Three Short Films from 2007
At the beginning of the year, Aryan Kaganof produced several significant short films and here we’re going to look at three of them.
“Suprematist Composition Number 36” is a gem which would fit well with Ron Athey or Johan Thom’s S&M performances – but in this film the naked star is the filmmaker himself – a fact which cannot go unnoticed! Extreme poetry, recited and filmed, produce this precious jewel of a short film. It is a sophisticated and intellectual film, introducing us to the pleasures of sadomasochism from a strictly artistic point of view. Kaganof admitted that the performance entitled “Shooting Gallery” (which was filmed in Grahamstown and Johannesburg) was a little difficult for him, but he accepted suffering for several days to leave us with this recorded document. Whilst suspended by a rope, naked and upside down, Kaganof recites one his poems called “The Funeral”. It begins “I went to my own funeral/they were playing that celestial music” and ends
So say “c’est la vie” to the broken-hearted
Say “bon voyage” to the newly-weds
Always say “I love you” to the one
You wake up next to
But o my sweet little darling
Don’t you ever say “forever”
Forever is a very short time *
* Aryan Kaganof “Drive-Thru Funeral”, published by Pine Slopes, 2003, Westhoven, SA, p.23.
While the poet recites his lines, suspended upside down, very violent images of war are projected on a giant screen, intersected with images of a baby (the poet-performer himself). As a metaphor for the naivety of every war ever waged, Kaganof’s short film offers us the most powerful pacifist allegorical visual poem of our times, and one that is also a vindication of extreme carnal pleasures – if regarded from a uniquely artistic-alternative angle.
A second performance set up and recorded by Kaganof took place in 2003 in Utrecht (The Netherlands) with the pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama, Kaganof and the plastic artist Dick Tuinder. All three of them star in another performance which is musical, literary and plastic (in the wider sense of its combining painting with the “happening”). “Trio Mental” is the title of an expanded performance which blends Kaganof’s occultist and metaphysical poetry (this time the poem “In the Beginning” from his anthology “Abraxas – The Prophet of Nothing” published by Pine Slopes, Westhoven, 2003, p.134) with Tuinder’s mock “childish” decors and paintings, and Mukaiyama on piano interpreting a free composition by Ramon Dos Santos (Dick Tuinder). Kaganof abandons himself to a hysterical interpretation of his hymn while Tuinder closely supervises the lighting of his plastic environment, rendering him an expert adult storyteller and fabulist.
The third performance is “Mechanicus” starring the hands of Tomoko Mukaiyama, interpreting on piano a Noise score in homage to her dead husband. The screen is split into two, three or, at the end, several parts, as the composition gets more and more complicated. In fact, the music remains repetitive but a climatic sensation is produced by this visual and acoustic symphony, due, principally, to the brio and interior energy of the pianist Mukaiyama.
translated from the french by lucy lyall grant