that served to illustrate to me the deep crisis of identity that Western society is facing.

In our present age there are more means to communicate than at any other period of history. We have cellular telephones and pagers. Landlines and lecture halls. The possibilities for communication are myriad. We can communicate with more people than at any other time in history, with better clarity, and at a greater distance. It is the effect of this communication, what I call "electronic consciousness," that I am most concerned with. Electronic consciousness is the idea that Western society in general, (and global society not before long) seeks to understand itself through its means of communication, rather than through the messages communicated by these media. Every word has intention, and that intention is potential power. Through the sheer verbosity by which society packs images of light and sound into film, television, music and computers we seem to laconically take it all in, yet rarely consider what we've ingested. It brings to my mind the images of Chris Woods, a Canadian painter from Chilliwack, B.C., who paints hyper-realistic images of adolescents as they consume fast food. The iconographic affect of the paintings, combined with the subject matter, serves to paint our quick, disposable culture in almost reverent terms. By doing so Woods exposes the essential falseness of the society. The paintings are pleasing to the eye-the content of the images are damning. In the same way electronic consciousness paints a picture of light and sound that seduces us, yet at the same time, in its utter banality, condemns our society for its worship of the medium, and utter ignorance of its message.

Film, like print, is a reflective medium. The film that engages your eyes, is essentially reflected light (light passing through still photography shots moving quickly in front of a beam). Unlike television, which directly engages the viewers' eyes (and creates a stupefying effect), film allows the viewer to be engaged, and at the same time allows for reflection (or a first kiss). In movie theatres across the globe, the theatre serves as the art gallery for the masses. It is a public house of reflection. Theatres serve as the place that the vast majority of people experience the truth of art; art that exists to question who we are, and in some cases, to forecast who we should become.

Given that society today is essentially a dialogue of images (we dress in order to impress others, speak to remind others of our social position and privilege, act in a manner which others find acceptable) society needs to be challenged by the power of the arts, in a familiar medium. This brings me back to Bill Viola. Viola's work serves this purpose, and in many ways, breaches the divide between the gallery and the viewing public. Viola's work is a search for meaning, an exploration of humanness, in a medium which all of us know and understand.

Epilogue

As I stepped out of the gallery into the glare of the California sun, I peered into the abyss of self as it was defined by the noise around me. Am I more than just the sum total of my ability to purchase things and store them in receptacles of stone and wood? What is this world that wishes to intoxicate me with its splendour, only to break-down my idea of who I am, in order to convince to become something that it wishes me to become? Suddenly I was tired, and I reached into my pack to grab a CD and my Discman®. My attention turned to a poster of a beautiful woman with a perfectly airbrushed body, holding a gun in her hand. A recruiting poster for some radical guerilla movement? Only in my dreams. Just another movie house advertising its wares. Large vehicles roared past and sounds of drum and bass, urban tribal rituals in progress, waft through the air. Amidst the neon and the electric signs, I sighed, and returned my attention to the next hit from my CD player.

Copyright © 1999 Robert F. Delamar

Robert Delamar is a first year student in the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. He's the Managing Editor of *spark-online.