{"id":29715,"date":"2012-04-17T15:00:17","date_gmt":"2012-04-17T19:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=29715"},"modified":"2012-04-17T15:40:46","modified_gmt":"2012-04-17T19:40:46","slug":"white-noir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/17\/white-noir\/","title":{"rendered":"White Noir"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/offshore_colorwork.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/offshore_colorwork-1024x614.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"offshore_colorwork\" width=\"583\" height=\"349\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-29716\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/offshore_colorwork-1024x614.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/offshore_colorwork-300x180.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/offshore_colorwork.jpg 1800w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A man with a briefcase arrives in a place called City-A looking like a double agent from 1973: mustachioed and trenchcoated, forever ducking into phone booths for cryptic conversations. The man, Mr. Holz, is a geophysicist of unknown origin. He has come here to work for the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. City-A is mesmerizingly bleak, a grid of concrete high-rises set between a brackish sea and a wintry industrial wasteland, all of it reeking of environmental contamination and failed utopia. Many things, Holz notices, are amiss here. Clocks don\u2019t run sixty seconds to the minute in City-A. The drinking water is spiked with lithium, a shadowy entity has confiscated his passport, language is rationed, and what exactly is this New Method Oil Well Cementing Company, anyway? As the bewildered-looking Holz moves through the city, is he piecing together clues to solve these mysteries or just being shuttled around by a powerful unseen force?<\/p>\n<p>\nThis, roughly, is the storyline of <a href=\"http:\/\/cheapandplastique.wordpress.com\/tag\/white-on-white\/\"><em>whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir<\/em><\/a>, the new film by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation. But because this noir is, as the title promises, algorithmic, the film has no beginning, middle, or end. <!--more-->At each screening, a computer program live-edits a movie out of more than three thousand film clips, eighty voice-overs, and 150 pieces of music. Each of these movable parts is marked with loosely content-related tags (\u201chorizon,\u201d \u201canxiety,\u201d \u201cwhite\u201d), and the computer fits the pieces together according to an algorithm that matches tags. Sussman calls this apparatus the \u201cserendipity machine.\u201d Containing more than thirty hours of material, the movie never comes together the same way twice, and it never loops. A small screen to the side runs the metadata of the algorithm while the film plays, reminding viewers that a computer is chugging away busily as they watch, matching \u201cdiscomfort\u201d tags to \u201cdiscomfort\u201d tags, \u201csurveillance\u201d to \u201csurveillance.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/dogbark_CROP.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/dogbark_CROP-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"dogbark_CROP\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-29719\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/dogbark_CROP-240x300.jpg 240w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/dogbark_CROP-819x1024.jpg 819w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/dogbark_CROP.jpg 1325w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Sussman is a British-born, Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker who works both independently and in collaboration with the Rufus Corporation, a self-described \u201cad hoc think-tank\u201d of performers, artists, musicians, writers, and programmers. Her first major piece with the company was <em>89 Seconds at Alc\u00e1zar<\/em>, a ten-minute video based on Diego Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s <em>Las Meninas<\/em> that debuted to great acclaim at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. <em>The Rape of the Sabine Women<\/em>, an eighty-minute video musical inspired by Jacques-Louis David\u2019s <em>Intervention of the Sabine Women<\/em>, followed in 2007. Continuing in the same vein, <em>whiteonwhite<\/em> also takes its name from an iconic painting: Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich\u2019s 1918 composition <em>White on White<\/em>. Like Malevich\u2019s work, Sussman\u2019s film deals with notions of limitless space, utopia, and transcendence. But the film has its origins at least as much in a trip to Kazakhstan as in Suprematism: around the same time Sussman decided to make a film named after <em>White on White<\/em>, an interest in actual space travel led her and collaborator Jeff Wood (the actor who plays Holz) to Central Asia to visit the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world\u2019s first and largest space-launch facility. Baikonur is a high-security place; when Sussman and Wood showed up there unannounced, the authorities swiftly arrested them and kicked them out. Rejected by the Cosmodrome, the filmmakers headed west across Kazakhstan until serendipity struck in the form of Aktau, an industrial port on the Caspian Sea. The Soviets built Aktau in the sixties as a planned city, a secret, closed uranium-mining settlement. To this day, the city has no street names; every address is a set of three numbers. Aktau \u201clooks like a circuit board,\u201d Sussman said in a recent interview with <em>Filmmaker<\/em> magazine. \u201cYour address is like 3-36-12 or something; it\u2019s sort of like you\u2019re living inside a combination lock.\u201d Aktau\u2019s <em>Alphaville<\/em>-on-the-Kazakh-steppe appearance gave Sussman and Wood the idea of making a noir movie, and much of the film was shot there.<\/p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Holz_Screen3_BW_017.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Holz_Screen3_BW_017-300x180.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Holz_Screen3_BW_017\" width=\"300\" height=\"180\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-29724\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Holz_Screen3_BW_017-300x180.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Holz_Screen3_BW_017-1024x614.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Holz_Screen3_BW_017.jpg 1800w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The booming Central Asian oil business, a layer of raw capitalism spread over the detritus of communist planning, is also present in the film. New Method Oil Well Cementing Company was the original name of the Halliburton Company. At one screening of <em>whiteonwhite<\/em> at the Berlinale, the algorithm matched footage of oil pump-jacks with aphoristic voice-overs about extracting lithium from the brine pools of City-A. <em>Whiteonwhite<\/em> plays with the motifs of resource scarcity and mineral extraction in more surprising ways, too, notably in the most intriguing problem Holz encounters: a language ration. Each person in City-A has a finite lifetime supply of each word, but nobody can know exactly what their individual ration for a given word is until it has run out, rendering the word forever unutterable. People are left to say \u201cconvey beaten dairy\u201d when they have used up their rations of \u201cplease pass the butter.\u201d Holz fears he might be close to running out of some commonly used words and tries to record them before it\u2019s too late. In the world of <em>whiteonwhite<\/em>, the supply of language is limited, but the movie\u2019s supply of time is infinite.<\/p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/phonebooth6.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/phonebooth6-300x187.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"phonebooth6\" width=\"300\" height=\"187\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-29722\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/phonebooth6-300x187.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/phonebooth6-1024x638.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/phonebooth6.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The film revels in its retro-futuristic aesthetic. \u201cThe place looked like the future,\u201d a voice-over says. It resembled a comic book Holz had read as a child. Much of the material shot in Aktau looks like found footage; Sussman has described it as \u201carchival footage from the future.\u201d Shots linger on analog objects: flip clocks, rotary dials, and reel-to-reel tape recorders. A factory scene in what looks like a 1970s stage set was actually filmed in a currently functioning all-analog chemical factory in Aktau. At times City-A comes across as one big clockwork machine, the analog counterpart to the digital serendipity machine. \u201cYou are mistaken about the nature of cities,\u201d a voice-over scolds crisply, \u201cand you are mistaken about the nature of our city. City-A is not a machine.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\nThe atmosphere of City-A is dank, paranoid, and downright suspenseful. One of the most surprising things about <em>whiteonwhite<\/em> is how well the algorithmic editing apparatus pulls off a movie that really feels like film noir. In his 1972 essay \u201cNotes on Film Noir,\u201d Paul Schrader wrote of noir as a mood, not a genre, in which \u201ca complex chronological order is frequently used to reinforce the feelings of hopelessness and lost time &#8230; The manipulation of time, whether slight or complex, is often used to reinforce a noir principle: the how is always more important than the what.\u201d The way the serendipity machine manipulates time is utterly new, but the stylized and disoriented world it plunges the viewer into is quintessentially noir.<\/p>\n<p><em>Jane Yager is a writer and translator living in Berlin.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A man with a briefcase arrives in a place called City-A looking like a double agent from 1973: mustachioed and trenchcoated, forever ducking into phone booths for cryptic conversations. The man, Mr. Holz, is a geophysicist of unknown origin. He has come here to work for the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. City-A is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":329,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1186],"tags":[7127,79,7128,7129],"class_list":["post-29715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-film","tag-eve-sussman","tag-film","tag-rufus-corporation","tag-whiteonwhitealgorithmicnoir"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>White Noir by Jane Yager<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 17, 2012 \u2013 A man with a briefcase arrives in a place called City-A looking like a double agent from 1973: mustachioed and trenchcoated, forever ducking into phone\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" 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