Item 2140 - WALTZ, A MOCK BALL

Video

In February 2005, the Croatian National Theatre tried to emulate the Viennese Opern ball by launching its own annual Ball. The Viennese Opern Ball has long been seen in Croatia as the pinnacle of high society, and Vienna as the heart of an imaginary Croatian cultural and political heritage - the Austro Hungarian Empire. The imaginary source shaping Croatian national identity is Vienna. The venture is primarily a business venture, the commodity on sale is the fantasy of an Imperial past, a colonised subject's longing for belonging to the mother state. During my two month resideny in Vienna in 2003 I recorded and filmed preparations, auditions and reharsals for the annual Vienese Opera Ball. I then used the audio material to reconstruct the rehearsals and micro scenes that occurred in Vienna. What we see is a mime act which sometimes concurrs with the original audio and at other times slips. The visuals are shot on mini DV and 16 mm. The mini DV footage emulates the mini DV footage shot from the rehearsals in Vienna, while the 16 mm signals a literal mise en scene of history as political fantasy. The 16 mm footage is telecined in two stages. The first straight from negative on antiquated Croatian TV technology, so the defficiency of the image is the result of a comparative technological backwardness, the second stage was telecined from a positive print and through comparative technological modernity achieves a technicolour hue. The images were separated frame by frame, frozen and then set into a series of dissolves, which brings upon a stilted reanimation of stillness. This is at once a strategy to render time dense but also to pluck it out of history and place mimicry in the rhetorical.

Press: Yes; Catalogue: Yes; Itinerancies: Yes; Online archive: Yes; Television: No

Permisos: premsa, catàleg, itineràncies, arxiu online

ovni-archives: Mon, June 11, 2007 11:45 pm language: CROATIAN, GERMAN, ENGLISH subtitles: ENGLISH enviado dvd + cd con fotos y infos

• Catalan

• Latin

copyright: (c) Nicole Hewitt, Studio Pangolin