There are few images more representative of total and utter destruction than that of a plane crash. Hito Steyerl’s film In Free Fall opens with a carefully constructed montage of spectacular, Hollywoodesque aircraft explosions, instantly laying down the contemporaneously allegorical narratives of economic, political and cultural crash.
Structured in three parts; After the Crash, Before the Crash and Crash, Steyerl’s film references the economic collapse of 2008 through the chronicles of a fleet of bowing 707- 700 planes. From their hey-day at Howard Hughes’ TWA, to military service in Israel and on to their final resting place at a small desert airport in California, the planes become subject to the cyclical nature of capitalism and consumer-driven production. Once they become functionless as machines they find new uses as scrap; recycled to make DVDs or destined for the money shot of a block busting film such as 1994’s Speed. There are a number of parallels explored throughout In Free Fall that reveal the comparative destinies of both humans and objects caught up in a repetitive sequence of production and destruction.
Using a portable DVD player placed in the landscape of the desert airport, and employing the televisual technique of chroma key, these images become layered, compositing one image inside the aesthetic, structural frame of another. This produces coexisting narratives that are in essence framed by the very nature of their construction to the point where, as Gil Leung explains in her introduction to the work:
“...it becomes unclear as to the reality of the situation. Out of this surplus of form, it is the now of presentation, not representation, that is experienced through each thing’s own contrary articulations, it is a plane, it is a DVD, this is a historian, this is an actor, this is a pilot... things speak in each others voices.”
A particular moving part of the film involves the acting narrator and Steyerl herself dressed as cabin crew, moving through the gestures of a pre-flight safety demonstration, whilst visible on the portable DVD layer is the video of a man in free fall, struggling to unravel his malfunctioning parachute; his article of hope for survival. This vision is very different to the cyclical modes of crash portrayed through the aircraft. Herein lies the moment of tragedy and a desperate will for the parachute to rectify itself in time. It presents to us most vividly the moment before the crash, the powerful knowledge of an unstoppable disaster. On the other hand, the falling man serves as a warning; one where this dense interplay between crash as the awesome spectacle of a Hollywood movie and the horrific realities of tragedy distorts how we might understand a crash in real terms.
In a talk given by Mark Fisher in conjunction with the exhibition (framed with the question: “Can anything genuinely new emerge in a political landscape that is clogged with ideological junk?”), the position of being ‘after the crash’ was sited as an inherently complex one. As the catastrophe of a crash unfolds, the very shock of its inevitability induces an urgency to remain in the air, for which Fisher uses the analogy of a cartoon character running off a cliff. In this scenario, mirroring the time since the collapse of the markets at the end of 2008, there is a momentary pause before the plummeting toward the ground ensues, where one must ask the question; what is keeping us afloat now that the ground has fallen away?
'Hope' seems to be a common reply, and indeed the film suggests, in its representation of renewal through capital, optimism is certainly a factor. But while it persists, the very comprehension of the crash and its subsequent ramifications is deferred along with the moment of devastation itself. What Steyerl is presenting, through this postponement of final destruction, is a cannoning of crash where the event is rolled over in to the next stage of production so the moment of crash can begin again.
Returning to Fisher’s question of ideological junk, it is this propensity toward recycling from the detritus of wreckage that reinforces the cyclical nature of capital, thereby eliminating the emergence of anything “genuinely new”. So what might counteract these recurrent episodes of failure? Fisher’s argument is one of practicality; finding solutions to the problems that prevent victory against the onslaught of capitalist realisms denial of fallen ground.
Steyerl’s film is not one of denial; it is as much about the moments of revelation that a crash can produce as it is it’s devastating repercussions. Therefore, whilst I do not dismiss the importance of resistance such as we have begun to see through recent student protests (in fact quite the contrary), works like this demonstrate it is culture that seeks to offset the stagnant, failing ideologies of capital and supply us with that which is genuinely new.
In Free Fall is on at Chisenhale Gallery until 19th December 2010.
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