This 13-minute black-and-white film, made in 1975 in the small village of Ashnak in the Caucasus, on the periphery of the Soviet Union, begins with a close-up: the camera looks down onto the head, bent forward, of a man washing his hair – as if it were following the stream of water pouring over this head, apparently tipped out from some sort of container. The scene is a simple one. And yet behind Hamlet Hovsepian’s apparently harmless view of this activity is concealed an entire repertoire of powerful visual gestures: one is put in mind of the close-ups of working hands that became conventional formulae in Soviet films, of cleansing rituals like those documented in early ethnographic cinema, of baptism. The opening scene in Hovsepian’s performance documentation and conceptual art film »Washing Hair, Biting Nails, Yawning«, which depicts an everyday action in minimal fashion, without any allegorical trimmings, thus becomes an allegory of an existential condition.
The sequence that follows is a rhythmically constructed, abstractly composed series of images of quarter profiles, back views and detailed studies of a young man’s shaven head. Each frame is constructed two-dimensionally and in balanced grey tones. With this sequence of images, full of direct and indirect presence, Hovsepian again opens up a whole network of cultural associations for the viewers. A network that ranges from the body-scan photography of 19th-century positivist psychiatrists, the film documents containing the rabble-rousing racial ideology of the Nazis, the objectively documentary camera of the liberators of the concentration camps, concealing the horror behind similar pictorial formulae, and the Stalinist repertoire of images of the »traitor«, to the abstractions of Surrealist photography.
After these severe, symbolically charged and ascetic series of cuts, the film swings about to theatrical scenery – both in structure and mood. In front of the neutral backdrop of a wall, as if positioned there for a casting session, sits a man whose clothing and behaviour easily identify him as belonging to the milieu of Soviet critical intellectuals of the seventies. He is practising yawning in an exaggerated stage fashion. After the half-portrait of this man, showing a close-up of his face, that of a woman biting her nails is projected.
Unlike the faces of the man washing his hair and the man with the shaven head, those of these two people are turned towards the camera. They carry out their gestures and actions, all indicative of boredom, in a space charged with attributes of fashion and thus with time, and in a manner that allows physiognomic and stylistic classification. In a time-stretching choreography, the images of the yawner and the nail-biter alternate repeatedly – the images stay the same, but mutate nonetheless. They do not do this in the »classical« procedures of cinema – montage, editing, camera work, etc. – but materially: Hovsepian over- or under-exposes the film, lets it fade or slides black in front of the scene. In a deconstructive procedure analogous to the analytical procedures of experimental films elsewhere, one that takes into account the physical materiality of the film, Hovsepian distracts attention from the constant repetition of the motif – and the way it is overworked -, drawing it instead to the kinds of abstract images which the material itself projects onto the screen: shadows, superimpositions, highlights, errors in exposure, scratches, smears, blurs. This play of light on the screen in the end finally blots out the reminiscences of scientific films and their viewer constructions from the scenes showing the gestures, almost rigid in their repetition, of the yawner and the nail-biter, who position themselves before the camera as in historical studio photographs; it makes one forget the similarity of Hovsepian’s scenes to the technique used by this genre to document patients with psychoses; the resemblance of the depiction to early slapstick cinema dissolves. Hovsepian’s succinct observation of the everyday as a theatrical installation does evoke these associated images, but also allows the viewer to see the performers themselves as observers of this game with light and media. In its static, minimal takes, the film tells of an almost existential state of being set back. A feeling that would seem to have parallels in the life of its maker.
In the late sixties and early seventies, Hovsepian, who was then living in Moscow for a while, was in close contact with the left-wing aesthetic avant-garde in the capital. But he differed from it in his artistic approach. As opposed to aesthetic critique as work in a symbolic space that draws on the formal apparatuses of everyday and ruling culture, as it is always incorporated, reflected, in Moscow conceptual art of the time, in his film, which was made after he had left Moscow, Hovsepian inserts the social back into the subjects. This conjuring trick - which, in one bold move, dispenses with the oppressive burden of the hollow ideological kitsch of the bureaucratic culture of the Brezhnev area as an aesthetic projection surface and withdraws to the stage of abstract, everyday acts - and the completely unspectacular camera work have no parallel anywhere else in the Soviet counter-avant-garde of those years.
In the mid-seventies, Hovsepian returned to Armenia, to his studio in the small village of Ashnak, where he has lived ever since. There, in voluntary reclusion, he began consistently to create a body of conceptual works. As well as this film, which was conceived and filmed on one of the rural afternoons in Ashnak, and is today only available as a copy urgently in need of conservation, he created a number of installations and interventions on an equally reduced scale: a few plants in plastic bags in front of a house wall, newspaper that draws a line in the landscape along a slope at the foot of Mount Aragats. And later, he produced a series of paintings following the new conventions of Perestroika art. In the Caucasus, Hovsepian is seen by many artists of the middle and younger generation as one of the erratic avant-garde figures of the seventies. (1) Arman Grigorian once paradoxically and ironically called Hovsepian’s studio »The Kitchen« of the Soviet Caucasus. Not completely without reason. This one film alone places the filmmaker Hovsepian in a genealogy in which the films of the New York underground are also inscribed. Washing long hair, biting nails, yawning – gestures of deviance that positively reverse the image of isolation current among cultural pessimists, as a seizure of space in a world of standardization, of the mass society, as cultural critics called it in those years. Hamlet Hovsepian’s film is not only the result of a small revolt against the deadly passivity of this society. The reduction it carries out, its silence, gives a universal turn to the meaning of emptiness, to the abstract space, and the frequently extended time.

Hamlet Hovsepian, stills from the film »Washing Hair, Biting Nails, Yawning«, 16 mm, b/w, 13 min., 1975

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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