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The Girls Without the Camera in Their Heads: An Interview with Leslie Thornton
Afterimage, Jan, 2000 by Joe Milutis
Leslie Thornton's film Old Worldy (1997) and its "rearticuladon/sequel" Another Worldy (1999) open with "The Lucky Girls" dancing atop a New York City skyscraper to the music of an all-female band. Among the many other dancers whose performances Thornton appropriates, this troupe of young, professional female 1940s-era American dancers reappears throughout both versions of the film in seedy Algerian dives, Russian outposts and Parisian can-can establishments. A preternatural luck seems to take them everywhere in space and in time with infinite energy. Yet as their various world travels were most likely filmed on the same sound stage, they are like-wise emblems of a flimsy utopia. In this void, there is no sound, or rather, the original sound of the all-female band is replaced by a techno beat that uncannily seems to have belonged there all along, punctuating the regulated paroxysms of ultimate global unity--promised in the image but deferred through the never-resolving beat. We have been expecting this ultima te event since these reels played out in living rooms or military encampments when the old-world order was about to turn a corner and become whatever we think of as "new."
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Old Worldy is one of the most hallucinatory of Thornton's works. As in her films on the nineteenth-century Russian traveler Isabelle Eberhardt (There Was An Unseen Cloud Moving [1988]; the more recent and compelling Haunted Swing [1998]; and the in-progress, feature-length The Great Invisible), hallucination is the explicit subtext. Thornton's obsession is with a woman who sought "to touch the secret soul of Islam"--an act that would require entering into the hallucinatory or intoxicated states of certain Islamic mystical brotherhoods. To reach this communal hallucinatory state, though, would require a total, and eventually fatal auto-hallucination, inducing a forgetfulness of her gender and race, and thus allowing her to enter a space denied to women and non-Arabs. In Old Worldy this hallucinatory state takes the form of what Thornton calls the "haunted gap" between sound and image. The unsettling erasure of synchronized sound coupled with her uncanny redubbing--the publicized "one edit" of the film--create s another haunted gap between past and present, which Thornton would like to displace from its locus between historical moments, and place on the outside of time.
Thornton's earlier work Adynata (1983) was a more explicit critique of the Orientalist impulse in which the beauty of exotic images and sounds hides the violence that produced them and brought them west. In her most recent films, these predictable patterns of critique and description give way to the unabashed Arabesque. Thornton has spent over a decade studying Arabic language and culture and there remains an intellectual relation to the material that does not give itself over to the pleasure principle of colonialism. Throughout Old Worldy and Another Worldy the viewer is allowed to reflect on deeper, more complex forms of colonialism that are difficult to comprehend. But Thornton's stance is not didactic and she readily admits the poetic and joyful powers inherent in images of Americans who, with the virtual license of exotic imagery, dance themselves into a frenzy. The films' images of a lily white Bahiana or the '40s novelty music impresario Spike Jones entertaining a bumbling Sultan may be symptoms of a deleterious misunderstanding, or they could be desperate--and maybe successful--attempts to cross borders, attempts to raise an everyday identity into an emblem of transport, dream and understanding through the inexplicable medium of the body.
With the ease of a talented DJ, Thornton engages in a form of culture jamming that is at once global and highly personal. The history of culture jamming and found footage manipulation has just recently begun to be assessed as a coherent, albeit multivalent tradition, and one of the purposes of this interview is to explore the secret impulses of a practitioner of this once underground tendency. In the world of experimental film, the works of Bruce Conner, Michael Wallin and Thornton (among others) have provided important reformulations of the modernist impulse to recontextualize information; but it is questionable whether this impulse leads directly from Marcel Duchamp's found objects and Dadaist collage since the usage of found footage seems an almost "natural" reaction to the media environment at hand. Found footage work, seen in this light, is not purely conceptual or art historical, but a message from the heart of the postmodern condition. But how is one to think of the artistic value or political meaning of this practice that has not only become widely popular (the appropriations of high school educational films and the like have become an art school cliche), but veritably corporate since postmodernism has given mainstream media license to become an appropriative machine? Sergei Eisenstein described his vision for the role of montage elements when he said, "[b]y combining... monstrous incongruities we newly collect the disintegrated event into one whole, but in our aspect." Perhaps one should keep Eisenstein in mind when visualizing Thornton's restructuring of the impossible event of global unity through the use of found footage. Thornton's monstrously incongruent images of Zen priests and Indian musicals, Kathakali and the lindy hop, expose her own intimate perversion of world order.
