Cinema is a dangerous thing.

It transports us to places and times and events. Really, it gives us the illusion we are transported. Through its magic, its sensual audio and temptuous flashing, our bodies ignite; and open is the way for cinema to take us. We leave the screening room, or theater, activated and soothed. We leave with a stain in us and on us. We go places we never go. (And it has given me really high expectations for love-type stuff!)

In our current exhibition, What Time is This Place, Mark van Fleet explores this phenomenon with his work, "Somewhere."

"Somewhere" is a multi media installation that presents and documents a screening room that was used for a 60 hour movie marathon. In the room, there is comfortable seating, a screen, and a projector. Movies with "places" as titles were projected on the screen continuously for 3 days from July 7th through the 9th, 2008. 10 - 15 second clips of video footage were taken every 10 minutes to create a unique video montage of all of the projected films. This montage, which is both documentation of the movie marathon and a feature-length video work in its own right, is now projected onto the same screen which the original films were shown.

This work reminds me of the work of Pierre Huyghe who wrote, "Everything you look at, an object whatsoever, or image, has been thought about, selected and been subject to huge activity." Thus if cinema stains us so, where does this stain originate and where has it been? Cinema objectifies what it presents, but it seems to objectify us too. "Somewhere" collapses the event of a 3-day, 27-film movie marathon into 1 feature-length video experience, creating not only a discourse about place, document and narrative, but also about the collapse of the subject-object relationship.

-Eva Ball, exhibitions preparator and guide

Read what Mark van Fleet has written about the piece:
Screening rooms and theatres are “non places” in which extra periphery information is typically kept to a minimum in the service of transporting the viewer into the space (physical and psychological) of the film. The "Somewhere" of the video's title refers, of course, to the places as well as the times depicted in the screened films.

In cinema, Place can be a complex thing. It can be a background of stunning vistas in which most of the action takes place as in a family film like “Alaska” or an action film like “Sahara”. These are films where the location becomes almost like an extra that the characters must struggle with or against. It can be the remote or exotic locale that is reproduced on a soundstage in Hollywood ala “Macao” or “Casablanca”. A film may be an ode to the loved and familiar city as in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”. The place may be the site of a fierce battle as in the film’s “Midway” and “Gallipoli”. Similarly, historic events in a city like Munich can inspire a film of the same title even if the events in the film do not take place very much in that southern German city. A film like “Woodstock” (the last film shown and the only documentary) captures that place in upstate New York’s iconic moment in cultural history. A film can also be absurdly named after a place for which it clearly bears no connection as in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”.

Time in the cinema is just as complicated. All films bear trace of the time in which they are made and they are all explorations of Time as an integral aspect of the medium. Many films take place in the “present time”, but as a film ages, we see the “present time” of those films differently. “Atlantic City” in 1981 is not the same Atlantic City of 2008. Likewise, just one interesting (and possibly depressing) thing about a film like “Nashville” from 1975 is knowing what we know about contemporary Country Music thirty years later.

Many films are “period pieces” that further problematize our experience of time. A film like the recent “Chicago” (based on a play first staged in the seventies) is supposed to take place in 1920’s Chicago during prohibition, but obviously, the film would not be the one it is even if it had been made in 1980, indebted as it is to music video influenced camera work, editing, and set design, as well fashion magazine sex appeal. Imagine how different the film would be had it been a 1950’s blockbuster! In this context, the question of “What Time is this Place?” becomes especially meaningful. “Chicago” (from 2002) feels as much like a product of its own time than the one it supposedly depicts.

I hoped that by organizing this Movie Marathon to reflect on the cinema’s relation to Place. I think that the resulting feature length montage it is a ruptured and strange meditation on that filmic idea.

The films were:
Alaska (1985) / Atlantic City (1981) / Barcelona (1994) / Brazil (1985) / Casablanca (1942) / Chicago (2002) /
Earth (1930) / Earth (1996) / Fargo (1996) / Hawaii (1966) / Istanbul (1957) / Kansas City (1996) /
Key Largo (1948) / Lake Placid (1999) / Macao (1952) / Manhatten (1979) / Montana (1950) /
Munich (2005) / Nashville (1975) / New York New York (1977) / Philadelphia (1993) / Pittsburgh (1942) / Sahara (1943) / San Francisco (1936) / Santa Fe (1951) / West of Zanzibar (1928) / Woodstock (1970)

I’d like to particularly thank Matt Bush for his devotion to this project. Matt was the only person who was present for the entire 60 hours of the marathon, and though he slept for about 5 hours (in the screening room!), he worked tirelessly and filmed a large portion of the montage. Andrew Graham helped us make it through both of the difficult late night/ early morning stretches and he also filmed significant portions of the resulting montage. Jen Burton spent a lot of time at the Marathon as well, and helped film in addition to other assistance she provided. Ryan Agnew gave great advice and also let me use his library card to secure many of the films we screened, as did Nathan Reynolds. Thanks to Berry Von Boekel and Eva Ball for all of their logistical help and to Sergio Soave, Elizabeth Gerdeman, and Kelly Stevelt-Kaser for their organizational assistance. I’d also like to thank the rest of the staff at the Urban Arts Space, the student assistants that helped put the exhibition together, and the other artists in the show for their encouragement and good humor.

-- Mark Van Fleet