Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Capturing the haunted psyche, guerrilla style: Top Light and the Haunted Man

After watching Top Light and the Haunted Man, I was left with a feeling of unsettledness, which, as negative as that may sound, is for me one of the markers of ‘good work’, if one can still respectably use the phrase in reference to art. It begs the question, asks one to look at their everyday surroundings in a different light and pokes fun of a system which most of us abide by unquestioningly. One of the unfortunate side effects of this, however, is that it goes against the human instinct for familiarity, and to ask someone to enter a range of unfamiliarity, especially mentally, is often met with apprehension, doubt and, yes, unsettledness.

In the case of Top Light, this mental agitation comes almost immediately from the opening clips, footage taken from 1950’s era documentation of subjects undergoing hypnosis. Groner puts us in the place of the archetypal couple being questioned by an unseen hypnotist, but the question is are we about to be hypnotised, or are we waking up from a long unconsciousness? Our position is uncertain, for the scenes that follow give us aerial shots of the sky and towns below; the initial prospect of being hypnotised changes to a more omniscient perspective. Furthermore, the two-channel format adds an inherent ambivalence to the view. Rough surveillance camera footage cuts into the aerial pans, and we just make out the banal details of a shop interior or street corner. Tension builds in the soundtrack and figures appear unaware in the camera’s eye. We see the dark outline of a lone man walking slowly on the street pavement. He pauses, takes a single step oddly to the side, and then slowly lifts his head up to the camera. The gesture is almost shocking; we are caught in our voyeurism. The brief moment of watching turns vulnerable once again; the artist watches us. Each time in a different location, he walks casually towards the camera, looks directly into the lens and exits again. The ‘haunted man’ is the artist himself, plaguing security cameras of the city by tapping into their video signals. But which is the greater threat—the ghost or the system in which the ghost perpetrates? Groner asks this question by returning to the couple, now under the deepest stage of hypnosis. In an ironically postmodern confession, they reveal the conflict and tension they feel without being able to identify its source. Groner acknowledges this sentiment as a widespread syndrome, but he also offers a small liberation. Returning to the CC-TV signals, the haunted man is now seen briskly approaching the camera before placing a tape mask over the lens. By restricting the view of the cameras, the artist asks us to see something else. In acknowledging the systems of control, there is a possibility to subvert it, however small or frivolous. From a webcam view of a street corner in Amsterdam, we see the haunted man extending a small mirror up to the perched camera, and for the first time, the camera sees itself. Even if we cannot identify the source of control, awareness may give us a certain amount of freedom. The couple may or may not leave their hypnotic session with a renewed sense of energy, but Groner really leaves us with more probing questions about who is watching whom in our society. And should we feel uncomfortable? Definitely.