Chain, 2004 film still [Enlarge in New Window]

Jem Cohen: Chain

Every four days, a new Wal-Mart store opens somewhere in America. And with each new franchise, a little bit of regionalism slips away.

The landscape is becoming homogenized, and not just in America. "That's Dallas. And that's Düsseldorf," says filmmaker Jem Cohen, pointing to shots of virtually indistinguishable corporate complexes, each sporting the same shiny veneers and the same angular lines. He scratches his head over the next location. "It's increasingly hard to tell where you are, since so many places look the same."

And that's one of the primary points of Chain, the latest project by Cohen, whose work has long stood out on the independent film circuit and garnered awards and accolades for the artist, including fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. The piece's title refers both to the chain stores that are a ubiquitous part of globalization, and also to the way Cohen is constructing this unusual piece. "The project is built link-by-link and in different forms," explains the Brooklyn-based artist. "The idea is to work towards a narrative feature, but do it in a modular way, where the pieces can have many different functions. They can be recombined or just connected together in one long string."

The first incarnation of Chain is a three-channel video installation, which premiered in 2002 at Eyebeam gallery in New York, and will go on to the Australian Center for the Moving Image's Screen Gallery. In this version, what's key is the interplay between images of indeterminate landscapes and megastores on adjacent monitors, while the multilingual sounds of globalism rise and fall -- stock prices, newscasts, motivational tapes, computer-generated speech. Hints of stories enter the mix through voice-over narration and moments where characters are seamlessly planted within the existing footage. True to form, Cohen's cinematography is moody, lyrical, even beautiful, despite its subject. "I don't want to take cheap shots," he insists. "It's like shooting ducks in a barrel if you want to make fun of this stuff - shopping malls, fast food joints, and all that. I'm not interested in that. What I'm trying to do is suggest that we take a hard look at these places in a way that is, in some respects, dispassionate. I think they're mostly invisible. We barrel into things in our society and don't stop to examine them."

In prior films, Cohen's emphasis had been on capturing the visible remnants of a bygone age in particular locations: Eastern and Central Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in Buried in Light (1994); New York City in Lost Book Found (1996); southern Italy in Amber City (1999). Facing the outcroppings of corporate culture meant a new global canvas for Cohen.

The director's ultimate goal for Chain is to create a theatrical feature that will integrate four or so narratives into the documentary footage. Each segment can also stand alone. The stories all involve characters who inhabit these generic environments. "I do a lot of my research in the business sections of the newspaper, which I also avoided for most of my life," he says. "Now I read them all the time. They're full of narrative."

One story that caught Cohen's eye was about the corporate approach to cherry-blossom viewing in Japan, in which low-level executives are sent out to hold good viewing spots for their bosses, waiting under the trees until blossom time. That inspired a narrative thread in Chain about a Japanese woman who works for a company that's constructing a cherry-blossom theme park. She crisscrosses the U.S. looking at corporate amusement parks as part of her research.

"All my stories start from a real-world basis," says Cohen. "I'm really interested in constantly building the headlines in. I'm tremendously influenced now by the Enron corporate scandal and all that. The project was not about that, but now it's unavoidable."Because of its collage-like, nonlinear, modular character, Chain has the fluidity to make this possible -- not to mention, unique. As Cohen understates, "It's not a normal project, but it's still accessible. It addresses the world that everyone now lives in."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | Products & Consumerism | The Built Environment | New York | 2000