Davide Pepe and Diamanda Galás – Schrei 27
by Giuseppe Zevolli
Published by Indie Eye
For the SPILL Festival of Performance created by Robert Pacitti, this year exploring the notion of "infection", the Barbican Centre hosted for two consecutive days the world premiere of Schrei 27, the first major film of the extraordinary Diamanda Galás, a short created in collaboration with Brindisi director Davide Pepe. The Schrei 27 project was born back in 1994 as a radio performance commissioned by New American Radio in Staten Island and Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, where it was recorded; two years later the work lived again in the live performances of Schrei X, staged in total blackness in Portland, New York, Prague and Columbus. Mute Records documented Diamanda's highly experimental work, beyond doubt one of her most extreme, with a release, and again in 2006 and 2007 Schrei was featured as a part of the exhibition Switch On The Power: Noise and Musical Policies, where it was curated by artist Xabier Arakistain in two Spanish locations; once again in complete darkness the piercing vocal experiments Diamanda has been researching since 1979 were brought to the audience live in a quadraphonic installation, as an example of "revealing" noise, primordial and implacable form of expression such as that of pain and despair, a disturbing element able to enter a system and modify it. Thus it comes to life "posthumous" and it benefits from these re-interpretations, the new synergistic collaboration with Pepe, active as an independent director since 1995 and most recently participating at the 60th edition of the Berlinale with the film Giardini di Luce. The two met back in 2004, when Pepe gained permission to shoot two of Diamanda's shows in Italy and she, enthusiastic about his short film Little Boy and struck not only by his talent as a director but also by his musical sensitivity, decided to choose him as co-author of Schrei 27. Up until now the core of the Schrei project has remained the same and it hasn't lost a bit of its experimental strictness. The aim of the work is to deal with the mental and physical state of a patient subjected to torture through chemical and mechanical manipulation of the brain. He is kept confined in the asphyxial space of a mental hospital, where in complete isolation he is subjected to electrical shocks, blinding lights and corporal punishment. The shriek, Schrei (key term in the tradition of the German expressionist theatre, born in small villages of the country) is a corporeal sound that not only describes, exasperating it, the tragedy of the torture as the suffering of the tortured one, but also becomes a powerful means of expression to devastate the spectator, who's dragged to identify himself with the victim and to instinctively refuse the tragedy of the other at the same time, as if responding to a mechanism of self-defense from horror. Those who are familiar with Diamanda's "impure" art knows for sure that any form of gratuitous, ephemeral art pour l'art is banished, shaken up, eventually dismissed as incompatible with her artistic vocation to tell and vindicate the real stories of people who are victims of grave injustices, the outcast annihilated by History, the people her "songs of exile" are sung for. This work makes no exception at all: the idea behind this short film doesn't come from a conjectural extreme situation made perfect for a typical contemporary art installation, but from documented cases of isolation and torture (the imprisonment of Greek communist intellectuals on the island of Makronisos, for instance, or the experiments conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron for the CIA) in which those who are suspected to betray the state are subjected to the worst treatment by professionals in order to confess. In Schrei 27 no confession is given, but compulsory linguistic nonsense alternates with a merciless recrimination ab alto from the persecutor, in which excerpts from Thomas Aquinas and the Book of Job are used, speaking of damnation, transition from life to death and madness.
The work is composed of eleven short performances for a total amount of 27 minutes in which the screams and devastating techniques of Diamanda alternate with dilated spoken words, often nearly impossible to decipher, and with absolute silence. In this silence the spectator doesn't have the time to recover, but tends to stay petrified, waiting for the horror to come. The bodies on screen, complementary in representing the tortured, are those of Diamanda herself and of the actor Salvatore Bevilaqua, both nonstop interchanged; more than noteworthy the schizophrenic overlapping of Bevilaqua's hand with Diamanda's, which is identifiable for the "We are all HIV+" tattooed upon her knuckles. Pepe creates little photographic nightmares in black and white for each chapter, directing obsessive close-ups for individual body parts (nose, mouth, stomach, chest and so on), which are often crossed with x-rays and images of Diamanda's vocal cords in action (taken by a doctor interested in their movements during her experimenting efforts), violent lights and absolute darkness, generating a disturbing effect that flings you into hallucination. All the pieces are united by brief alienating interludes in which Diamanda's paintings and drawings of distorted faces and bodies, inspired by military executions, oscillate and penetrate each other until they disappear in pitch dark. While these drawings rapidly interweave creating a swarming on the screen, industrial sounds, almost like the noise of drills, leads to the next scene. Indeed one of the most compelling aspects of this "impossible" union of images with Diamanda's terrorizing vocal performance is the use of sound distortions, on which Dave Hunt worked (already with Diamanda in Litanies of Satan), but often realized by Pepe himself using the sounds generated by the camera. The trembling of the flesh, the voice, the lights and the noises wears with disturbance the precision of the photography: the framed body parts show all the devastation though extremely beautiful in their look. They express the violence of an inescapable constriction, in which the body becomes the only form of resistance left: the subject is nothing else but surface. The inside torment, unattainable per se, finds here its form of expression instead through the sound, the voice of Diamanda Galás: being her vocals beyond unique, this short movie is thus an unique piece in which the two forms of art meet.
Three moments in the short are particular affecting: the torturer, played by a sinister, Lucifer-like Diamanda, who jolts from the chair laughing at the victim (and at the spectator) with the exclamation "OK, go!" followed by a nightmare laughter beyond control; the ending image of torture by asphyxiation, with the artist's face compressed under a cellophane layer; the middle chapter called Cunt, in which Diamanda's voice reaches one of the highest levels of torment, nearly unbearable, and where two muscle tissues violently merge and veer off, a very much vivid visual counterpart of the words, probably referring to the pulsing tragedy of sexual violation. Schrei 27 is a complex work, that does full justice to the artist's declared aims and that expands this astonishing experimental research that those who bumped into the recording only may have found difficult to understand. Certainly not a documentary, it was born and it works as a form of art in which sound and images, sound and body are not only juxtaposed, but blend with a peculiar violence and energy, in which Diamanda's "vocal terror" reconfirms itself as an exceptional instrument to shake our minds.
Translation from Italian to English by Giuseppe Zevoli
by Giuseppe Zevolli
Published by Indie Eye
For the SPILL Festival of Performance created by Robert Pacitti, this year exploring the notion of "infection", the Barbican Centre hosted for two consecutive days the world premiere of Schrei 27, the first major film of the extraordinary Diamanda Galás, a short created in collaboration with Brindisi director Davide Pepe. The Schrei 27 project was born back in 1994 as a radio performance commissioned by New American Radio in Staten Island and Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, where it was recorded; two years later the work lived again in the live performances of Schrei X, staged in total blackness in Portland, New York, Prague and Columbus. Mute Records documented Diamanda's highly experimental work, beyond doubt one of her most extreme, with a release, and again in 2006 and 2007 Schrei was featured as a part of the exhibition Switch On The Power: Noise and Musical Policies, where it was curated by artist Xabier Arakistain in two Spanish locations; once again in complete darkness the piercing vocal experiments Diamanda has been researching since 1979 were brought to the audience live in a quadraphonic installation, as an example of "revealing" noise, primordial and implacable form of expression such as that of pain and despair, a disturbing element able to enter a system and modify it. Thus it comes to life "posthumous" and it benefits from these re-interpretations, the new synergistic collaboration with Pepe, active as an independent director since 1995 and most recently participating at the 60th edition of the Berlinale with the film Giardini di Luce. The two met back in 2004, when Pepe gained permission to shoot two of Diamanda's shows in Italy and she, enthusiastic about his short film Little Boy and struck not only by his talent as a director but also by his musical sensitivity, decided to choose him as co-author of Schrei 27. Up until now the core of the Schrei project has remained the same and it hasn't lost a bit of its experimental strictness. The aim of the work is to deal with the mental and physical state of a patient subjected to torture through chemical and mechanical manipulation of the brain. He is kept confined in the asphyxial space of a mental hospital, where in complete isolation he is subjected to electrical shocks, blinding lights and corporal punishment. The shriek, Schrei (key term in the tradition of the German expressionist theatre, born in small villages of the country) is a corporeal sound that not only describes, exasperating it, the tragedy of the torture as the suffering of the tortured one, but also becomes a powerful means of expression to devastate the spectator, who's dragged to identify himself with the victim and to instinctively refuse the tragedy of the other at the same time, as if responding to a mechanism of self-defense from horror. Those who are familiar with Diamanda's "impure" art knows for sure that any form of gratuitous, ephemeral art pour l'art is banished, shaken up, eventually dismissed as incompatible with her artistic vocation to tell and vindicate the real stories of people who are victims of grave injustices, the outcast annihilated by History, the people her "songs of exile" are sung for. This work makes no exception at all: the idea behind this short film doesn't come from a conjectural extreme situation made perfect for a typical contemporary art installation, but from documented cases of isolation and torture (the imprisonment of Greek communist intellectuals on the island of Makronisos, for instance, or the experiments conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron for the CIA) in which those who are suspected to betray the state are subjected to the worst treatment by professionals in order to confess. In Schrei 27 no confession is given, but compulsory linguistic nonsense alternates with a merciless recrimination ab alto from the persecutor, in which excerpts from Thomas Aquinas and the Book of Job are used, speaking of damnation, transition from life to death and madness.
The work is composed of eleven short performances for a total amount of 27 minutes in which the screams and devastating techniques of Diamanda alternate with dilated spoken words, often nearly impossible to decipher, and with absolute silence. In this silence the spectator doesn't have the time to recover, but tends to stay petrified, waiting for the horror to come. The bodies on screen, complementary in representing the tortured, are those of Diamanda herself and of the actor Salvatore Bevilaqua, both nonstop interchanged; more than noteworthy the schizophrenic overlapping of Bevilaqua's hand with Diamanda's, which is identifiable for the "We are all HIV+" tattooed upon her knuckles. Pepe creates little photographic nightmares in black and white for each chapter, directing obsessive close-ups for individual body parts (nose, mouth, stomach, chest and so on), which are often crossed with x-rays and images of Diamanda's vocal cords in action (taken by a doctor interested in their movements during her experimenting efforts), violent lights and absolute darkness, generating a disturbing effect that flings you into hallucination. All the pieces are united by brief alienating interludes in which Diamanda's paintings and drawings of distorted faces and bodies, inspired by military executions, oscillate and penetrate each other until they disappear in pitch dark. While these drawings rapidly interweave creating a swarming on the screen, industrial sounds, almost like the noise of drills, leads to the next scene. Indeed one of the most compelling aspects of this "impossible" union of images with Diamanda's terrorizing vocal performance is the use of sound distortions, on which Dave Hunt worked (already with Diamanda in Litanies of Satan), but often realized by Pepe himself using the sounds generated by the camera. The trembling of the flesh, the voice, the lights and the noises wears with disturbance the precision of the photography: the framed body parts show all the devastation though extremely beautiful in their look. They express the violence of an inescapable constriction, in which the body becomes the only form of resistance left: the subject is nothing else but surface. The inside torment, unattainable per se, finds here its form of expression instead through the sound, the voice of Diamanda Galás: being her vocals beyond unique, this short movie is thus an unique piece in which the two forms of art meet.
Three moments in the short are particular affecting: the torturer, played by a sinister, Lucifer-like Diamanda, who jolts from the chair laughing at the victim (and at the spectator) with the exclamation "OK, go!" followed by a nightmare laughter beyond control; the ending image of torture by asphyxiation, with the artist's face compressed under a cellophane layer; the middle chapter called Cunt, in which Diamanda's voice reaches one of the highest levels of torment, nearly unbearable, and where two muscle tissues violently merge and veer off, a very much vivid visual counterpart of the words, probably referring to the pulsing tragedy of sexual violation. Schrei 27 is a complex work, that does full justice to the artist's declared aims and that expands this astonishing experimental research that those who bumped into the recording only may have found difficult to understand. Certainly not a documentary, it was born and it works as a form of art in which sound and images, sound and body are not only juxtaposed, but blend with a peculiar violence and energy, in which Diamanda's "vocal terror" reconfirms itself as an exceptional instrument to shake our minds.
Translation from Italian to English by Giuseppe Zevoli