Garret Linn: "Jacques Jarrige Or How I Lost My Blind Faith in Unreliable Narrators" by Levan Mindiashvili
When Valerie Goodman, the owner of the Valerie Goodman Gallery in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, approached filmmaker Garret Linn to create a movie about Jacques Jarrige, a French artist and designer represented by the gallery, Mr. Linn’s response was: “It’s gonna be weird and abstract… it’s gonna be about Jacques, but the subject matter will be creativity, death and daddy issues.”
GARRET LINN - Jacques Jarrige Or How I Lost My Blind Faith in Unreliable Narrators -
When Valerie Goodman, the owner of the Valerie Goodman Gallery in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, approached filmmaker Garret Linn to create a movie about Jacques Jarrige, a French artist and designer represented by the gallery, Mr. Linn’s response was: “It’s gonna be weird and abstract… it’s gonna be about Jacques, but the subject matter will be creativity, death and daddy issues.”
Garret Linn’s first collaboration with Jarrige dates back to 1996 when he created a multimedia slide presentation for Jacques’ installation at the Hotel de Ville in Paris. For the new movie, Linn spent several weeks in Paris, filming Jarrige in his studio, and also working with the artist’s son, Emmanuel Jarrige, who created a number of original sound pieces. Later they were edited by Linn himself and became part of one whole piece, a soundscape of a sort, that accompanies the movie. The film was meant to be projected on one or two screens at the gallery to provide a backdrop and a soundtrack to Jarrige ’s exhibition of sculptural furniture. “I believe if the film is done right, you do end up with an idea, or an inspiration, or a feeling for the subject matter. As a piece of poetry is often personal, you do end up with the idea of the subject matter, and hopefully of the writer,” - says Linn.
The final outcome is a poetic visual soundscape that immerses the viewer into a contemplative journey. The movie is about the act of looking, about perception as a sensual cognitive act. “I certainly believe in images, and I believe that images have emotional power,” said Linn to me when I visited him in his Chinatown loft which serves as his studio as well. “ And I’m very interested in how people consume imagery,” he added.
The movie has a complex visual structure. It starts with the fading of a white rectangular shape in the middle of the screen that stays there throughout the entire film. That horizontal sharp shape, repeating and outlining the format of the screen itself, is a constant reminder of the flat surface -of the device- through which we perceive not only the world around us but ourselves as well. Its importance and presence are outlined by the fact that the visual it overlaps is inverted. On the other hand, the movie is split into two screens, one next to each other, containing different footages coinciding or very rarely creating one image.
“[Images] in my films, are not necessarily narrative driven in a classical sense, but I’m very interested in how we can re-inject poetics back into film,” says Linn, “I am using the tools of poetics as opposed to superheroes, and capes, and explosions, and guns.”
The movie is not a literal representation of Jaques Jarrige, nor it contains illustrations of his works. His sculptures appear here and there, sometimes blurred, sometimes just close-ups of the details, sometimes in their natural settings. There is a small sequence of Jaques working on the aluminum sculpture in his studio. The film is about creating, it is about an artist’s (both in this case, the movie maker’s and the sculptor’s) constant attempt to translate abstracted subconscious images or ideas into recognizable ones. The movie brings together all the possible settings: private spaces, public ones, environments with cultural events or almost random, rural scenes, settings, where Jarrige’s work might exist or can be nurtured from; And by doing so, indirectly, the moviemaker shares his own inspirations, reveals his very personal territories. Despite its complexity, and rich visual diversity, the surface of the film never loses its clear, geometric, rectilinear structure and creates contrasting framing for Jarrige’s anthropomorphic sculptural work. Jarrige’s pieces never feel “made,” even though they are rigorously handcrafted in his favorite materials - wood, aluminum, and brass. They always feel naturally grown and evolved from nature, barely reshaped to become “functional.”
Creative kinship of these two artists is palpable in this film. In times, when we are expected to constantly and instantly “react” to the non-stop visual or informational stream in our “feeds,” when our actual interaction with that information or even with each other is limited to a single click, these artists are proposing the opposite - to slow down, to pay attention, and to look. With unexpected cuts, the movie keeps the viewer always alert and in need to think and analyze, but it’s perfect timing and sensitive soundscape creates almost meditative atmosphere, where one can open up and listen to his or her perceptional mechanisms. The same way Jacques Jarrige’s sculptures require attention and contemplative state. His sculptures (I deliberately avoid term furniture, because his approach doesn’t change whether the piece is “functional” or not), slowly grow and evolve in front of the viewer as they spend more and more time with them, reminding ever-changing cycles of the nature; They communicate universal messages about time passing and eternity.
“I adhere to Godard’s teaching where the minds of the viewers are where the film is made, not on the screen,” said Linn to me, and I believe Jarrige as well, would happily share this statement. And not surprisingly, the movie reaches its emotional peak when on the background of a serene rural scene paired with the seascape, over a calming noise of the sea, the voice of male presenter recorded at the Global City conference directs to the audience: “We are here…, now talking about our privacy, our data, our right to be seen, our right to not to be seen, our right to be known, our right to be forgotten.”
GARRET LINN Jacques Jarrige Or How I Lost My Blind Faith in Unreliable Narrators
GARRET LI NN Jacques Jarrige Or How I Lost My Blind Faith in Unreliable Narrators
Garret Linn