Atom Egoyan: Steenbeckett
Forthcoming at:
Happy Days: Enniskillen International Beckett Festival
23 - 27 August 2012
[Info]
Originally shown:
Former Museum of Mankind
Burlington Gardens, London W1
15 February - 17 March 2002
Subsequent screenings included 2 July - 4 September 2011 as part of
Projections: Works from The Artangel Collection, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
[Details]
An obsolete machine in a forgotten room of the former Museum of Ethnography. An old man eavesdrops on a younger man: we watch through glass. Canisters of celluloid and audiotape combine in a forest of memory. Rewind. Play. Shuffle. Delete.
Random storage on shelving systems and in bookracks, exit past the technician's room. A ledger that tails off in 1974; a complete card index; foreign classics; someone's pram. And then the old man's voice, re-formatted. Internationally-acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's Steenbeckett is a labyrinth in miniature; a route round an archive of personal history, down empty corridors and up flights of stairs to the abandoned projection booth of a hidden cinema.
Egoyan conceived this work based on his previous experience of directing British actor John Hurt in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape for the Beckett on Film series televised by Channel 4. Egoyan shot this short film on 35mm and edited it on a Steenbeck, now something of a dinosaur in the world of digitised post-production. The last reel of this film (a single, 20-minute take), rather than being stored or thrown away, became the centrepiece of an installation for Artangel in the small ground floor viewing room at the Museum of Mankind. Through the empty projection booth, a small group of visitors looked down on a forest of travelling celluloid - 2000 feet of film, moving precariously and continuously around the room through pulley-suspended sprockets driven by a lone Steenbeck.
In the adjoining room, the complete 50 minute film Krapp's Last tape played continuously in a very different environment : a state-of-the-art, clinically precise DVD home cinema set-up where the visitor could experience Egoyan's film in a sleek, grey minimalist lounge in high definition sound and vision. As the 35mm film picked up dust, dirt and scratches, the audio and image irreversibly deteriorated while the digital projection remained unchanged over the course of the exhibition.
Steenbeckett is included in The Artangel Collection.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel, courtesy of The Royal Academy of Arts and The British Museum. The project was supported by Arts Council England, Special Angels and The Company of Angels
