INTERFACE

REVIEW

Emily Wardill: Game Keepers Without Game

Spacex, Exeter
12 December - 20 February

Reviewed by: Gabrielle Hoad »

Part social drama, part lifestyle commentary, Emily Wardill's disturbing seventy-six minute film reminds me more than anything of American Psycho. Though it doesn't hit the horrific depths of Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel, it draws similar parallels between psychosis and consumerism.

Based on the seventeenth-century play Life is a Dream by Pedro Calder'n de la Barca, the story concerns a young girl, Stay, who lives in modern day London. Taken into care as a child, she's later invited back into the home of her affluent family, where she wreaks psychological and physical havoc. Stay's detached, fragmented mental state seems to have infected the film itself, disrupting its attempts at delivering standard dramatic narrative.

Before the film, I look over a diverse collection of objects in the gallery, wondering how they will come together in the plot: a scorched circular table, Nike trainers with borsht stains, a cockerel costume, a book of concrete poetry and a copy of a painting by Wilfredo Lam with added graffiti.

In fact, these objects remain as static and isolated in the film as they are in the gallery space, even as their significance is revealed. Presented one by one against a stark white background, they are described like items in a catalogue. Characters are introduced in a similar way. Each stands alone in a white void, staring at the camera while their biographical details are read aloud.

The status of real people and inanimate objects is blurred from the start - both seem to be commodities, both capable of communication. An object might speak of its owner's class, wealth, taste - or even their paranoid state of mind. A person might be possessed, exploited or discarded.

All inhabit a featureless, monochrome world, where context and connection seem to have been erased. Often the action takes place off screen and we're left eavesdropping on something terrible. Objects and people rarely touch; when they do, it's not only a visual jolt, the connection itself may be violent too.

With its chilly tone and alienating presentation, this isn't an immersive experience, even though it's a truly compelling one. The film is accompanied - and occasionally interrupted - by a soundtrack of complex drumming, sometimes working with the narrative, sometimes cutting right across spoken script. There's constant switching from live action to stills, from silence to noise, from colour to black and white. Smooth, authoritative narration is followed by a reader stumbling over the script. At one point we even hear the director giving voice directions to the actor who plays Stay. I feel overwhelmed with information I can't quite assimilate, simultaneously invited into this strange place and shut out of it.

There's almost a surfeit of ideas in this film, collected as assiduously as the designer pieces that fill the home of Stay's family. Issues of language, race, class, identity, surveillance, public and private space, reality versus imagination and the creative process are all raised. These little scraps of meaning resonate, but rarely connect up. In the world portrayed here, there are cold, blank spaces everywhere - even between ideas.

Writer detail:
Artist and writer based in Exeter.

art@gabriellehoad.co.uk| www.gabriellehoad.co.uk

Venue detail:
Spacex »
45 Preston Street, Exeter EX1 1DF

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