- Venue
- Victoria Miro Gallery
- Location
- London
To accompany Playtime, Isaac Julien’s ambitious new film work, there is a filmed discussion between the artist and the Marxist geographer David Harvey. During this discussion Julien asks Harvey ‘Why is capital so hard to depict?’
The discussion is screened on the ground floor at Victoria Miro’s Wharf Road gallery, with Playtime itself occupying the whole of the floor above. In some ways this allows Julien’s question to stand as a message to prospective viewers of Playtime, a gnomic self-assessment, a review, a disclaimer.
Playtime is big and slow and beautiful. It spreads itself across seven screens. For example, on one screen there is footage as a character walks along a Dubai backstreet with ambient sound of traffic passing. Simultaneously, on another screen, the same scene, but filmed from further back, this time with no sound, and clearly a second or two behind the footage on the first screen. This use of the multiple screens allows the timeline of the film to splay out, separating into delightful asychronicities. Then, like a length of rope given a clockwise turn, the timeline twists back together again.
Playtime is plangent and viscous and immersive. It relies on soliloquies from its main characters. While some of these – particularly the Filipina housemaid caught in semi-servitude in Dubai – have a story to tell, Playtime is not driven by the imperatives of plot. Each character floats in their own setting. The multiple screens somehow add to the sense that each strand of the film – the Dubai strand, the Icelandic strand – is a floating world, membranous, free of influence.
Two of the characters in Playtime – the housemaid and an Icelandic artist – are suffering. Though their experiences are very different, they respond in a similar way: by gazing out of the window and speaking their troubles. From the pristine apartment in which she is trapped, the housemaid looks over terrifying nocturnal views of Dubai. The artist stares from his half-built and now never-to-be-finished dream home onto the bare Icelandic hillsides with their wafts of volcanic steam.
Playtime is plush and persuasive and watchable. The characters with more agency, more movement around the frame, are those who ride the global markets. There’s a charming art dealer who walks up a long expensive staircase, while delivering a long expansive explanation of the global art market, setting out an intellectual justification for buying artwork. There’s a hedge fund manager wielding a trumpet. With a swinging drum kit solo pushing the soundtrack along, he strides the empty office space. He has views over the City of London. Periodically he unleashes soulful trumpet licks. Then a young colleague comes in and breathlessly explains hedge funds as if reading from a textbook.
Harvey’s answer to Julien, in the filmed discussion on the ground floor, was that capital is a bit like gravity, you can only intuit it by its effects. In one way Julien has solved his own question. By handling his material with such consistency and beauty Julien creates a visual language that does depict capital. The slow cycling of motifs and the luminous lethargy of Playtime provide a palpable connection between the different strands of the film. As viewers, we begin to read this particular rhythmic and visual ensemble as standing for the deep and inexorable movement of global finance.
At the same time, Julien has not solved his own question. Although characters in Playtime describe the effects of capital, those effects remain somehow latent, suspended, deferred, pushed beyond the edge of the frame. This is partly because Playtime concentrates on individuals who speak alone. We are not shown capital as a social relation, only as a consistent visual language. And so we don’t see the how the imperatives of capital are enacted through mundane social relations, through the decisions to call in the bank loan for someone’s extravagant home. Or through the decision to prevent a housemaid from ever leaving their place of work.