Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana haloba lars lauMann - Statoil

The Smiths’ album The Queen is Dead, 1986 display a clairvoyant
knowledge of the future death of Princess Diana in 1997.
Those of us who grew up with Morrissey as an icon in the
1980s would be quite happy to believe that he had such powers.
Part of Morrissey’s iconic status was the fact that he was so
literate and culturally aware. He made reading sexy, quoting
from Oscar Wilde, Proust, the Brontës, Hardy, Kerouac and
of course his beloved Shelagh Delaney, author of A Taste of
Honey. He also proved himself to be an astute and insightful
semiotician of British culture in a decade when cultural studies
and semiotics reached fever pitch. Roland Barthes, Jacques
Derrida, Umberto Eco, Stephen Heath, Deleuze and Guattari
were the cultural theorists you simply had to familiarise yourself
with if you were studying literature or philosophy or even if you
were merely playing “spot the signifier” whilst out and about. For
Laumann to make a film about Morrissey as a cultural shaman of
sorts just seems to make perfect sense.
Laumann’s baroque unfolding of his Diana conspiracy would
seem to follow the rhizomatic principle of Deleuze and Guattari,
presenting us with a type of cultural cartography which is
“acentric, non-hierarchical and a-signifying.” It is as if Laumann has
structured the film to introduce conspiracies within the conspiracy
– a perfect aesthetic conceit. The work becomes an investigation
of the form he chooses to use. Starting with Alain Delon from
L’Eclisse, he weaves a path through The L-Shaped Room (with
its subtext of lesbianism), Darling, A Taste of Honey, The Man
who came to Dinner, The Killing of Sister George and Hobson’s
Choice – creating a vortex of cinematic signification.
There are larger issues emerging here: the computerisation
of the public and private sphere has led to a digital society
where traditional knowledge systems of inference and induction
have broken down, hence the propensity for wildfire conspiracy
theories. There is a sense that no one can trust where
information is coming from; yet at the same time, all information
– no matter how irrational or crazy it seems – is of equal value.
We also find a new preoccupation with coincidence in
contemporary culture. It seems like some kind of therapeutic
strategy for dealing with increasing alienation, a way of coping
with the density of new social networks. This is no doubt related
to the death of religion and to what philosopher Paul Virilio calls
the fantasy of simultaneity imposed on us by globalisation.
The acceleration taking place in our present culture also
leads to an intensification in the rate of accumulation of
information. With so much becoming obsolete so quickly, we
have become obsessed with cataloguing and archiving the “past”
in new ways as time slips more rapidly through our fingers.
In Outside the Archive: The World in Fragments
Lucy Reynolds has written:
Experimental filmmakers’ tactics of subversive intervention
constitute an assault on cinema’s homogenous surfaces …
as outsider archivists they break into the layers of history locked
into the film image in an attempt to assimilate their own position
as artist filmmaker to that of film’s wider circles of history. 2
Laumann certainly utilises this strategy.
In Berlinmuren (The Berlin Wall) Laumann presents us with
a portrait of a woman who describes herself as an “objectum
sexual”, a woman who falls in love with and marries the Berlin
Wall. Superficially, this would seem to be a portrait of an
idiosyncratic and transgressive human being, but as with all
of Laumann’s work there is far more here than the banality of
psychological interpretations which,
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