- In an attempt to visualize and dissipate through familiarity the
angst of the US american psyche in the wake of communal loss,
a mental pastiche of Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic 'dream' or Surrealist
sequences informs conductor's visual style - a kind of Freudian
Modernism - but so too does Disneyesque melodrama. This off-key
alienation device is intended to allow an audience critical
distance from the news-media's obscene coupling of real
tragic imagery with overplayed sentiment and opportunistic commercialism
that characterizes coverage of '9/11' - conductor may then
operate as intended, sparking synapses to fresh thought around the
subjects of hubris, trauma, revenge and redemption.
- conductor relies heavily on the notion and use of 'the
helicopter shot' - a device often used in clumsy attempts to rescue
bad cinema. In this scenario though, the helicopter view is replaced with the
point-of-view of a 'lost soul', caught forever in the purgatory
of a premonitory dream on the eve of September 11, 2001. No martyr or hero,
this believer is an asylum-seeker, a shell-shocked refugee from a moribund Faith,
frenziedly and repeatedly navigating the Jacob's Ladder of the World Trade Center towers
in increasingly more desperate but futile attempts to ascend to Heaven's Gate
prior to Armageddon, 'the war at the end of the world' ...and God.
- Experimental musician Karl-Heinz Stockhausen's brilliant
profundity is honored in conductor. To formal and critical
ends it uses a short passage from his helikopter-quartett
- a disturbing mix of modernism and tradition - as appropriate
to the on-screen action, but also as a reflection upon his difficult
and misrepresented thoughts about the events of 9/11 in the course
of a media event concerning his opera, Licht or 'Light'.
-
The Angel of History, Walter Benjamin, is an enduring and pertinent
influence. From a critical, secular, and social perspective ,
conductor reposits the centuries-old religious debate concerning how
many angels can fit on the point of a needle?
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