Off the Wall with Shchedryk
This paper examines how music and juxtapositions can ground a story in a longer history where the potential of images and cutting points become a dialectics of point, counter-point, and fusion in a revisitation of archetypal images and as a co-authorship of reception. A visual dialogue evolves in the film Shchedryk (2014) through a remediation of scenes from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Alexander Dovzhenko‘s Earth (1930) and Norman McLaren’s experimental film Synchromy (1971). People who do not have recourse to the dominant culture are through recipient-co-authorship able to replay things in more sophisticated ways. Judith Butler’s idea of the performative and of subjects re-performing an injury (Butler 1993) can be introduced to the multi-screen experience. Foregrounding the wounding aspect as visual images is about ‘bad pleasure’ (O’Brien & Julien 2005). If realness is a standard by which we judge any performance, what makes it effective is its ability to compel beliefs and embody and reiterate norms (Butler, 387). Image Credit: Frame from Shechedryk, directed by Kalli Paakspuu