Stillness and the Anticinematic in the Work of Fiona Tan

摘要

Fiona Tan's video installation Island (2008) is a twelve-minute black-and-white film composed of footage taken by Tan while she was staying on the Swedish island of Gotland, the largest island in the Baltic Sea. The visual subject of Island is the natural landscape of Gotland's peninsula of Narsholmen, and the majority of the film is made up of a series of shifting long takes, which, in their sameness and repetition, get at the barrenness of the stark landscape.Like her other recent installations-including A Lapse of Memory (2007), Rise and Fall (2009), and Disorient (2009)-Island abstracts the more overt postcolonial themes of Tan's earlier work to focus on broadly conceived questions of provenance, place, and medium.In the opening fixed shot of Island, a few scrubby pine trees and a lighthouse, which is the only sign of human life, punctuate the shore of the peninsula.