Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana haloba lars lauMann - Statoil

censorship in America and Iran. Salinger famously took legal
action to block the showing of this film in New York in 1998.
Other images of State and personal censorship are intercut with
this footage to create a powerful work against the suppression
of literature and art, but the reason this film has such an
affective capacity is due yet again to the many layers Laumann
manages to embed in the work: the exploration of contrasting
views of freedom of expression in East and West, the mythology
of the individualised self and how it came to be represented
in the icon of the “Modernist” author, and what it means when
that author, a man who was one of the first soldiers to enter the
liberated concentration camps at the end of WWII, later chose to
become “formless” and engage in acts of self-censorship.
The sense of self-immolation associated with Islamic culture,
of sacrificing oneself for a cause, also echoes through the Kari
og Knut/Catcher in the Rye metaphor (where is the Salinger
now who would stand at that cliff face and save those fleeing
to its edge?).
We live in an age when cultural icons such as Diana, Morrissey,
Nico, Salinger, and those who live at the extreme edge of
society (the death row prisoner, the woman who loves walls)
have become absorbed into a world of virtuality where their
boundaries dissolve beyond even the fractured identities of
previous cultural epochs. Their stories multiply and transform
amidst this time of saturated communication. Laumann engages
with the problematic of whether a cultural semiotics is even
possible today, pursuing as he does the “fault lines between
[cinema’s] seductive surfaces, through which a multitude of
histories seep” (Lucy Reynolds). The depth and complexity of his
work has even begun to produce its own strange coincidences.
At the end of Berlinmuren we see perhaps the only scene
in which Laumann disassembles the image completely: we
perceive a formless mass of colour gradually taking shape as
we hear Riita talk about the horror of seeing her husband, the
wall, being torn down. For her this is the ultimate of forms
being disassembled. A figure begins to emerge from the mass
of colour – could it possibly be…? Yes, it’s The Hoff – David
Hasselhoff dancing in his 1980s leather jacket singing on the
wall for the freedom of East Germany.
The film Top Secret (used by Laumann in Swedish bookstore)
is a 1984 spoof in which Val Kilmer plays an American teen rock
idol intent on entertaining teenagers behind the Iron Curtain in
East Germany. Surely this coincidence presents us with the most
ludicrous cultural icon of our age, as we descend from Morrissey
and Nico to the “Hoff”. Is this what the fall of the wall really
meant? The “X-factorisation” of culture for us all? We can at
least gain some comfort in the fact that artists such as Laumann,
with his profound engagement with literature, the history of
cinema and art, are making work to counter such calamities.
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