The second installment of a series about rarities or forgotten items from the last three decades of media and electronic culture

Only very recently there was a lot of talk again about so-called »realtime reporting«. However, the tradition of capturing dramatic political events on a running camera, whether intentionally or unintentionally, goes back a long way. Further back than the recent wars, at any rate, in which reporters proved themselves to be increasingly adaptable modules within a larger (imperial) programme. Ever since Abraham Zapruder filmed the assassination of John F. Kennedy with his Super-8 camera in November 1963, the way has been clear for a new media fetish: one could call it verité, or do-it-yourself-style. Again and again, this has provoked artistic reactions – just think of Bruce Conner’s »Report« (1963-67) and »Television Assassination« (1963-95), for example -, as if the traumatic moment has to be broken down into its smallest medial particles for so long until something like a real core perhaps becomes visible. Or the original material is brushed up the wrong way – that is, confronted with contrary or, in the best sense of the word, »far-fetched« narratives -, as Zoran Naskovski has done in his work »Death in Dallas« (2000).

At the beginning of his career, Spike Jonze, now a Hollywood director (»Being John Malkovich« and »Adaption«), also experimented with realtime footage from American presidential history. It is not the Zapruder film, analysed down to the last frame, that Jonze subjects to pop-cultural reprocessing, but another assassination, no less dramatic in the details captured on running camera. On March 30, 1981, a certain John Hinckley Jr. chose the recently elected president Ronald Reagan as the target for his individual, anarchistic »one-man campaign« – allegedly to impress the actress Jodie Foster. The shots fired in front of a Washington hotel had relatively negligible consequences for the president; however, two secret service agents, and Reagan’s press spokesman, Jim Brady – who was thenceforth to fight for stricter controls on weapons – received severe injuries.

Spike Jonze shows video recordings of this »near-death report« - which were played over and over again on television at the start of the eighties - uncut but in extreme slow motion, to a soundtrack composed of the piece »Five Stop Mother Superior Rain« by the American indie rock band »The Flaming Lips«. The clip, produced in 1995, never ran on music television, and was now dug up by Resfest 2003 (http://www.resfest.com) for a Spike Jones Rarities Special. It brings together a number of asynchronous elements that give an insight into the relationship between US politics and independent culture. The song »Five Stop Mother Superior Rain«, brought out in 1989 at a time when the consequences of the arch-conservative Reagan years began to be felt with a vengeance, comes down primarily on sanctimonious political hypocrisy, and displays a certain dissident helplessness. »I was born the day they shot JFK«, sings front man Wayne Coyne about the start of the great blindness – long before the expulsion from the counter-cultural paradise. »Somebody please tell this machine I’m not a machine«, suggests another rebellious phrase, finally ending up with the resigned insight: »You’re fucked if you do, and you’re fucked if you don’t«. Even Lawrence Grossberg was not able to sum up the connection between popular conservatism and post-modernism more succinctly when he said that all former »lines of flight« had, in the eighties, become ever increasingly regulated or disciplinary moments.

Spike Jonze has all of this – the insight of the impossible outside – collide with the super-slow-motion pictures of the assassination attempt. Even in the jerky pictures at the start, it becomes apparent, putting paid to any conciliatory hint of retro, that something here is no longer quite right, that something has gone fundamentally out of synch. Neither music and image nor the video and memory trace (of the real event) can be made to tally up. At the same time, the extreme slowing down of the events shown, which, at a visual level, almost turns the panic into its opposite, creates (retrospectively) the impression of an inevitability that unrolls both unhurriedly and programmatically. It is not that a particularly successful historical method or a new view of the misery of the eighties becomes evident. But the moment at which dissent – which must constantly be rearticulated and renegotiated – turns into raw, irrefutable violence could scarcely have been better captured. Music and images comment on each other from radically incompatible positions, while the unavoidable takes shape on both sides.

In the clip »Five Stop Mother Superior Rain«, realtime terror is neither stripped of its medial integument, nor reduced to it. This makes it controversial for more reasons than just its obscure confrontation of material. So controversial, in fact that the recently issued and highly representative Spike Jonze DVD (www.directorslabel.com) dispenses with it completely. One could say »found«, only to be »lost« again.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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