Language Lessons (2002) film still [Enlarge in New Window]

Jeanne C. Finley & John Muse: Loss Prevention

"We are interested in making work that draws from documentary and imaginary sources, yet extends the experience of the material by stimulating a full body response that includes intellect, spirit, emotion, and participation," say San Francisco-based video and installation artists Jeanne Finley and John Muse while discussing their project Loss Prevention (2000). Finley, a former Fulbright scholar and Guggenheim fellow, and long-time collaborator Muse have been investigating the tensions and spaces between fiction and nonfiction storytelling to astonishing effect. Their video works and interactive media installations employ image, text, and sound in ways that disrupt narrative continuity and create a complex, layered experience where the viewer is both participant and observer.

Originally conceived in 1999 as a radio piece for the NPR program "This American Life," Loss Prevention (made with a third collaborator, Doug DuBois) combines documentary and narrative elements to tell the story of Irene. An elderly woman arrested for stealing aspirin from a Miami Wal-Mart store, Irene is sentenced to 10 weeks of senior citizen shoplifting prevention school, where her class is warned that another conviction will mean jail time. Yet Irene continues to steal. Her tale is intercut with that of her daughter, who must grapple with her mother's misadventures. Irene, her daughter, as well as the other voices heard in the video, are fictional characters -- composites based on true stories Finley and Muse recorded researching the work. "We tried making a conventional documentary," says Finley, "but it didn't happen. Our imaginary process interceded, as it usually does when we work with nonfiction material. Instead, the piece became a meditation on the relationship between parents and children, boredom and pleasure, accident and intention, authority and subterfuge."

Exploiting the lush landscape of Florida, the artists filled Loss Prevention with iconographic imagery of the state: fountains, bottoms of swimming pools, seascapes, beach houses, palm trees. These pictures are mixed with voiceover -- there are no people visibly represented in the film -- and close-ups of miniature toy objects submerged in water. The work is shot on digital video and Super 8. According to Muse, Loss Prevention functions "allegorically rather than literally. We allow highly abstracted sound and imagery to displace the particulars of time and space to discover the boundaries between documentary and fiction. In this film, Florida is not the here and now, but something of the imagination." A keen parable of obsession and disgrace, the film had its premier screening as a work in progress at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater in New York in 2000.

The overarching themes of vanity, loss, desire, and gratification contained within Loss Prevention live on in Finley and Muse's new four-part installation series, The Trial of Harmony and Invention. With a title that references the suite of eight concerti by Antonio Vivaldi, which includes "The Four Seasons," the multi-channel audio and video installations are "experiments with the dislocation of time and space," explains Finley. Winter, completed in 2001, consists of a two-projection video: one throwing visuals onto the floor and the other trained on a spinning disco ball, splashing images over the walls and ceiling. Depictions of a drowning girl, falling airplanes, and floating dust are overlaid with 24 diverse recordings of Vivaldi's "Winter" movement from "The Four Seasons." Spring, a work in progress, will be housed in two rooms with huge one-way mirrors; two video projectors will display a series of tracking shots, including images of women at various stages of life. The audio will consist of differing interpretations of Vivaldi's "Spring" movement. Paradoxes of time and rhythm, and the allure of the unreachable permeate the works, say Finley and Muse, "serving to unmoor the spectator's sense of center and balance."

Finley and Muse are philosophical about their explorations of the shifting borders between fiction and nonfiction. That they both hold MFAs in photography, an art form that straddles evidentiary and formal concerns, doubtlessly informs their work. "While the concrete nature of people's stories is compelling, it is the conflict between document and documented, fiction and representation that we find inspiring," observes Finley. Agreeing with her, Muse adds that "the very existence of some ostensible distinction between fiction and nonfiction is trouble. There is an ethical call to investigate that boundary."

[ About this article ]

THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | The Human Animal | Labor | California | 2000