Windowlicker
It’s been a long time since I saw any Chris Cunningham films. Like most people I was wowed by his 90’s splurge of awe-inspiring, utterly original and mostly very dark music videos for the likes of Aphex Twin, Portishead and Bjork. I also liked some of his more commercial output (Madonna, PlayStation adverts) and his uncharacteristically sedate video for Leftfield. Then there’s the curios like Monkey Drummer. But I think the last full-length Chris Cunningham film I saw was Rubber Johnny in 2005. This seemed to display a return to his dark, experimental roots, taking the unsettling horror movie vibe of Come To Daddy a stage further.
Last night I was re-introduced to the twisted world of Cunningham in spectacular style. If Rubber Johnny took the horror up a notch then his latest live show, projected on to 3 giant screens with accompanying audio, raises it so high that it blows the scale. Falling somewhere between a musical performance (featuring classic tracks and Cunninghams own remixes/productions) and live cinema, it was an hour of profoundly unsettling but arresting and accomplished work.
Cunningham’s trademark marriage of sound and visuals is still ever present but both more refined and more direct: it’s easy to miss the syncopation between the flash of a train wheel sparking and a wheeze of static, but somewhat easier to spot the association between a woman bouncing her giant breasts in time with the throbbing beat.
Much of the audio is cacophonous and lacking a regular rhythm but there is always that inseparable correlation between it and the visuals. This is where Cunningham excels (I often wonder why other video artists miss the chance to tie visual and sonic cues together to even a fraction of the degree exhibited by Cunningham). However, I preferred the more rhythmic output of his early music videos – there was something profound and organic, almost synaesthetic, about this audiovisual inseparability that I think is slightly lacking from the frenetic noise of his current work.
The performance was divided into several pieces, some with themes more obvious than others but with no overarcing narrative. In this way it was like a twisted VJ set. Proceedings started with footage moving around some kind of machine that fired green lazers. An actual lazer spat spears of light over the audience too, giving the impression that you were in the machine.
Next came a sallow, yellowy-green mound of flesh; slowly writhing. At first I wasn’t sure if it was one body or several, but it transpired that it was a man and a woman. What could have been rough love developed into near-rape and then brutal, mutual violence in a film that pulled no punches. Explicit sexual imagery was sporadically flashed on the outermost screens whilst centre stage the man and woman, naked, beat the shit out of each other in perfect syncopation with aggressive techno. Donna Summer’s I Feel Love was slowly introduced into the mix making it all the more obvious that Cunningham was exploring the links between sex and violence.
It wouldn’t have been nearly so disturbing if it was two men or even two women fighting and I’m undecided as to whether the woman getting even in the fight justified the fact she was the only bloodied party and that, moments earlier, she was lying prone and apparently defeated as the man loomed over her, grasping his semi-erect penis. Pretty full on stuff, and whilst I felt prompted to make a moral judgment regarding man versus woman in the context of sexual dominance, I wonder in hindsight if the piece had such clear cut intentions.
I thought things were going to lighten when I heard the twinkle of a Boards of Canada tune, but it didn’t last. Neither did the ‘Intermission’ which was declared on-screen, superceeded by a few seconds of inertness, then followed by the message ‘Intermission Ends’ and an explosion of noise. Funny! (Funny ha-ha or Funny mental I’m not sure!) Some classic videos like Windowlicker made an appearance, as did the alien-looking PlayStation girl.
The final piece is the one that has stayed with me most strongly. Apparently Cunningham has been working with Gil Scott-Heron’s new material, utilising night-time footage of trains and subways to augment Heron’s from-the-heart poetry. His tired visage was overlaid on a black background as shooting lights gradually revealed themselves to be trains, stations, tunnels and track. Heron gruffly spoke/sung his bluesy lament over stark, ringing, swooping synths. With the brooding, edgy urban visuals it made for a foreboding finale. It seems that Heron’s latest material fits perfectly with Cunninghams teasing out of the modern cityscape’s innate light and sound show. For me it held the kind of detached and unsettling yet strangely beautiful aesthetic that is found under streetlamps in pre-dawn drizzle; deserted industry; places where the stamp of humanity is so saturated that humanity itself is absent.
Overall I think Cunningham has become more explicit and brash, which in some ways is a shame. It seems that pleasant and uplifitng noises, music and visuals aren’t part of modern experimental electronic discourse. Take the talks hosted by the Southbank Centre’s annual Ether festival this year, focussing as they are on the controlling, homogenising nature of urban landscapes and electronic music. I think there’s room for a more optimistic and beauty-focussed voice, myself. That said, Chris Cunningham remains an undeniably powerful and technically mind-boggling artist, still with the power to shock and captivate and still at the top of his game.
PS, I’d highly recommend sourcing decent copies of his videos if you haven’t seen them – YouTube just doesn’t do them justice.