Visual arts review: Willie Doherty

Published on Monday 11 May 2009 19:33

WILLIE DOHERTY **** FRUITMARKET, EDINBURGH

ARTISTS' films are all too often a bit like karaoke: rank amateurs posturing in a sophisticated art form of whose real complexities they have very little grasp; and then, even worse, just like karaoke, they inflict the results on a long-suffering public.

Film, indeed cinema, is a rich and complex tradition. Even though nowadays anybody can make a film, the techniques and conventions of film as an art form cannot be picked up on a whim.

Too few artists understand this. There are some notable exceptions to this dismal rule however. The Northern Irish artist Willie Doherty is one of them. He is always presented as a visual artist. Art galleries are where you see his work. He is currently showing at the Fruitmarket and he represented Northern Ireland at the last Venice Biennale, but he is also an exceptional film-maker, if not a very jolly one.

Born in Londonderry, or Derry, in 1959, he has lived his life at the heart of the latest episode in a history of violence that, as Fiona Bradley remarks in the catalogue, has been either actual or implicit, hot or cold, at least since the siege of Londonderry in 1689 and perhaps even longer; the events of 1689 had their origins in the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland and the consequent polarisation of the country between native Catholic resistance and Protestant intrusion.

This history is a constant presence in Doherty's work, not overtly, but in a way that he clearly feels mirrors how it insinuates itself into almost everything that happens there. His films are dark, often claustrophobic, like the short, split-screen film Re-Run of a man forever running both ways across a bridge. In fact it is the Craigavon Bridge across the river Foyle that divides the Catholic and Protestant communities in Londonderry, or, if you like, London from Derry.

Doherty's films are also often full of unspoken menace. In Ghost Story, shown at Venice two years ago and now showing here, scenes of violence seem to lie just beyond the frame. The action is almost all the camera's. Mostly it tracks steadily along a straight narrow road on a dim wet winter's afternoon. With dark trees crowding in on either side, the road is deserted. There is no traffic, nor any sign that there ever was much. Any there may have been, we feel instinctively was up to no good. In the voice-over, the speaker, whose accent locates the scene as Northern Ireland, reminisces about scenes of threatened or actual violence. None of these appears to have happened for certain in the places the camera visits, but the voice fills these with menace nonetheless. Sometimes the speaker reflects on events he has seen reported and these take us beyond Northern Ireland to Palestine or Iraq, universalising the theme. Sometimes he was himself a witness of violence. He recalls the horror of seeing a fleeing crowd fired on by soldiers (Doherty himself witnessed Bloody Sunday).

The speaker then relates how he revisited the scene over time and how eventually all traces of the event were eliminated. The site was built over. The event is forgotten, but nevertheless the violence is still there like some ghastly secretion oozing out of the ground itself. It becomes implicit in the landscape through which the camera steadily travels, but then it digresses to equally threatening scenes of urban decay and dereliction. It hints at real events, actual presences. At one point the speaker anticipates an ominous meeting with a stranger and the camera finds him waiting in the dark in a derelict underpass.

At another moment, a car is driven into an empty twilit car park, its driver only glimpsed in the shadow. There is a real remembered world beyond the narrow hypnotic lane, but it is just as sinister and it too is inhabited by ghosts: "Not everyone can see them / They inhabit a world somewhere between here and the next / They move between the trees…"

The strength of this film lies in the close match of the mood and rhythm of the images with the voiceover and the sinister events it recalls. The script is printed in the catalogue and it clearly does have independent status as poetry. Indeed, its imagery and tone often recall the way in which, in his poetry of the time, WH Auden shifts between, and thus connects, the actual violence of the 1930s, of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Fascism, with the dark places in the individual human psyche. It is a vision of a universal inner darkness, very different from the Christian idea of sin, that had passed from Freud into art via Surrealism. Compare the lines above to lines from Auden's poem The Witnesses, for instance: "And look, behind you without a sound / The woods have come up and are standing round / In deadly crescent." Such echoes here make that link for Doherty, too, to Surrealism and so to the wider history of art.

In Ghost Story, as the camera travels along the straight and narrow road, sometimes you imagine you see a figure in the dim vanishing point of its perspective and the poem ends invoking a wraith: "The daylight wraith takes on the appearance of a living person." Such a manifestation is also seen as a premonition of danger or even death to the individual it represents. Doherty's new film, Buried, made for the Fruitmarket, complements Ghost Story and extends it to imply just such an unspoken individual tragedy.

The film has no script, but continues the analogy with Auden nonetheless. Take another line from The Witnesses, for instance, "When the green field comes off like a lid / Revealing what was much better hid…": revealing what is buried in fact, buried in the ground, or buried in memory's hidden places.

The film is actually set in the wood that runs alongside the road in Ghost Story. It is a plantation of those tall, dark close-planted conifers that always seem a little alien. Beneath their dense, dark canopy even the trees own lower branches are dead, brittle and spiky.

The camera explores this shadowed world. Nothing grows in the gloom, or at least nothing that belongs in daylight. There are poisonous-looking fungi. Ivy creeps in. The camera does catch occasional movement in the gloom, but it is the wriggling of creeping insects among the detritus of the wood. Glossy brown, or livid white and shiny, they seem the kind of subterranean creatures associated with corpses and burial.

There is a world beyond. Light filters in from the edge of the wood, where for a moment a sheet of water is glimpsed through the trees. So does sound. Sometimes this seems to be the roar of traffic, but sometimes, too, it seems to modulate to the sounds of crowds and of violence. In the wood, the camera visits and revisits a campfire built in a circle of stones. Sometimes it is lit, implying a human presence, sometimes cold, implying whoever may have been there is gone, perhaps a long time ago. Abandoned garments also suggest a human presence though we cannot guess when. Is this the scene of some forgotten crime? Is there an actual murder victim buried here? Or is it a metaphor for what we bury in the dark parts of our minds by choosing to forget it? Doherty himself gives us a hint. "What do we remember and what do we forget?" he asks. "What becomes memorialised?"

And so too, it follows what does not? "These are quite contentious issues," he adds. In Northern Ireland that is clearly true, but what Doherty says in these films also has much wider relevance.

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