- Venue
- Tribeca Grand Hotel Screening Room
- Location
- United States
The title of Harpstrings and Lava, the new film by the American artist Daria Martin, is taken from a nightmare that a friend of Martin’s had as a child. The nightmarish element is the conjunction of two seemingly impossible things – the thick, molten heat of lava and the cool, clear strings of a harp. The film, a PERFORMA Commission co-commissioned by S.M.A.K and Outset, also builds to an encounter between two conflicting ideas – this time, embodied in characters. There is the driven activity of a musician, played by the experimental musician Zeena Parkins, and the exploratory, animal-like behaviour of a woman in a woodland set, played by the performer Nina Fog.
Parkins wears a Japanese Kimono and carries out a series of unexplained rituals – banging chalks together, whipping the sleeves of her dress – before sitting down to play the harp. She is surrounded by formal architecture and when she starts to play music, it’s in a never-ending courtyard. The courtyard’s walls and archways glimpse more walls and archways, receding into an infinity of man-made space. In contrast, Fog’s world is consumed in nature and discovery. She wakes up, confused, under a tree, and scrambles round for food. Her dextrous fingers fumble through leaves and dirt, while Parkins’ dextrous fingers take command of the harp. The camera slides between each character by way of a long, twisted branch; it is dead when it leads to or from Parkins, but comes to life as it gets closer to Fog.
Harpstrings and Lava is itself a contrast to the other two Daria Martin films shown at this screening, Birds (2001) and In the Palace (2000). In these earlier works, the camera travels around performers striking poses, or getting prepared to strike a pose. These films draw on modernist aesthetics – relishing the shapes, forms and colours of objects; attending to the acts and tools of representation and performance themselves, rather than to mimesis (the drive to imitate). They draw attention to the camera’s participation in performance and the actors, as Daria Martin said in her introductory speech to this screening, are used like mannequins or marionettes, rather than individuals with their own agency.
In Harpstrings and Lava, however, the characters sometimes lead the camera. While in her earlier films, Martin uses the camera to explore a set that is complicit in and produced entirely for its gaze, in Harpstrings and Lava the camera seems to have stumbled upon a world that resonates beyond its horizons. Here it is the agency of the camera and the performance of film as a medium that are rendered passive. Dripping with meaning beyond the viewers’ control, Harpstrings and Lava really does feel like a nightmare. It ends just as the two irreconcilable characters meet. The lights go up in the auditorium, and we wake without resolution.
