Walking in the Age of Video

In 2006, a corner room in Barcelona’s MOCBA displayed a single-screen video work by Frank Hesse, entitled Florence: From St Croce to the Institute of Art History. Filmed at night with a handheld camera, this video traces a walk, in blurry and unstable imagery, through the streets from St Croce to the Institute of Art History. An on-screen text narrates the fugue-like experiences in these streets of two emblematic figures of opposing philosophies of art – the nineteenth century writer Stendhal and the turn of the century art theorist Aby Warburg. Taking Hesse’s video as a starting point, this paper discusses the documentary filming of place, in the form of a walk, or a drifting tracking shot, in large-screen installation and single-screen video works. The walk has a long history in non-fiction films and videos that engage with the experience of place and of human passage through it. The contemporary video walk is a phenomenology of place, taking account of history, memory and forgetting as well as the reciprocity between perceiver and the material world. The video walk shares certain formal and philosophical preoccupations with several artistic genres that draw on actual and metaphorical experiences of walking: psycho-geography; the literary ramble; the ‘long walking poem’ (to paraphrase de Certeau and Roger Gilbert); the sculptural walk. The film and video walk tends to take an open-ended essayistic form, ruminating introspectively in voice-over or on-screen text, or silently, intensively looking. In its introspective dimensions, the video walk can be seen in the light of Alexander Astruc’s concept of the ‘camera-pen’ and Raymond Bellour’s account of video writing. Quoting from recent video works by Stella Brennan, Chen Chieh Jen, Frank Hesse, Robert Nery and my own work, the paper will ask why the walking/drifting documentary moving image has attracted quite a few artists recently, and what these artists share in their preoccupations.

Gabrielle Finnane is a filmmaker and lecturer in the School of Media Arts, College of Fine Arts, UNSW. She directed and co-wrote the film I, Eugenia (1998), a fictional biography of the early twentieth century Australian transvestite Eugenia Falleni. She was the producer of the documentary feature film Black Nazarene (directed by Robert Nery, 2003). Her photographs of the Philippines were exhibited in Manila in 2004. She is currently completing a series of short video texts written and filmed in the streets of four cities. She is a member of The Boondocks, a collective of artists working on If, On A Tropical Night, a project on the life of Ferdinand Marcos, to be installed in Casula Powerhouse in 2008.