Joan Jonas

Born in 1936 à New York (US)
Lives and works in New York (US)

  

He Saw Her Burning

1983
video colour sound
duration: 19'32''
Purchased in: 2009

Good Night Good Morning
He Saw Her Burning
Wind

A man and a woman. An actor and an actress. Two stories are being told. Two confused narratives are juxtaposed and intersect until they intertwine. In a fit of madness, a serviceman steals a tank and demolishes everything in his path. A woman catches fire in the street. A woman who is waiting for a man. A man who is waiting for a woman. An impossible encounter. A cancelled golf match. A red pennant. A feather is passed from hand to hand. Love? Panic in the streets. The tank ends its journey in the water. The woman ends up in a pile of ashes. Violent death. A hallucination? I saw her burn. I saw it drown. But also: a sketched portrait of a man with a moustache. A red skirt billowing. The movement of abstract forms. Music. The depression of an American GI stationed in West Berlin. A close-up. A border that cuts a lake in half. Individual madness used as a weapon. The repressed frenzy that spontaneously combusts.
Based on a 1983 performance made during her residency in West Germany, this strange video by the artist Joan Jonas is a visual patchwork. It’s a collage of disparate sounds, images, and drawings which relies on a visual and narrative shock. One can sense the urgency of expression which leads to cacophony, stuttering, improvisation. It is an audiovisual experiment in the chemical sense of the word: mixing things just to see what happens, what reactions are produced, what new compounds are formed. Or yet, an alchemical, even more than a chemical, experiment. Facts related and repeated as incantations, a whiff of the fantastic in a political context. In short, it is a hybrid form of storytelling which combines reality and fiction, human interest stories and the fantastic, testimony and speculation. Detailed report and fable. Fairy-tale reporting [conte-rendu]. Factual news item? Parable? Madness? One will never know.
This a priori theatrical experiment is profoundly rooted in television and unfolds its contents typologically: debates, animation, news reports, confessionals, fiction, sport, etc. Channel-hopping in order to tell the story of the neurosis brought on by the morbid succession of stories. The video thus functions as a visual poem. The background yields the form which translates the hesitant words of the protagonists into image and rhythm. Thus a jumpy, almost frantic montage produces a doubly traumatic effect. Cathartic video clip. Psych drama. The choppy, unstructured narrative gives rise to an alternative vision of violence and of “peace-time” conflict. The 1980s and the persistence of the not-so-cold war. Absurd and repetitive. A situation apparently stuck in place which conceals multiple personal dramas. A deceptively peaceful context capable of spontaneously producing dead bodies. Without a fight, or fighting against itself. Implosions.

The disjointed rhythm of the film evokes the image of fragmented, splintered memory which is therefore capable of objectively bearing witness to the real. From then on, one can start to discern a discreet critique of the media, built on desynchronization and distancing, and a premonitory denunciation of the fictionalization of news and historical events as they are being passed through the audiovisual meat-grinder. A confusion produced by the overabundance of images and the incessant noise. “He Saw Her Burning” is a video experiment which, with its chaotic method and permanent indetermination, paradoxically is a faithful echo of the issues of its time.

_{Guillaume Désanges}

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