Pataphysical Explorations to Disrupt Reality in the Most Unproductive Ways: An UMMA Dialogue with Christian Bok, David Doris, and Stephen Rush

Last week the Museum of Art held one of the weirdest series of performances and dialogues I’ve seen in my life. Presented by experimental poet Christian Bok (University of Calgary), art historian David Doris (UM), and music performance professor Stephen Rush (UM), the event challenged the audience to reconsider their preconceived definition of art, philosophy, and what ought to be presented in a museum in the first place.

The event featured a poetry reading and dance, a lecture on the art of turd polishing (which is exactly what it sounds like), and a talk on avant garde musical performance. I will focus on the poem recitation/interpretive dance.

I expected something a little off-kilter—pataphysics is a philosophical precursor to Dadaism, an attempt to create “imaginary solutions” to explain physical pheonomenon in the world.

But I still wasn’t prepared to see an interpretive dance performed by a group of students while Bok read Green Eggs and Ham aloud. Bok spoke aloud with energy and enthusiasm, accenting words at odd times such as to break the rhythm of the meter. He broke from his recitation at points to ask the dancers questions, and as they all yelled their answers in cacophonous unison, he told them to “shut up!”. The dancers themselves lay on the ground, performing independently and entirely uncoordinated.

The performance felt spontaneous, unrehearsed, and highly chaotic. Nevertheless, it was an excellent demonstration of Bok’s philosophical premise: the notion that the universe is chaotic and beyond human understanding. He explained his philosophy through the lens of multiple disciplines, primarily quantum physics, Hinduism, and Dadaism—a strange, perhaps even contradictory set of disciplines.

Quantum physics and Dadaism cohere in that quantum physics suggests a level of unpredictability and incoherence intrinsic to life and the universe. According to Bok, humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe is still so limited that we have trouble even randomizing models for planetary movement.

Hence, our everyday life is full of unwanted unexpected events. Bok’s pataphysical response to the accidents or randomness of life is colored by the Hindu philosophy of mindfulness—living in the moment, seeing the unexpected as an opportunity rather than a problem.

Keeping this in mind helps made some sense of Bok’s nonsensical performance. Artistic performances are intended to be creative acts. Yet most performances are rehearsed, binding originality and individual expression in a very specific structure. This pataphysics-inspired performance give the performers the freedom to be unique and individual with their every movement—Bok’s breaks from the Seuss poem allow him to imprint a personal touch on a classic text.

Bok’s performance also forces the audience to re-learn how to watch an exhibition in the first place. Rehearsed performances not only limit how an artist can express themselves, they also force a set of conventions on how to appreciate art on the audience. When we’re confronted with a strange, avant-garde performance unlike anything we’ve ever seen, we don’t know how to react, how to understand what is going on. Instead of feeling confused or uncomfortable, perhaps we should go with the flow, appreciate that we’re doing something new.

Night before last, I took a friend out to watch the Oscar-nominated live action short films, which are playing as a set at the Michigan Theater. I tried to go in as a blank slate, because I figured short films differ from feature films in that their publicity isn’t part of the final product. The film has to be entirely self-contained. Because of my lack of preparation, there are a few pretty fundamental things that I discovered only in the theater:

The shorts are all foreign, though that’s not a requirement for the award, and only one and a half of them are in English. (I wonder why? Does America not support its short filmmakers as much as European countries? Are they just better at it?)

The shorts were intercut with a couple interviews about short films, which were fairly interesting. I enjoyed them because they talked a lot about a short film’s ability to be more focused and work on a single idea or sense or concept without being constrained by the myriad expectations that a feature film would have to meet, which I conjectured about in my preview for the event.

Some of the films deal with fairly heavy subject matter, and they’re not as light and fun as I had imagined going in and having heard people talk about the animated shorts. Except for the last short, which is one of the cutest things I’ve seen in a while.

So as far as audience recommendation goes, I would strongly recommend this screening for anybody interested in storytelling or filmmaking, as an art to be appreciated or a skill to be acquired and learned about. For someone looking to see something lighter, brighter or more lushly visual, the animated shorts might be more enjoyable.

There are five short films in all: a Danish film centering around the interaction between a male nurse and a patient at a children’s hospice; a slightly-science fiction-y English film following a prison psychologist’s interactions with a patient who thinks he’s God; a French film following a woman and her children trying to leave town to escape her abusive husband; a Spanish movie about a group of Spanish aid workers trying to kidnap child soldiers; and short, seven-minute, Finnish comedy in which a couple try to get ready for a friend’s wedding.

Although they are all good, the standout is the French short, which managed to create full, human characters, build and maintain incredible tension, and remain entirely realistic throughout. A lot of what makes it great, however, is something that’s shared by all of the shorts: their richness. With less than half an hour each to work with, the ideas in the films have to be presented in layers. No scene has only one thing going on. Camerawork, tension, story, character, message, meditation, and experiments with form are richly interwoven in each of these shorts, creating in each one something more deeply satisfying than many feature-length movies.

Here be spoilers.

The first short, Helium, is touching, and the most visually beautiful of the shorts. Perhaps it was shown first in order to immerse us, to bring us in and envelop us in its poignant but beautiful visual storytelling. In the short, a male nurse tells a patient, a young boy, at a children’s hospice of a place called “Helium” where he will soon be going. Whenever he sees the boy and continues the story, the camera begins to fly through the land of Helium, in a wordless exploration of visual storytelling that is beautiful, poignant and magical all at once. The complexity of the characters of the nurse and his supervisor are clear too, and, though the film is in Danish, the characters’ interactions are immediately recognizable as real and familiar. In fact, the film is so visual that one hardly notices the language at all.

The second, The Voorman Problem, I liked a lot. It stars Martin Freeman (Watson in Sherlock) as a psychologist working at a prison with an inmate who thinks he is God. It felt a lot like a short story to me, adapted into a film. Although, I found myself wanting to read the story. Freeman’s performance, and the performance of the inmate, Voorman, are great, although the warden’s acting is a little amateurish. It’s a cozy, twinkling little piece that’s elevated by its story.

Next, the French short, Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just before Losing Everything), is the short that stood out to me. Set in a beautiful French village, it begins with a young boy walking by the side of the road. We hides under a bridge and squats there, waiting and playing with some driftwood. Soon he hears a honking, and comes out to join his mother in the car. They pick up his sister, who is crying, and she drives them to the supermarket where she works. There is some commotion and confusion about why she has brought her children, but she tells them it’s important, and goes to tell her boss that she has to quit and that she’s leaving town.

Up to this point, we don’t explicitly know what’s going on. Maybe it’s more obvious, but to me it was still a mystery, and that’s one of the things that this short does very well. Tension. First, the tension of not knowing why she is scared, or what she is running from. Even more subtly, very little conventional explanation is given. Who is the boy in the beginning? Why is his mother picking him up? He’s calm and not scared, and yet there is no explanation. The subtle exposition that movies and television usually provide are absent, creating enigma and tension. It’s subtle, but it gets to you, the vague unknowing, and the tension is heightened when we see how scared the mother is in the store and the confusion of the other employees. It eventually transpires that she is running from her abusive husband, a truth that gets pieced together from ominous details. (Some of the reveals are heavy-handed, though. The boy telling the employees that his dad likes to hunt, and shout when he holds the rifle, even when he points it at his mother. The mother having to change in front of her coworkers revealing the bruises on her body.) Then the husband arrives at the store, his sinister presence evoking more dread and fear than most horror movies I’ve seen. Its relentless realism drives the tension and makes us feel the real helplessness and adrenaline in the mother’s heart.

Again, there’s too much going on in the film to talk about or even separate. The power from fear. The fear from tension. The tension from realism. The realism is another strength of the film. The boy playing with driftwood, the mother being stopped by a customer when she is in her uniform. The daughter and her boyfriend kissing. The calm, dead anger of the husband. Nothing feels fake, and it’s terrifying.

Penultimately, a Spanish film, “Aquel No Era Yo (That Wasn’t Me)”, about which my feelings are most mixed. It’s the most intense thing I’ve seen in a long time. A trio of aid workers arrive at a rebel camp somewhere on the African continent, where most of the soldiers are children. They are intimidated by the “general,” who uses them as practice for the soldiers to kill. It’s intense and scary and it grips you completely and doesn’t let go until the credits roll.

My mixed feelings come out of a frustration that every action, every word uttered by the rebels are perfectly crafted for us to hate them. Everything they do and are is evil, evil, evil. We’re supposed to hate them with every cell in our bodies. Which some people did, around me, growling and hissing almost involuntarily during the movie, joining the filmmaker in their hate. The entire film seems to come from a place of righteous anger. Their goal is to take the children out of this evil, evil place from these evil, evil men and back to Europe where they can be fixed and made better. This sort of cross-cultural hatred disturbs me. Is it true? Are the child soldiers and rebel groups so perfectly despicable in their every action? And is it unimportant that the only Africans we see are ones we (the filmmakers and us) are passionately hating together?

The writing, too, is occasionally awkward, veering once or twice into the cartoonish. I accepted that the rebel groups were speaking English, but their patterns of speech, I realized, were somewhat out of place. “Your parents are the president’s slaves. People whom nobody respected.” says the “general” to his soldiers. “You know a cripple won’t do for the revolution, ’cause the militarists will take them and use them to do black magic against us.” he shouts. “I want to fuck you” says another officer to the female lead several times, before a very graphic rape scene. I took issue with the rape scene. I felt as though it hadn’t been earned, that it was being used as a cheap way to hammer home the evilness of the rebels. And it was excessive, lasting a full minute, with their pelvises in frame moving horribly, the woman screaming at first and then seeming to leave her body, and a child with a rifle watching them righteously. It was gratuitous enough that even as they were trying to show the horror of rape, they appeared to be cheapening it.

Finally, the camp is invaded and all are killed except a few. One of them, the boy that killed both of the men in the beginning, is taken by the woman out of the camp. He has been a framing device up to this point, much older, telling his story in Spanish in an auditorium to a horrified yet rapt Spanish audience. Hence the title of the short, as he attempts to escape his past. The woman is now at a crossroads, asking the boy which path leads to the city. He refuses to tell her and threatens that she will be raped again when the soldiers find her, when she shouts at him, telling her how much she wishes she could kill him instead of take him back to Spain and forgive him of his sins. “You’ll go to school, you bastard!” Finally, she shoots him in the leg so that he will be useless to the rebels, and he tells her the way. Her acting is superb throughout. I had to remind myself several times that she was acting in order to preserve my sanity. The pain and conflict in her mind as she decides to save the boy who killed her companions and then to shoot him in the leg are made real by her incredible power in the role. That, more than anything, stuck with me from the film.

The last short, Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?), is extra short. Seven minutes. It’s cute and nice and funny and heartwarming, and the perfect thing to let the audience breathe after the last one. in which a Finnish couple wake up late for a wedding and have to hurry up to get there in time. Wake the kids, get the present, get the kids dressed. A wonderful layer of comedy, which the film winkingly never draws attention to or mentions, is that the mother, always complaining and asking “Do I have to take care of everything?” has caused every single problem she runs into. They wake up late because she thinks the alarm clock is a phone, she can’t find the present because she has covered it with her shawl, and so on. It’s lovely and funny, and it almost certainly won’t win the Oscar, which is a shame. Because comedy is harder than it looks, and the short does it well.