Andrey Tarkovsky's 1974 feature film, Mirror, is a daring, dreamlike memoir, a collage of disparate images and sequences that cumulatively make up a cohesive and compelling statement.
It eschews linear narrative, but it is consistent in terms of character and chronology. That is, despite its fragmentary structure and elements of fantasy, you gradually get a sense of what is going on, of the life and events at its centre. For once, the dubious term "visual poetry" seems justified.One of Tarkovsky's touchstone scenes, variations of which appears in several of his films, is a view of a horse in the landscape, and a comparable image turns up in Orla Barry's video, Foundlings, at the Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin.
Foundlings, too, takes the form of a non- linear, dreamlike memoir, a meditation on time past. Shot around areas of Co Wexford where the artist grew up, it contains intensely evocative scenes, and is in some respects highly structured and stylised, but, rather bravely, it continually declines to meet our narrative expectations and stays firmly within its own internal, reflective world. In this, Barry could certainly be accused of being self- indulgent - but then, so could Proust.
Given that the work avoids narrative conventions, and avoids telling a coherent story as such, perhaps it would be rash to say what it is about, if only because to do so might proscribe the meanings viewers attach to the words and images themselves. But, like Mirror, it does seem to be about something quite specific. There is a main protagonist, and the words and images consistently refer to her memories of growing up, of her formation of a sense of herself, her sexual identity, in the context of family and of a fairly tough, unforgiving rural culture.
In the past, Barry has worked extensively with language. She is clearly drawn to the form of the stream of consciousness, internal monologue, and in pieces by her I've seen previously I thought, fairly or unfairly, that she went too far in the direction of sheer randomness. The fragmented utterances she used, though incidentally striking or evocative, didn't ultimately hold together. Language is very important in Foundlings too, and for the most part takes the form of a disjointed, internalised, oblique commentary, with some felicitous use of words written in the sand, with stones and shells, as well.
While both verbal and visual elements are,to all intents and purposes, made up of a series of disparate fragments - a group of prose poems and a group of visual poems, you could say - they do have a unifying logic, something like a coherent structure to hang on to. Nothing really happens, but by the end we know a great deal about the central character and her world.
As an adult, this character (Sorcha Hyland, going by the credits) drifts through a landscape of memory while remaining curiously apart from it. For most of the time, and often incongruously, she wears a bright red swimsuit - a bold, surreal stroke that works very well.
Why the swimsuit? The sea and the seaside are central to Barry's vision, making up an arena of heightened awareness and sensuality within which the longings and passions of her protagonist emerge. We are able to piece together a progression from the inventive playfulness and intense joys and rages of childhood to a sense of difference and the need to escape. Boys seem "unreal" and she identifies with the "unruly girls of the wild sea".
Throughout, there is a sense that we are looking at a world ordered by memory. Actions and compositions are stylised and choreographed, colour schemes rigidly controlled, in an obsessive, almost Peter Greenaway manner. But at the same time, Barry allows the camera to scan the beautiful, uninhabited landscape, or settle on a detail within it, in long, leisurely takes, often counterpointed by verbal passages. These are the sequences that will win you over or lose you because, schooled by years of television and cinema, when we look at a screen we expect something to happen. While things occasionally happen in Foundlings, mostly they don't.
It comes close to being a film in the conventional sense of the term. It depends significantly, for example, on the presence of Hyland, who is very good, and other "performers".
Although it is an ambitious work with a lot going for it, it is flawed. There is a tendency to hammer home points and, particularly given the oblique nature of the narrative, the editing is sometimes heavy-handed - particularly in some pieces of cross-cutting between barking dogs, a group of men playing handball and a woman rolling in the surf, all of which are very good in their own right.
The area of artists' film and video grew up enormously in the course of the 1990s. The remarkable quality of the work of someone like the Finnish artist, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, shows just how far things have come. Ahtila is only in her early 40s now, but there is already a younger generation of Finns, like Salla Tykka (who has shown in Temple Bar), who are pushing up standards all the time. The way for artists to get better at film and video is to look critically at more, and to make more, but despite technological advances it is still an extremely expensive business. In this context, Foundlings is an ambitious project and a good, creditable piece of work.
Foundlings by Orla Barry can be seen on the hour, every hour between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., Tuesday to Saturday (plus Thursday at 6 p.m.), and 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin. Wideawake, a performance monologue by Barry, will be in Temple Bar Square at 7 p.m. on August 11th and 18th (details: 01-6710073) .
