Art review: Duncan Campbell: Make it New John | Documentalist

Published on Monday 1 March 2010 18:03

DUNCAN CAMPBELL: MAKE IT NEW JOHN **** TRAMWAY, GLASGOW DOCUMENTALIST *** COLLECTIVE GALLERY, EDINBURGH

A LOT has happened since a winsomely boyish Michael J Fox was transported back in time in a customised DeLorean sportscar in Back to the Future. When the film came out in 1985, the DeLorean, with its futuristic form and distinctive gull-wing doors, was already confined to the past.

Everything about the DeLorean was visionary, from the ambitious attempt to design a car from first principles, to the decision to build it in an area of high unemployment in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, uniting Protestant and Catholic workforces. Yet, within two years of the first models rolling off the shiny new production lines in 1981, poor performance, a lack of orders and the withdrawal of public funding had caused the factory to close, with the loss of 2,000 jobs.

The swiftness of John DeLorean's journey from visionary beginnings to commercial failure seems inherently cinematic, and it feels like ideal material for Dublin-born, Glasgow-based artist Duncan Campbell, who is gaining a growing reputation as a film-maker. As with his earlier film, Bernadette, about young Northern Irish socialist Bernadette Devlin, he manages to hold up a mirror to the way in which stories are told, while still managing tell a compelling story.

Make it new John is the first time his work has been shown at a major venue in Scotland and, as such, is long overdue. However, though he undoubtedly merits a show in a space like Tramway 2, and no-one is arguing with its cinematic proportions, the vast (and, in this weather, extremely chilly) room does feel like overkill for a medium-sized screen and half a dozen benches.

The 50-minute film, co-commissioned by Tramway, Film and Video Umbrella, Chisenhale, and the Model, Sligo, unfolds in three movements. The first, jaunty and Technicolor, swept along by Beach Boys-esque music, has to do with the world that gave birth to the DeLorean dream: a vision of neat 1950s houses and futuristic multi-lane highways, men on surfboards, women in bikinis, a place in which the car was integral to freedom and prosperity.

The DeLorean DLC12 was, briefly, the ultimate expression of this vision. Billboards invited the citizens of the early 1980s to "live the dream". The second part of the film tells the story through footage from television, film and private archives. Campbell seeks out the behind-the-scenes moments which humanise: a cleaner vacuuming the carpet in front of the training centre before a visit from the boss; a young executive bumping his head on a gull-wing door.

The montage brings home just how quickly the story unfolded: mass recruitment sessions, gleaming assembly lines and beaming politicians quickly giving way to rumours of imminent financial collapse and a tight-lipped Ted Heath sealing the car plant's fate.

We are forced to consider who knew the truth, and when: the Beverly Hills car dealers bragging about how many they could sell; the worried workforce threatening to occupy the factory and fight for their jobs; even steely-eyed John DeLorean, determined to stay on-message while clutching his boarding pass for Concorde.

Various theories are put forward in the film for why the project failed, but no answers are given. This is not what Campbell is about. The final section of the film which – unusually for him – is scripted and filmed using actors, brings the impact of the failure right back to the personal.

A group of redundant DeLorean workers round a table at a drop-in centre are by turns angry and resigned. One by one, they leave the table to take phone calls or make tea until just one man is left, a middle-aged man called John, uncomfortable in the glare of the camera and the interviewer's questions, reluctantly admitting that he sees no prospects for his future.

It's a daring way to end the film, to focus on a single human story. Whether it succeeds in bringing us back to look with sympathy at John DeLorean himself, a man of similar age, who eventually filed for bankruptcy in 1999, is not a given. But we are left in no doubt that, more than politics and big business, this is a story about individual lives.

There is a similarly thoughtful revisiting of the past by Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius, one of the three artists in the Collective Gallery's current show, Documentalist. He explores his interest in his country's Communist and post-Communist history through the lens of Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky's iconic science-fiction film.

He films actor Donatas Banionis (Kris Kelvin) returning to the story after more than 40 years, a strong, serious face which can still carry a film. Narkevicius makes use of lines from the last section of Stanislaw Lem's novel, on which the film was based, but his evocative use of settings – dreary, bureaucratic Communist era interiors, abandoned institutional corridors, snowy vista of rivers and apartment blocks – takes it beyond this to a visual essay in recent history, another example of futuristic visions giving way to a rather different reality.

The artists in Documentalist all "explore blurred boundaries between fiction and reality", though it could be argued that all art does this to some extent. Suzanne Treister does so very clearly by reworking newspaper front pages – Die Welt, Le Monde, New York Times – into mysterious, alchemical ink drawings.

The original material is still there – Clinton vs Obama, the dreary outlook for Iraq – but the straight columns of text and photographs become twisted into mysterious new forms, like home-made spells, pointing alluding to unseen forces which drive world events.

Chris Evans' works, a playful sculpture and a geometric design painted on a wooden slatted blind, are more difficult. They are made in response to interviews with elderly Italian politicians, which is interesting, but you wouldn't know it unless someone told you. In the same way, his film, The School of Improvement, is beautifully shot in after-hours classrooms, but its coyness about what it's really driving at makes it hard to engage with.

&#149 Make it new John runs until 14 March, Documentalist until 28 March.