Pacifies a Lier is a 13 minute video by Hsin-Yu Chen and Better Lovers (the team of Layla Marcelle and Jacob Raeder). In the opening sequence, we’re looking at a video art installation such as one might see in a gallery or museum, featuring an arrangement of projections on the walls, ceiling, and floor. The projected footage is of a dance piece for two dancers, performed in a public park. There is no music, and the choreography features an assemblage of everyday, non-virtuosic movement, an abstract exploration of space and time, squarely within the post-modern, post-Judson school of dance.
While watching, we hear a woman’s voice verbally describing the piece, both the choreography and the arrangement of the screens, in a fair amount of detail. Her description is complete enough that, at first, it sounds like a “score” for the piece, the choreographic plan used to create the finished work. Over time, we notice that her description includes certain elements which must have been unplanned, such as the movements of passersby in the park who happen to get caught on camera, so it seems this text was created after the work was completed, as a kind of transcription from the visual to the verbal.
This setup draws our attention precisely into this transcription: we notice the difference between our visual experience of bodily movement and what we might have imagined about it, if we could only hear the verbal description. One swishy movement is described as being “like a glamorous cartoon crab, trying to get our attention.” It is remarkable how words, because they evoke multiple associations, can imbue an image with multiple meanings, while at the same time they leave out almost all of the granular detail of the moment.
As if this isn’t meta enough, in the next development of the idea, we watch a university professor giving a lecture about a novel, but with the dance video piece projected on a screen behind him. The lecture is about a post-modern novel, one with a complicated structure, which the professor argues forces the reader to question her own mode of reading, and become conscious of her interpretive choices. Since his lecture is being “illustrated” by something other than the book he’s talking about, this scene adds layers of complication and self-reference, making us even more aware of our own effort to make choices as we interpret what we’re seeing and hearing, the very point that the professor is making about the book.
Abruptly, the shaky, hand-held camera starts to move behind the professor’s lecture stage, to explore whatever is inside of or in back of his presentation. What we find is yet another assemblage piece: an odd collection of old clocks, radios, burnt matches, and other detritus, arranged with meticulous casualness on several tabletops. We’re still immersed in a world where fragments of the past are endlessly re-arranged into ephemeral post-modern moments.
We continue with several more episodes of juxtaposed texts and images, and the film finally lands on an odd scene: a ceramics class in which the students are all wearing a prosthetic device on their fingers, looking something like a purple cartoon worm, apparently a device which teaches pottery in some remote, algorithmic way. (The traditional way to learn how to use a potter’s wheel is for the teacher to help the student by directly touching her hand.)
The scene is accompanied by a slowed-down version of a Fred Rogers song, written to help youngsters to manage their anger in better ways, What do You Do with the Mad that you Feel? The song makes a reference to pounding clay when you feel angry, and casts the scene of the ceramics class into one of sublimated, repressed anger. The slowed-down voice sounds like someone heavily tranquilized, and perhaps this strange ceramics class is part of a nefarious scheme to pacify the anger of the masses, turning their energy towards more innocuous pursuits? This “innovative” teaching technique immediately raises red flags, because it offers no obvious advantages, at least to the student.
How do the film’s disparate elements, its themes of assemblage, deconstruction, and transhumanist pacification, fit together? Perhaps they don’t, but this may be precisely the point the artists are making. They have made their film-puzzle deliberately confounding, attempting to overturn as many expectations as possible, including the expectation that the film has an overarching theme or a rhetorical point of view, and the viewer is indeed thrown into a conundrum of heightened self-awareness. It’s certainly a valuable thing for a work of art to accomplish, and this self-awareness produces its own feeling of exhilaration and uncomfortable pleasure.
The difficulties of reading a text, as described by the professor in the film, may not preoccupy anyone outside of the halls of academia. But ordinary people certainly are confounded by trying to decide how to interpret a social media feed, or a mainstream news report, or a government announcement. Propagandistic media always comes with a guiding, shaping hand, which is sometimes quite well-hidden, pushing the viewer towards a desired response. Consumers of media, “liers” on couches and easy chairs, are passively guided into attitudes which fulfill the agendas of others. Pacifies a Lier, on the other hand, has no hidden guiding hand. It doesn’t tell you what to think or feel, or how to interpret the images. You’re on your own, and while you’re figuring it out, you’ll probably become more aware of the choices that you’re making. This heightened awareness turns out to be an essential survival skill for modern life.
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