kiki kouniari

2020, Single-Channel Video 

Driving Movie speaks about the relation between reality and spectacle (specifically cinema). The title refers to the movie fragments from Part 1 as well as to the driving clips from Part 2. Most significantly, it refers to the work’s composition, as both Part 1 and Part 2 are shown as projections in a room of which we can see only the ceiling, most likely a cinema hall. The projections are off centred as though the viewer is looking from the side of the cinema hall. The distanced position that the viewer is placed, this second-hand viewing, comments on the effect spectacle has onto reality and perception.

Part 1: Marion’s Rear Car Window uses clips from Hitchcock’s film “Phsycho” as runaway Marion Crane drives towards Bates Motel. The original clips from Hitchcock’s film show Marion at the centre of the frame and of our interest; what happens outside the car is of secondary importance to the story. On the contrary, in Part 1 we only see the fragment of the road visible through the car’s rear window. Here, fragmentation implies the subjective element (what one sees in a movie is a fragment, a projection of what each viewer wants to see), the objective (what one sees in a movie is framed by what the movie wants to communicate) and the rational/irrational (the impact of a movie does not lie in the “centre” but in the “background”, behind the obvious, in what the obvious really means and which is subconsciously internalised in the viewer).

Part 2: Reality Upon Marion Reclaimed uses clips from inside a car taken with a mobile camera. Its “amateuristic style” alludes to reality, but how real is this reality? Part 2 inherits an aura from spectacle and becomes cinematic as well. To the extent that reality draws from spectacle, Marion (the spectacle) has reclaimed reality and has transformed it. To the extent that reality is at the end of the day something not fictional, reality has re-claimed reality from Marion, but this recovery has brought another transformation: As the aura of spectacle slowly fades away, the video becomes more and more aggressive in a desperate attempt to stick to the spectacle.