For the multidisciplinary artist Meredith Monk, there has always been a strong visual component to her understanding of music. The artist credits this longtime association to a Dalcroze eurythmics program she was enrolled in by her mother when she was a child as a potential cure for her strabismus. The program, which integrates music with movement, is why Monk, in her own words, “see[s] music visually,” and has continued to explore and express this throughout her career. The 82-year-old artist, who considers the term “avant-garde” too alienating to describe what she intends with her work, has released multiple recordings featuring abstract vocalizations, as well as haunting minimalist compositions and accompaniment, through the pioneering German record label ECM, but her small yet highly impactful output for the screen is key (pun intended) to a full appreciation of her synesthetic work.
Anthology Film Archives is offering an opportunity to experience the fullness of Monk’s vision with the “Meredith Monk” film retrospective from December 3 to 5. Filmed performances and recent video-work will be shown alongside Monk’s films, including work made for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, an institution the artist has a longstanding relationship with. While filmed performances, such as Quarry (1977), are a rare treat, the artist’s films are worth special attention. Monk’s two most notable films, the feature-length Book of Days (1988, pictured at top) and the short film Ellis Island (1981), are hypnotic visual compositions that use precise combinations and calculated discontinuities of sound-and-image to gracefully choreograph what we see (or don’t see) and hear (or don’t hear). In her music and performance, Monk’s voice is continually bringing us back to what is—the body and the sounds it can produce—but her filmmaking opens up another dimension for the artist where past and present, sound and silence, color and its absence more explicitly mingle in a steady rhythmic trade-off of point and counterpoint.
Book of Days begins with a brick wall blown to bits opening up a hole to another time. Like a reverse Wizard of Oz (1939), Monk’s film moves from color to black-and-white as the viewer is transported to a walled city during the middle ages. What follows is a collection of novel ideas and images that use cinematic tools to move beyond literal representation and narrative standards, as seen in the use of her time-traveling camera or her decision to feature herself in the film answering a series of questions with only the most subtle of facial gestures. Book of Days also includes performances of a medieval play, anachronisms such as a telephone placed between a series of medieval objects, graceful tracking-shots and unhurried pans where the slow-moving camera takes in objects and landscapes, and Edvard Munch (1974) style interviews with peasants. Despite the apparent autonomy of these engaging, yet somewhat disparate elements, a narrative emerges—the plague is on its way and there is a young girl who may have the ability to see the future.
In one of the film’s most compelling scenes, this young girl performs a call-and-response dance with a mute oracle played by Monk. The young girl attempts to follow Monk’s unpredictable yet assured movements, perhaps invoking the eurythmics of the artist’s childhood. She does not catch them all at first but mimics Monk’s gestures with her own uninitiated body. The mystic implications of the scene return at the film’s end when the young girl’s home is excavated hundreds of years later, revealing crude drawings of modern objects such as a plane. The scene is a clever and powerful dramatization of knowledge being passed from one generation to another; in this instance, arcane and misunderstood.
In Book of Days, Monk also pays specific attention to the place of Jews in the medieval European order. They maintain what appears to be their own small, separate society; however, they are still subject to a set of laws imposed from without that govern their behavior. As the plague descends upon them, they become easy scapegoats. Monk attempts to give a measured and realistic view of this reality, evoking Roberto Rosellini’s historical films, where a sensationalized, or overtly thesis-based representation of the past, is avoided in favor of a more diffuse and banal vision of well-known events. It’s an impressive achievement in a film that already offers so much on a formal and poetic level.
Monk explored the theme of outsiders in the earlier work, Ellis Island, which almost serves as a small-scale trial run for Book of Days. In the short film, past and present mingle again, as we see turn-of-the-century immigrants being processed at Ellis Island interspersed with a tour group in the present. The center of Monk’s film is a series of vignettes dramatizing the linguistic power struggle between the authorities and the new arrivals. We watch as a man’s surname is americanized through a long series of repetitions, changing from Ellessen Rahmsauer to Elie Ram to Eli Sheep to, finally, Eli Lamb. In the film’s most brilliant scene, a classroom of immigrants is being taught english. We see and hear as the teacher points to the blackboard and exaggeratedly enunciates English-language words. When we see her adult students though, their responses are muted. It is as if they cannot be heard in this new language, or perhaps more appropriately cannot express. Or maybe it is that they have been stripped of their own native tongues. The scene, and Monk’s precise formal choice, opens up a range of aching semantic possibilities.
Paris (1982) takes the wider lens of Ellis Island and focuses it on a couple played by Monk and Ping Chong, a celebrated director, choreographer, and performer in his own right, and Monk’s longtime collaborator. Directed by Ping Chong, the film is a composition by the artist in parts. In the balletic film, the two performers shuffle through a dilapidated industrial space like two sightseers in Paris. The frame, along with the building’s pillars, doorways, and walls become part-stage and part-framing device. Monk and Ping Chong move through the space with strange cadences and physical affectations, like broken toys set loose on a playroom floor. In one of the film’s most compelling set-ups, each performer is given a solo, but Monk’s approach troubles the very idea of the performer’s sovereignty. In Solo 1, Monk performs the movements but it is Ping Chong’s voice that provides the soundtrack, and vice versa for the portion titled Solo 2. The scene is simple in its brilliance and exhilarating in its audio-visual diaphony.
Turtle Dreams (1983) is perhaps the most esoteric of Monk’s films. Directed by Ping Chong from Monk’s 1983 album, it begins with a series of close-ups: eyes, a cigarette in an ashtray, a drink drained by a straw, and hands over a keyboard rubbing together in preparation for the piece to be played. Monk and her company of performers (The House) are dressed in black against a light pink background. In a rare moment of discernible speech, Monk lilts “I went to the store” in an operatic high note. From this commonplace statement, the rest of the piece devolves into abstraction. Bodies become graphic elements in rest as they’re placed on the floor in patterns and in motion as they perform side-by-side and in close-up. Interspersed with Monk and her fellow performers are images of a turtle, crawling across a map or slowly moving through a city miniature.
It is in Turtle Dreams, with its focus on choreography and vocal performance, that the viewer gets their most direct exposure to Monk’s phonetic system. It is one that includes primordial utterance and ululations that “bypasses language and aims directly at the senses,” according to the broadcaster Tom Huzienga. The film also captures Monk’s unique style of stuttering—halted movement where gestures repeat but don’t quite become dance. In the film, her work comes to life in all its radical idiosyncrasy, and while it's certainly surreal, it proves why the artist historically shirks the label of avant-garde. Although it may appear confounding on its surface, her work can be perceived, felt, and understood on the most direct human level. Her films, with their multiplied possibilities for expression, make this even more apparent and arresting.
Meredith Monk runs from December 3 - 5 at Anthology Film Archives.
