Omer Fast, The Casting, 2007, four-channel video

Omer Fast understands media—or at least he understands what questions to raise regarding media. Since his work debuted in 2000 at Momenta Art in Williamsburg, Fast has assembled video installations that play with and call into question received histories, memories, and representations. His projects underscore the increasingly blurred line between historical events and their subsequent (or even simultaneous) portrayal in the media, begging the question, to whom do our memories belong and with whom do they originate?

Early works such Glendive Foley (2000) and T3-AEON (2000) investigate the role of the home viewer. For Glendive Foley, Fast filmed various suburban exteriors in Glendive, Montana, America’s smallest television market, according to Nielson Media Research. He then filmed himself creating sound effects for the stereotypical noises that one might expect to hear in suburbia, from lawnmowers to birds whistling. Such low-tech sound effects, all created through voice and mouth manipulation, are known as Foley effects, named after Jack Foley, one of Hollywood’s first sound artists. The juxtaposition of the suburban façades with Fast’s manipulated sounds in the resulting two-channel video installation underscore the suburban fantasy exported internationally through American television. For T3-AEON, Fast deftly smuggled four voiceovers into video rental copies of the Hollywood blockbuster Terminator (1984). The voiceovers, all of which were provided by Fast’s relatives, inserted personal childhood memories of parental discipline alongside scenes of intense manufactured Hollywood violence. The altered tapes were then released into the general New York City video rental inventory, thereby circulating personal memories within a media-produced narrative.

Slightly later projects like Spielberg’s List (2003) and Godville (2005) look into reenactments of major historical narratives, highlighting links between past and present. In Spielberg’s List, Fast interviews former Polish extras from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List. He interweaves their memories of acting in the film alongside recollections of the German occupation of Poland during World War II. For Godville, Fast traveled to Virginia to interview historical reenactors in Colonial Williamsburg about their personal lives as well as the fictional lives of the eighteenth-century characters they play.

Most recently, Fast’s four-channel video installation The Casting (2007) had its American premier at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. For this piece, Fast interviewed a United States Army sergeant; the soldier speaks to Fast about a traumatic wartime shooting in Iraq and about a separate disturbing romantic relationship. Fast edits the soldier’s memories into one near-seamless narrative that he then pairs with corresponding acted versions of these two incidents. Memory is thus transformed into a script.
 

Omer Fast, The Casting, 2007, four-channel video

What struck me perhaps almost as much as the installation of The Casting itself was the audience’s response to it. Everyone who entered the dark video gallery generally stayed put. The only movement in the room seemed to occur when someone new entered or when viewers watching the front of the installation realized that they could move around to the back side of the screens. In an era in which viewers are constantly bombarded with visual information (and especially within the context of such a massive group exhibition as the Biennial), generating this kind of extended viewing experience is no small feat. I discussed The Casting with Fast over a series of e-mails written between late May and early June. The following interview is the culmination of these conversations.

Sarah Rosenbaum-Kranson: How does The Casting relate to your earlier works?

Omer Fast: The preceding two works focused on individuals whose personal narrative somehow floats between first-hand experience and its re-creation. Spielberg’s List looked at the extras who participated in the filming of Schindler’s List while Godville presented the costumed guides who work as historical characters in Colonial Williamsburg. In both works, the idea was to exploit an ambiguity central to these peoples’ experiences: as narrators, they can recall an impossible past in precise lived-through detail; as witnesses, they’ve lived through memorable events that are nevertheless replicas. By cutting and mixing the narrator’s memories with the witness’s reflections to a point at which they start to blur and intermingle, I was trying to play with the normally fixed notions of past and present, authentic and copy, private memory and public story. Another feature common to the previous two works is that both look at historical events through how they’ve been reenacted in the public domain. Since both Schindler’s List and Colonial Williamsburg obviously preceded my filming, both are famous and discrete spectacles in their own right, and both can be handled like found objects or readymades. This gives me the split subject that I like so much, namely the duped/duping witness, which allows me to look at historical events by looking at how they’ve been portrayed publicly and remembered privately by those who have “been there” on location for their re-creation, as extras or tour guides. In the more recent work, The Casting, I think that this logic was turned on its head. To begin, there is no notable reenactment to hark back to. There are certainly genre conventions and plenty of media depictions of the war in Iraq and blind dates, ones to emulate or to avoid. Nevertheless, the young Army sergeant does become an actor in his recollections in the way that anyone who agrees to sit in front of a camera and talk about private stuff does. But the past that he describes is his own, narrated in two separate stories: one takes place near Baghdad and involves a violent attack; the other is a romantic liaison with a girl in Bavaria. As a script, the two stories are woven together to produce a hybrid that swings back and forth in time, place, and feeling. Finally, since The Casting isn’t based on an already-made reenactment, this leaves me room to move in and produce one. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, not the least because I’d grown tired of being associated with the sort of easy media critique that naming a work after Steven Spielberg, for example, seems to welcome. In this respect, I think The Casting represents something of a turn for me: it still provides the evidence of the “documentary”—the encounter with the real that’s been so important to me in previous projects and continues to be, but it simultaneously presents its own dramatization of that encounter: re-creating the real by staging the soldier’s stories as a series of silenttableaux, complete with actors in costumes, several locations, props, and even a smoke machine.

Omer Fast, The Casting, 2007, four-channel video

SRK: I’m interested in the idea of the “duped/duping witness.” When it comes to The Casting, there seems to be a question of both the soldier as private witness and the audience as public witness—both the interviewer within the film and the external viewer in the museum. How do you relate the two?

OF: I’m interested in the ambivalent situation which the soldier was put in, both in his original role on the road in Iraq and in the way he is made to revisit that role in a new role, as a storyteller, after the fact and in front of a camera. You might say that we’re all actors playing roles all the time, certainly when we put on a uniform and definitely when we’re made to sit down and talk in front of a camera. I made The Casting about a year after Godville, the work that dealt with the costumed guides who work as historical characters in Colonial Williamsburg. The guides were interviewed in character, as their eighteenth-century personalities, and out of character, as their twenty-first century selves. The two lives were then mixed to the point at which past and present, art and life blurred into something that we could probably call psychosis. While I was editing, I tried to sort through my own confusions by reading Stephen Eddy Snow’s Performing the Pilgrims, which led me to Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist, which in turn led me to Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, specifically for his analysis of the “front” and “back” regions of human behavior, the concept of which was important to me when thinking about the way that The Casting was eventually structured and installed for an audience. Viewers who come into the installation are always made to see the dramatization of the soldier’s stories, or the “front region,” first. The scenes are clearly staged, filmed according to the usual conventions of moviemaking, often of the B variety. Moreover, on the audio track, viewers also encounter the stories after they’ve been worked on, woven together, and acoustically polished to sound like they’re one. So there is a double presentation, which the viewer is asked to make sense of and follow. But The Casting also has a “back region.” According to Goffman, this is the area that is normally off-limits to the audience. This is where work is done to prepare for the presentation and consumption that takes place publicly in the “front region.” This idea applies not only to movies and theaters, but also to restaurants, doctors’ offices, banks, schools, etc. Goffman extends the notion of performance to the “back region,” behind the scenes, as it were. This “secondary” performance is usually perceived as being more authentic or truthful, since it often takes place away from the public and the responsibilities of the official presentation. But the “back region” performance can also cut closer to home in that inter-personal politics are involved, or roles within the “front region” are evaluated, fought for, lost, and won. Reality Television is probably the most vivid recent example of the collapse of the two regions into one performance. In The Casting, the “back region” is literally found on the opposite side of the two hanging screens on which the finished scenes of the silent tableau are shown. On the back sides, on the other hand, a viewer can see the talking heads, the “real people” behind the narratives. Much in line with Goffman’s complex notion of the “secondary” or “back region” performance, though, the viewer’s desire to cut through to a behind-the-scenes truth is provoked but ultimately frustrated. This is not because the soldier is making the stories up or is actually an actor, as some viewers suggested. Actually, the work refuses to have its subject—the soldier—fixed in a formulated phrase. In this sense, perhaps something of the private burden that the soldier carries with him from his first roles on the road in Iraq—as victim, perpetrator, and witness—is transferred to the audience, as a public burden, through the soldier’s being assigned and taking on secondary roles—this time as an interviewee, a storyteller, and actor. This shift from the private to public is what I’m after.

SRK: Your reference to reality television seems significant for the way in which such entertainment presents a form of scripted or staged reality that resonates with the production of The Casting. I’m also interested in the way that the “back region” of the work resonates with more traditional media like the evening news or newsmagazines like “20/20.” There’s a blurred line that The Casting explores between the “hard news” interview and the “confessional” interview of reality television.

OF: The back channels do show the original interview footage with the soldier, alluding to the “real,” which is just another format, of course, when it comes to television and cinema. So, the viewer who dares to go behind the screens is rewarded with extra material, like behind-the-scenes footage that’s in line with the “reality” genre—candid shots and the evidence of a genuine emotional recollection, along with not-so-sleek video images and sometimes awkward or unflattering moments. But, the work also plays with the parameters of the genre. For example, the entire segment concerning the German girl’s self-inflicted scars has been made up, literally cobbled together word-for-word from otherwise unrelated parts in the interview. Actually, during three days of interviews, the word “scars” was never uttered. So when it appears in the video, it’s a compound of two words, “scared” and “cars,” which were actually spoken on different days. For a smooth sound, you always want to cut on an unvoiced consonant, hence “sc/cars.” Admittedly, I expended a lot of time in making these sentence constructions sound fluent. But since the specific words come from different points in the interview, the itinerant video image that accompanies the audio jumps and stutters from one word to the next, revealing the breaks in overall continuity. Some people don’t seem to believe their eyes at those moments: the footage is totally concatenated, and the speaker is jumping all over the place, but many viewers with whom I’ve spoken simply repress all of that and come away with an impression that preserves realism. Another back-region detail that might contradict the viewer’s desire for the real is the clothing. During the original interview, I used two cameras: one was trained on the soldier, the other on me. I later discovered that I leaned in my chair too much during the interview, resulting in footage that mostly featured my left ear and shoulder. Back in Germany, I tried to redo the shot with some home lighting, creating a rough impression that I’m in the same space as the soldier. The double image looks almost OK, except that occasionally the two of us appear in the same checkered shirt, which the soldier borrowed from me during the interview. You might say this is about identifying with your subject so much that you start dressing like him. But it’s also an undeniable visual discrepancy, albeit small. Who are these guys? What’s with that ugly checkered button-down? Anyway, I don’t think of the edits and games as ploys to reveal how much the real is constructed. Certainly most viewers have a good idea that interview programs, news, and reality shows are highly choreographed, edited products. For me, it’s about setting up simultaneous layers of storytelling, ones that hopefully contribute to a more nuanced account not only of what happened to “him” “over there,” but also what happens to “us” later, in the process of retelling. And I believe that discontinuities are not only illuminating devices of the Brechtian order but also excellent sources of aesthetic and sensual pleasure.

SRK: How did you compile all of the audio and visual elements of the piece, and whose voice(s) are we listening to?

OF: The voice belongs to Ronn Cantu. He is a sergeant in the US Army, and we met in December 2006, right before he was shipped to Iraq for his second year-long tour. I spent a week in Killeen, Texas, talking with several soldiers from Fort Hood, all of whom were recent returnees from Iraq. Some were being sent off again soon; one was being court-martialed for refusing to go back; another was dismissed for reasons of conscience. I chose Ronn’s two stories because I found them moving and because it occurred to me that they could be intercut: both involve driving down the road as a means of propelling the story towards a climax, and both involve the destruction of a vehicle—literal in one, nearly avoided in the other—as a dénouement. I spent a few weeks editing the stories together into a script, which was then given to actors to perform in scenes that were mostly shot in California. Google provided the visual cues for what things should look like. The Mojave desert provided the setting for the scenes in Iraq, a house in Hollywood Hills stepped in as the family home in Bavaria. We also filled in a few so-called B-roll shots in Germany, mainly in the hills around Dresden. All in all, it was a four-day shoot on 35mm.

SRK: It’s fascinating that Google influenced the look of the work! Can you discuss the blurred line between fact and fiction that The Casting presents?

OF: Before making The Casting, I made several experiments, in which instead of actually filming anything myself, the stories or interviews that I had were visually accompanied by images downloaded from Google. The fact that the images shown in The Casting are instantly recognizable – they are, after all, based on images in the public domain – is what helps make the work a bit uncanny. Once familiar narrative details are registered and processed [leading to thoughts like], “Oh, it’s Iraq,” the other strange stuff starts to kick in. By strange stuff, I mean the way that the narratives in the work intertwine, their unstable sense of time and place, the deliberate handling of actors like mannequins, a sense of a realism always approaching, but stunted by the failings of memory, honesty, and production standards.

SRK: Another obvious element in the video’s look is the stillness of the actors in the scenes representing Iraq and Germany. There is enough movement that you know you’re watching a video and not simply projected photographs, but the frozen quality of the actors is striking. It actually reminded me of the association that Roland Barthes draws between photography and death in Camera Lucida. Can you elaborate a bit on this stillness?

OF: Matthias Michalka actually talks about Barthes, mortification, and being photographed in his essay on The Casting published in the MUMOK book. As for me, for both conceptual and financial reasons, I knew from the beginning that The Casting couldn’t possibly be filmed as a shoot ’em up action feature, complete with explosions and car chases. On the other hand, I did want the images we would film to quite literally illustrate the stories that Ronn told me, and this indeed called for some heavy-duty props and elaborate staging. But I also felt strongly that the images had to refer to the Google snapshots that they were based on. I’ve never been to Iraq, so that’s the way it looks in my mind’s eye. I don’t know what it’s like for others, but for me, memory works like a slide show. I rarely remember things moving in the magical sense that they do in dreams or in the movies, let alone in reality, but rather as a sequence of images that need to be summoned and filled in, slowly, one at a time. Each picture or scene remembered might indeed contain elements that are endowed with motion, but the situations or stories that I can recall remain mostly still, more in line with pre-cinematic spectacles like tableaux vivants and magic lantern shows than Imax and Virtual Reality. Anyway, before we began filming, I actually imagined scenes that would be magical, trance-like, photographic, dead, and absolutely still. The only thing that would distinguish them from actual snapshots would be the moving grain of the film, the scratches that pop up on the surface, literally the life of the medium. What I often got on location instead were coughing fits, laughter, and whispering, actors suddenly having unexplained spasms and twitching, and lots of Mojave wind. We did our best to suppress all that, but the original mission proved to be more or less impossible. After flying back home with the footage, I was really surprised, especially by those very scenes that did not seem to work out on-location. It’s exactly at those moments when the body rebels, when the wind blows, when little unforeseen events happen, that the footage becomes alive, perhaps in Goffman’s back-region sense. I think this gives the stories otherwise narrated in the piece a strong countervailing sense of time, one that flows against the dramatic time of the two narratives. For me, watching the actors try to keep still is almost like watching an action movie under heavy sedation: you’re not watching so much for what these people are doing, or why, but rather for whether they’re alive and for the signs that betray that. I also see these scenes as a collection of the frozen, awkward moments that exist between an actor’s wish to identify with his role—the cathartic objective of good ol’ drama—and the vagaries of the real: wind, gravity, and the body’s ever-present desire to twitch, cough, fall, and rebel, always at the wrong moment, i.e. when the camera’s running. Strangely, this is probably the basic principle of comedy. So this puts the project in an uncomfortable place somewhere between drama and comedy. I didn’t think of any of this while we were filming. What I really wanted was to avoid the problem of pathos.

SRK: The Whitney was the first US venue for The Casting. Have you noticed different responses between American and European audiences? What is the significance of nationality in the work?

OF: I did not notice a general difference in reaction between American and European audiences. I suspect that the work probably resonates more with American viewers. They can follow the stories more easily and probably tend to better identify with the narrator. Ronn comes across as a kind of American Everyman; he talks very quickly, and he peppers his speech with American idioms. For me, the notion of nationality has always been foremost a matter of language. I grew up in two countries and know how much accent, idiom, and the correct turn of phrase play a role in the way others perceive a person, and in turn, how one perceives oneself. However, since The Casting eschews the Iraqi and German perspectives, I suppose it is vulnerable to the accusation that it represents an American one. I don’t have a problem with that.

SRK: Finally, congratulations on winning the Bucksbaum Award. The award acknowledges the impact of The Casting on American art practice and enables you to return to the Whitney within the next two years and present a new exhibition of work. Have you thought about what you would like to do next?

OF: I’m writing a script for a new work. It’s another genre sandwich alternating situational comedy scenes and an interview with the witness of a suicide bombing.