- Venue
- White Cube
- Location
The title of Runa Islam's new film work Empty the pond to get the fish(2008) is also a convenient metaphor for attempting to locate where the real point of focus lies in the content of her 12 minute 35mm film. Screened in a new cinema space by Tobias Putrih, part DIY aesthetic to house the projector, part meticulous curtaining of the cinematic space with floor to ceiling rolls of Islam's film, Empty the pond to get the fish is the second work by Islam based on writings by French filmmaker Robert Bresson on the theory of Cinematography. Islam's film attempts to take on and interrogate several different theories and interpretations with her camera, which faced with the prospect of a thorough investigation, struggles to reveal little other than present a glossy composition punctuated by jarring movements that mark the camera's progress. Bresson's early films are examples of using the camera as if to write the film; the 1960s theory of the camera-stylo (the camera-pen) which emphasises the act of creating a film, rather than simply reproducing what is in front of the camera. Islam's film writes itself only through the intermittent machine-like sounds the equipment on which the camera sits makes. Background sound is almost absent. The camera finds the empty corners and architectural features of an unidentified museum space: an empty auditorium with it's slitty air vents which panel the back of the room, white plinths waiting for works of art to be placed atop them, paintings moving in and out of a store, and a repetitive focus on the long window panes of the building, interchangeable also as individual film frames. Islam's project with her first film Cinematography (2007) and subsequently with this one is to question what kind of image-making is possible when the mechanisms that govern the aesthetic and narrative form of a film are done away with. This question is only partly answered albeit in a somewhat contrived manner, through restricting the apparatus by employing motion control camera equipment, and only arrives at a superficial answer to this question through the relationships between art, film and architecture. "Empty(ing) the pond to get the fish," the work's title taken from Bresson's 1975 text Notes on Cinematography appeals to a quality of filmmaking that harnesses ambiguities, often appearing to conceal, but instead clarifies and emphasises fundamental detail. Islam's film attempts to replicate this process, but it instead glides at a distance over its content, a fact that is yet more apparent when it is revealed that the controlled camera movements in fact simply spell the words "Empty the pond to get the fish."
