A Western Hanging in the Museum

Reflections on Julian Rosefeldt’s American Night

By F. Javier Panera Cuevas

“The only technologies worth having are a six gun and a movie camera.”

Sam Peckinpah

Over the past decade we have witnessed the progressive incorporation of cinema into museum halls.¹ Although this phenomenon is not entirely new, the reason it has become commonplace can be found in a double paradox: on one hand there has been an exponential increase in the audiovisual production of artists who investigate cinematographic issues related to the format (filming in 16 and 35 mm), narrative structure, or the time of duration of their works; and on the other, there is an increasing number of experimental cinema directors who have found in museums an expanded venue in which to exhibit-to an ever-increasing public-works which would have otherwise had a hard time finding conventional cinematographic distribution.²Some image theorists³ have started defining these audiovisual mise-en-scène strategies with terms like “post-cinema,” “screen art,” or “expanded cinema,” since in order to confront many of these productions it is essential to take into account aspects like the disposition of the spectator in the exhibition hall, the purely objectual and technological component of the audiovisual devices (projectors, screens, monitors, wiring, etc.), and even more complex issues like the “temporalization of space” and the “spacialization of time.” In summary: “What is seen” is as important as “how it is seen.” The oeuvre of Julian Rosefeldt (Munich, 1965) should be analyzed in this context. His film installations start with a painstaking rethinking of the exhibition experience itself. The artist then attempts to control all of the parameters comprising the museum mise en scène.

From a narrative standpoint, Rosefeldt’s “movies” are often endowed with a labyrinthic, fragmentary, and polyphonic structure, which mesmerizes the spectator but is not always easy to interpret. Fracturing the narration and the integrity of the visual and sonorous fields, Rosefeldt produces what could be classified as “performative temporality,” challenging the spectator’s systems of perception, first making him take positions then make decisions and elaborate his own interpretative theories.⁴ Another common element in these installations is that the artist integrates the processes of creation into the plot of each movie, thereby allowing the spectator, as new and unexpected narrative twists are revealed, to discover cinematographic production devices: cameras, lighting, cranes, microphones, backdrops, trailers …

His latest production, American Night, ⁵ can be included in this metafilmic category. It is a five-channel film installation (filmed in 16 mm) conceived as a set of mirrors in which, as happens in some of Godard and Truffaut’s movies, “the cinematographic construct contemplates itself.”⁶ American Night is, in this sense, an extraordinary work, not only because of its visual attractiveness, but also because of the way in which it tackles the deconstruction-from a political standpoint-of the narrative and iconographic stereotypes of a cinematographic genre as seldom addressed by contemporary art as the Western.

In effect, the Western is one of the oldest and longest lasting movie genres in spite of having suffered various crises, and this is essentially due to its archaic narrative and iconographic structure in which each scene, each personage, and each location are rigorously ritualized. In this sense, this cinematographic genre has been used to rewrite the epic narrative of American foundational legends. For this reason, it is not strange for there to appear in the background of these movies concepts such as the frontier myth, the fight for territorial expansion, and the justification for violence as a means of preserving the security of a civilization (predestined to expand Westward in accordance with the famous “doctrine of manifest destiny”⁷).  This civilization had to be defended against all threats by a hero embodying some of American action movies’ most deeply-rooted traits: white, masculine, solitary, and generally dedicated to “doing what a man has to do.”⁸ However, throughout the evolution of this genre, the hero has become increasingly cynical, bitter, and pessimistic-as seen in “twilight” Westerns like Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992)⁹-or Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), passing through the parodic tone of Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns,” filmed, like American Night, in Almeria (Spain) in the 1960s and 70s. The deconstruction of the hero reaches its climax in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), in which the protagonists are doomed to ruin because of their homosexuality, thus breaking through one of the Western’s final taboos¹⁰.

One does not need to be familiar with these references to enjoy American Night. However, each of the cinematographic, literary, musical, and history of art citations, introduced in its 40-minute and 42-second duration, configures a surprising audiovisual palimpsest with which Rosefeldt demonstrates the ideological function of images and the way in which these have been ingrained in the collective American psyche for generations, legends like the founding of the United States under the paradigm of individual liberty, justification for the use of arms as a means of dissuasion, or the need for hegemonic foreign policy.

The title of the installation, American Night, is a metalinguistic reference that functions at various levels. On one hand, it is a reference to François Truffaut’s movie La nuit américaine (1973)-which presented the subtle use of a movie within a movie to tell the story of a love triangle-and on the other, it refers to a cinematographic device called “day for night,” utilized in many low-budget Westerns to create nocturnal effects during daytime filming.  Often employed in Westerns, it involves the use of special filters to allow “night scenes” to be shot during the day.

From a narrative point of view, Rosefeldt introduces sequences prototypical of this type of film on each of the five screens, but alters the staging, narration, and creation of meaning, which has been exploited to the nth degree by Hollywood cinema. On the first screen there appears the archetypical image of a cowboy riding alone through a twilight landscape, reminding us of the epic landscapes of John Ford’s movies, like The Searchers (1956), and the romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, although in the end one cannot help but think of Marlboro ads. The second screen shows another location seen thousands of times, a dusty, deserted street in a seemingly abandoned town, where we sense that at any moment there could be a gun fight. On the central screen we see a nocturnal scene (in which the device “day for night” has been used) starring a group of cowboys sitting around a bonfire, among whom we can make out a Charles Bronson look-a-like and another who vaguely reminds us of Kris Kristofferson. The fourth screen shows different scenes that take place in another typical Western location, a saloon full of cowboys drinking whiskey, where there are also a pianist and dancers performing on a small stage. On the final screen there appears another prototypical scene, the melancholy image of a woman standing in the doorway of her cabin, awaiting the return of the hero, with a worried but dignified expression on her face. This personage of “Beckettian” resonance is, without a doubt, the most disquieting element in the installation since she remains completely still in this position for the 40-minute duration of the film.

Although the narrative has a beginning, a middle, an outcome, and an end, “nothing is as it seems,” and as the film progresses, the apparent familiarity of these scenes gives way to unexpected turns. On the central screen the five cowboys, who up until now have remained silent around a bonfire, begin a seven-minute conversation in which they reflect, with phrases as solemn as they are  trite, on concepts like honor, individual liberty, and the need to bear arms as the only way to guarantee it. Up to that point everything appears normal within the framework of a Western, were it not for the fact that all the phrases placed in the mouths of the five cowboys are literal appropriations from dialogues of the legendary movies of Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, Anthony Mann, and John Ford;¹¹ it is a litany of empty phrases which utilize the original voices of actors like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, James Stewart, and Clint Eastwood.¹² However, as if this were not enough, in the same conversation, fragments of speeches given by politicians-such as Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and George W. Bush¹³-are introduced (also with their original voices), as is the categorical phrase of the actor and president of the NRA, Charlton Heston: “You can have my gun when you can pry it loose from my cold dead hand.”

One of the most hilarious moments takes place when the cowboys themselves behave like consummate experts on Westerns, participating in a guessing game about the names of actors, directors, and movies to which the phrases they have just uttered belong (as if they were trying to emulate what the spectator is mentally doing at that very moment), but the conversation reaches grotesque overtones when the five cowboys stand up and continue the conversation dancing to the stanzas of the song “Gun Runners” by the rapper 50 Cent¹⁴, while someone whistles the melody from the movie Per un Pugno di Dollari (Sergio Leone, 1964). This surrealistic conversation reveals a correspondence among the codes of honor of nineteenth century cowboys, Republican political rhetoric, and the sexist and extremely violent words of gangsta-rap songs.

Maybe that is why it almost does not surprise us when minutes later, on the second screen, we witness another scene as surrealistic as it is anachronistic: a helicopter lands on a street in the abandoned town and dozens of soldiers from the U.S. army climb out of it. They are armed to the teeth and hasten to “occupy” the ghost town as if it were Fallujah or Baghdad. Is the U.S. army against its own foundational legends?

In classic Westerns the final showdown involves a climax, which justifies the use of violence and redeems those who perpetrate it. In this sense, American Night also has its own climax. Rosefeldt challenges the spectator’s expectations and consciously avoids associating it with the violence that in this work has a parodic tone; any modicum of epic poetry is situated in the narrow margin that separates the sublime from the ridiculous.

American Night ends with various linked sequences, as brilliant as they are unexpected. On the fourth screen, the saloon scene appears occupied by a puppet theater whose protagonists are none other than Barack Obama and George W. Bush; the The farce culminates with Obama fatally shooting Bush - much like the plot of a conventional Western, in which the establishment of a new, supposedly more civil order comes about through armed force.conversation between the two puppets re-edits the Obama/McCain debates of the last election¹⁵. However, in this case the farce ends with Obama fatally shooting Bush… “Yes, we can,” the Democratic politician repeats aggressively before using his revolver.¹⁶

Minutes later a fight breaks out in accordance with the rules of the genre, but it is suddenly interrupted by a tragicomic (although at once moving) choral scene: all the people in the saloon stand up and look at the spectator and solemnly sing the stanzas of “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem. At that precise moment, the camera is raised above the scene and reveals the movie set, the equipment trailers, the backdrops, the spotlights, the cranes, and the very camera that has been recording each sequence. On the collateral screen, the camera is also raised and we observe that the wooden cabin of the woman who was waiting perfectly still, is in fact a backdrop that slowly moves away on rails and leaves her standing alone on the dirt floor of the desert. The musical interlude underscores the incongruence of everything that is going on, while at the same time revealing the metafictional character of American Night, a mini-theater in an Old West saloon, which in turn forms part of a large movie set, which is located in a ghost town where movies are filmed. All represent to a tee the concept of the baroque theatrum mundi to which Rosefeldt’s oeuvre is clearly in debt.¹⁷ The very accumulation of audiovisual citations functions almost like an “echo chamber” in the sense given by Severo Sarduy in his essays on the Baroque. The Cuban writer utilized this metaphor to define a communicative structure where the echo often precedes the voice, associating said strategy with an “ahistorical and atemporal” narrative, with several simultaneous and discontinuous times. The world becomes a palimpsest, a never-ending accumulation of text over text, of fragment over fragment. And it is here that the title of Rosefeldt’s installation reveals its third level of meaning: the twilight of an empire that, without hurry or hesitation, is being broken down into its various elements.

The vast expanse of the American landscape where the lone cowboy (who in the end turns out to be a Black man, thus breaking through another cinematographic taboo¹⁸) rides is no longer a place of great adventures, but instead an infinite succession of desert prairies and hills that lead nowhere and whose aridity reveals confusion rather than a sense of freedom. The landscape has become a melancholic reminder of a time that perhaps never existed … In the final scene-parallel to the choral scene in the saloon-the cowboy ends his ride at the ocean (in an unmistakable reference to Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea [1808]), but the romantic resonances of this scene vanish when we discover that it has been filmed on a beach in Almeria.¹⁹ It is an epitaph as melancholic as it is skeptical for more than 100 years of epic movies, and it is an obscure allegory for the less than innocent repetition of clichés in cinematic history.

NOTES

1. Some noteworthy exhibitions on this matter have been: “Scream and Scream Again. Film in Art,” Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1996); “Cinema Cinema. Contemporary Art and the Cinematic Experience,” Stelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (1999); “Notorious. Hitchcock and Contemporary Art,” Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1999); “Action, on tourne,” Villa Arson, Niza (2000- 2001); “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977,” Whitney Museum of American Art (Oct 2001 - Jan 2002); “Cut. Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video“ (2004); “Remakes“ CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux and DA2, Salamanca (2003/2004); and “The Cinema Effect. Illusion Reality and the Moving Image,” Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Washington (2008).

2. Filmmakers of such different registers as J.L.Godard, Peter Greenaway, Harun Farocki, Chris Marker, Mike Figgis, Chantal Ackerman, Abbas Kiarostami, and J. L. Guerín indiscriminately make movies in a mono-channel format for the cinematographic circuit or audiovisual installations for museums.

3. José Luis Brea: La era postmedia. CASA Salamanca, 2003; Jean Christophe Royoux: “Por un cine de exposición. Retomando algunos jalones históricos,” in Acción Paralela, 5; Veronique Goudinoux and Michel Weemans: “Remaking Cinema. Les Nouvelles Strategies du Remake et l’Invention du Cinema d’Exposition.” Reproductibilité et Irreproductibilité de l’Oeuvre d’Art. Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 2001, 215-229; Antonio Weinrichter: “El cine se instala en el museo.” In Exit Express, nº 20 May 2006: 8-13.

4. “When you are at the movies, you are sitting, watching, and we all have more or less the same feeling about the film sequence. However, our behavior with respect to the film in an exhibition context is totally different.” Excerpt from Heinz-Peter Schnerfel’s interview “Amerikanische Nacht” (2009).

5. It can currently be seen within the extensive retrospective that DA2 in Salamanca (Spain) devotes to him: “Julian Rosefeldt. Making Of. Film Installations and Photo Works (2002-2010),” Oct 2010 - Mar 2011.

6. See, Stephan Berg: “Twilight of the Myths” in: Julian Rosefeldt, American Night. Kunstmuseum, Bonn, 2009.

7. In 1845, the politician John Sullivan coined the term “manifest destiny” to morally justify the conquest of the West. According to this doctrine, Providence favorably viewed the expansion of the United States to the Pacific given the superiority of the White man over Indians and Mexicans. A similar opinion encouraged European powers to divide up Asia and Africa at around the same time, and it is easy to find parallels with the theory of Lebensraum with which the Nazis justified their expansion into Eastern Europe.

8. The phrase uttered by James Stewart in Anthony Man’s Winchester’ 73: “Some things a man has to do, so he does’em … “

9. In reality, as Stephan Berg points out (”Twilight of the Myths,” 7), in movies like John Ford’s classic The Searchers (1956) or, even more clearly, in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), the moral superiority with which the classic hero justified his actions has been shattered and has been replaced by a somber and apocalyptic voyage in which the protagonist confronts himself.

10. In an iconoclastic vein strangely convergent with Rosefeldt are the homoerotic visions of Andy Warhol in Hose (1965), a cowboy movie filmed on a movie set at The Factory with a rented horse where-as happens in American Night-many frames reveal cinematographic production devices: cameras, lights, microphones, cranes, telephones, etc.

11. The movies from which the main citations have been taken are: John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Stagecoach; Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953), Vera Cruz (1954), and Winchester’73; Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948) and El Dorado (1967); Sergio Leone’s Per un Pugno di Dollari (1964); Michael Curtiz’s Dodge City (1939); Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930); George Stevens’ Shane, and even small citations from recent films like Rambo (1985).

12. “He knew a lot about cattle,” James Stewart in Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953). “Out there a man settles his own problems,” John Wayne in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). “But, of course a weapon is only as good as the man who uses it,” Gary Cooper in Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954). This phrase is almost identical to the one used by Charlton Heston in an NRA speech: “A gun in the hands of a bad man is a very dangerous thing. A gun in the hands of a good person is no danger to anyone except the bad guys …”

^13. “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us … Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” This phrase was uttered by George W. Bush on 07/10/02.

14.  ”And this? This here? This is a 12-gauge Mossburg, kid. Two shots and you can wet like a half a block. This shit here gets my dick hard; it’s a Calico. It holds a hundred shots.”

15. In this case the dialogues are inspired by citations from Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930) and Anthony Mann’s A Bend of the River (1952), in addition to the phrases of Bush, Obama, and McCain: “I feel like shooting somebody,” the Bush puppet repeats obsessively.

16. The fact that in the end it is Obama who unexpectedly shoots at Bush and not the reverse, as the spectator might expect, is a way of showing that even in politics, instincts prevail over the capacity for reasoning and debate on occasion. On this point, Lorenzo Giusti and Arabella Natalini recall that during Obama’s appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, the President stated with the complicity of the host: “I said yes, without thinking about it, just as Bush did in Iraq.” He later added: “Before deciding on a new strategy, we need to pause for reflection.” The Late Show 09/21/09. Cited by Lorenzo Giusti and Arabella Natalini Eine (nich nur) amerikanische geschichte” in American Night. Julian Rosefeldt. Ed Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2009, 17.

17. On this point Julian Rosefeldt explains the narrative structure of many of these pieces in accordance with the model of Russian nesting dolls (dolls that are placed inside of each other): “I start with a tiny micro-action, then there is a kind of subsequent plan, which again is incorporated into another action, and, at a given point in time, I leave the action and show how it was developed by looking behind the scenes, and I often mix the world of the stage machinery with the action taking place in the forefront. As a whole, it is all symbolic of the cyclical component of life.” (Julian Rosefeldt/Heinz-Peter Schnerfel)

18. Contrary to what literature and cinema have led us to believe, there was a vast number of Black cowboys, since at times they were the only ones who would accept such hard and poorly paid labor. In fact, one of the most famous cowboys of all time was a Black man named Nat Love. It is significant that his biography served as the inspiration for The Adventures of Deadwood Dick, a White cowboy protagonist of one of the best-selling novels of the period.

19. American Night was filmed at Fort Bravo Texas Hollywood, an Old West town reconstructed in Almeria (Spain), which served as a movie set for Sergio Leone in 1964 for his legendary movie Per un Pugno di Dollari (A Fistful of Dollars).