Associação Cultural Videobrasil

essay ff>>dossier_ Roberto Bellini_ "Landscape Theory" - by Cezar Migliorin

Landscape Theory

Cezar Migliorin

The Landscape Theory video is all about patience. It features Bellini recording a conversation of his with a man, in the U.S., as a plane flies across the sky. The man tells him he should not be filming there: “people are kind of edgy…they get suspicious of people filming major overpasses or big buildings….” Bellini remains calm enough to realize something important is taking place here: a dialogue like this one won't happen twice, and the artist shrewdly keeps the conversation going, tension-filled, without acting submissive. Slowly, the talk renders Bellini's camera increasingly dangerous: “some guy was held in here the other day for taking pictures…” and Bellini keeps talking to the man, not giving in, just listening. The video is not aimed at provoking an uncommon, radical experience such as a fight, but rather at letting the conversation flow. How far is this thing going? The patience and cleverness here lie in allowing the text to go beyond the realm of communication, vibrating a state of the world.

In Landscape Theory, the artist managed to materialize the violence of a “casual” meeting, the violence in a talk that starts out as a friendly conversation. Landscape Theory stands on borders: between the delicacy of the birds Bellini intends to film, and the nature made private by a citizen who deems himself responsible for the safety of all. Here, the State no longer needs signs and rules to indicate the prohibition. The ban, the danger, the threat are everywhere: in the birds, in the landscape, in the overpasses, and in the occasional casual meetings one can have with strangers on the streets.

The terrorism that destroyed the World Trade Center is back in this video, featuring no image of the event at all, no black screen censoring the scenes. 9/11 inhabits the images of this five-minute video. Perhaps this materiality of a state of affairs is what impresses the most in Bellini's work; each and every image in Landscape Theory overflows, spills out of the landscape, pointing out to how the war of images has been “won” by the terrorists. The world is not meant to have a meaning, says the man who addresses the artist. Everything you are filming poses a potential threat: the big buildings, the overpasses, the computer companies, and even the landscape: “Do you know where I could do this without it being a problem?” Bellini asks. “No, I sure don't,” goes the man. Each and every place is impregnated.

At first I asked myself, why not maintain a spatial unity between speech and image? Why not keep the original images? I reckon it was through a multiplicity of images, which meet the text at times and distance themselves from it at others, that Bellini managed to extrapolate that conversation between the two of them to infinite space. The ethical and political composition of space materialized in Bellini's video relates not only to the space in which the video takes place, but also to a reality of image and of space in general.

The two voices in the video are vying for space. On the one hand we have the artist seeing a microaction of nature: the sun sets, birds fly, and in a strange, disfunctional way, he becomes interested in that space. On the other hand we have a voice that comes along to give “advice,” and ends up giving a “scolding,” a voice to whom that same space has a function. For that man, there are no ambiguities in between camera and space. Filming the space and nature is a statement in itself. It is a double capture: of spaces and of images. Bellini fights against this capture; in this sense, the video is strongly political. To produce an image is an act of opening up, of presenting something still under formation, still embryonic, whatever it is that might come out of this process. Meanwhile, the voice addressing the artist claims it knows what the images are meant for, hence they cannot be filmed.

“The painter does not work on a blank canvas, the canvas is full of clichés that need breaking,” Francis Bacon once said. If preconceived images have always existed, they have now attained an unprecedented degree of saturation. The quasi-comic effect of Bellini's video lies in the fact that he is able to capture this terrorrism-related cliché in the flying birds or even the sunset. Oddly enough, the sunset, a cliché in its own right, escapes its fate when confronted and tensioned with yet another cliché.

“Do you watch the news or anything? Do you read the paper?” the man asks, expliciting what makes him a power agent. According to the panoptic model described by Foucault, there is an architecture designed to render individuals visible, causing people to introject this watch over individuals, making them responsible for their own surveillance. The indignation of the man talking to Bellini stems from the fact that the one making the film has not incorporated the surveillance yet. Beware! They will spot you and they will punish you. But here, different from Foucault's disciplinary basis, surveillance is anticipatory and preventive. The man is on the lookout for him with the camera, anticipating a risk that the artist (and himself) might be at, and the police watch over those filming, anticipating the risk “we all” are at. In a chain of predictions, contemporary surveillance establishes itself.

Landscape Theory is a victory; it discusses a speech that provides rules for space and image, at the same time producing an image devoid of rules, exposing with great intensity an attempt to immobilize the act of image creation. In Bellini's video, it is the image and the spaces that rebel. “This is not surveillance,” the images of the video seem to scream, while Bellini keeps his calm even as he realizes, in the act, that he was capturing something precious. Nevertheless, this work shows that every camera is a surveillance camera and that every space must be watched. In the video, an ordinary man takes on the role of the eye of power, an eye that can do anything and which is not individual; it is not aimed at an individual due to certain features of race or nationality, but rather due to the way in which he/she operates with nature and technology. As we head down the path paved by Foucault, we grasp the concept that subjective constructions are not separate from forms of visibility. These are the forms that make themselves unique at each historic moment, and in Landscape Theory they can be detected in that which is specific in the contemporary: a transformation of space, with regard to its visibility and its forms of control.

In the video, security is not a responsibility of the State anymore, but of each community, each citizen. Security is no longer regarded as a State standard, but rather as a local contract according to which each person is in charge of his/her own security, as well as the security of the community. In the United States, where the video takes place, these policies became known as “neighborhood watch” or “zero tolerance” but, as a matter of fact, this privatization of security involves the entire relationship with the State. Just look at the way in which the State is seen nowadays, no longer as a provider, but as a partner; it is not up to the State to provide health services, but to set limits for private health insurance-which people may or may not have. In the world today, as in Bellini's video, a person is responsible for his or her own destiny. This is what the man who approached the cameraman had to say; you may film if you want, but it is best not, you might get arrested. On the other hand, he deems himself responsible for his safety; this is what authorizes this man to view the camera and the architecture as threats.

Since at least the mid-19th century, urban architecture was instrumentalized by the State for the sake of public order and citizenship. Urban reforms undertaken at that time are proof of concern regarding security and health in the reconstruction of cities. Those cities were becoming increasingly transparent and “organized.” Around 1880, the standards applied by Haussmann in Paris had spread to distant cities, such as Santiago and Saigon (Marshall Berman). Curiously enough, in Landscape Theory, replicating the 9/11 attacks, the urban architecture takes on new significance. Big buildings, which are synonymous with progress and order, turn into threats, potential chaos, weapons of crime that must be watched.

We are responsible for our security, our ongoing development, our education, our personal health, and our risk management. In other words, “postponement is limitless” (Deleuze). This postponement now includes terrorism, which can never go unmanaged, and responsibility for it is ours (so tells us the man who approaches the cameraman). To make a film of an overpass means to owe an explanation. The society of control, as pointed out by Deleuze, works through modulation between institutions. If, in a disciplinary society, we used to move from one institution to another-school/army/factory/hospital-, in the society of control, these transitions no longer occur by means of cuts. Each institution has its own flows and forces, which are passed on from one institution to the other. The flows of a given institution are often being updated in the other ones, therefore the very identities of these institutions are in crisis, so they too begin operating by flows. The scary thing about this work is the fact that the terrorist/criminal “flow” seems dispersed and all-encompassing; these are poisonous, totalitarian forces that demand multiplying, insubordinate actions, such as this video by Bellini.

Associação Cultural Videobrasil. "FF>>Dossier 021>>Roberto Bellini". Available at: . São Paulo, August, 2006.