Wilson Twins Unveil 'Aryan Papers' Film Installation
Harry Bailey
Unfolding The Aryan Papers
http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2009/unfolding
Unfolding the Aryan Papers is as much about a film that never happened
as it is a portrait of the chosen lead actress Johanna ter Steege.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Duration17'30"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Credits
Directors Jane and Louise Wilson
Producer Pinky Ghundale
Director of Photography Alistair Cameron
Editor Reg Wrench
Actress Johanna ter Steege
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Artists' statement
Unfolding the Aryan Papers is as much about a film that never happened
as it is a portrait of the chosen lead actress Johanna ter Steege. It
begins with images of Johanna taken in 1993 by Stanley Kubrick - they
are of the wardrobe shoot for the film Aryan Papers. Johanna was to
play the lead role of Tania, a compelling character. Tania is central
to the film: she is a Polish Jew trying to save herself and her family
from the Nazis.
When we visited the Kubrick Archive, we were intrigued to look at the
detailed research for a film that never made it into production. The
amount of research is overwhelming and it seems to have overwhelmed
Kubrick himself. The research left him very depressed and he abandoned
the project.
The work takes its title from Kubrick's film and, intercut between
stills of Johanna, are images from the archive of specific scenes
Kubrick wanted to recreate and images from the Ealing Studios Archive
of interiors, shot in 1939/40. The film moves into live action with
footage of Johanna filmed now, fifteen years later, where she appears
to come to life, recreating stills from the original wardrobe shoot.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Technical information
Filmed on 16mm and transferred to HDCam. Live action footage edited
with stills scanned from The Stanley Kubrick Archives.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jane & Louise Wilson and Stanley Kubrick at BFI Southbank
Jane and Louise Wilson don't want the fact that they are twins as well
as artistic collaborators to distract from their new work about
Stanley Kubrick
Kevin Maher
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5677553.ece
Jane Wilson, one half of the 41-year-old twin sister art phenomenon
known as the Wilson Sisters, sinks her head into her hands and groans.
“Oh no! The twin theme!” Her sibling, Louise, the dirty blonde to
Jane's brunette, sighs, “Here we go!” The pair, Newcastle-born and
Hackney-based, are resistant, it seems, to the “twin thing”. Turner
Prize nominees and creators of ambitious art installations (their most
famous, Stasi City, was filmed entirely in the eerie former Stasi
headquarters in Berlin), they will later say that the twin obsession
ultimately distracts from the work itself. “It has about five minutes
of interest, doesn't it?”Louise says.
And yet, in their cavernous East London studio, and in the opening
minute of conversation, they bring it up themselves. “Kubrick worked
with twins,” Jane offers cheerily, by way of introduction, describing
the late great film director Stanley Kubrick's first movie, Day of the
Fight, a 1951 documentary short that featured the Irish- American
boxing twins Walter and Vincent Cartier. The creepy twin girls in
Kubrick's The Shining, Lisa and Louise Burns, also get a mention, but,
Jane adds, “they didn't get very extensive roles, did they?”
Kubrick is at the forefront of conversation because the sisters are
halfway through their latest installation, an exploration of the
director's unfinished passion project, a 1993 Holocaust-themed drama
called The Aryan Papers. The movie had been in development since 1976,
and eventually emerged into preproduction in 1993 as an adaptation of
Louise Begley's Wartime Lies, about a Jewish woman and her nephew
pretending to be Roman Catholic to escape persecution. Julia Roberts
had been circling the lead role, but Kubrick chose the Dutch actress
Johanna ter Steege (The Vanishing) and began scouting locations in the
Czech Republic. However, Schindler's List was released that year, to
critical and commercial acclaim, and Kubrick subsequently abandoned
his film, fearing that there wasn't enough cultural space for two
prominent Holocaust movies.
The Wilsons' work, entitled Unfolding the Aryan Papers (a joint
commission from Animate Projects, funded by the BFI and the Channel 4)
began as ten days of immersion in the Kubrick archives in South
London. The sisters could have chosen any Kubrick movie for
inspiration, but The Aryan Papers grabbed them from the start. “There
was something unique about it, which made it stick out,” Louise says.
“It was the closest that any of his films would have come to being
slightly biographical, in the sense that he had family from Eastern
Europe who were lost in the Holocaust.” “Plus,” Jane adds, “it became
obvious that this was an amazing role for a female lead to take on -
he didn't actually do that in any of his other films.”
Related Links
The finest art you'll hear
The charming enigma of Kubrick
Kubrick's lost Napoleonic work
After painstakingly sifting through the material (“Ten years of
research, rows and rows, 50 or 60 boxes!” Louise says), they began
constructing their own project - they interviewed ter Steege, filmed
her, re-created Kubrick's wardrobe tests, recorded voiceover lines,
and edited it all together with newsreel footage of Holocaust abuses.
The work-in-progress that they play here today on their ancient
television is fractured, dreamlike and appropriately disturbing (the
final BFI installation, complete with infinity mirror and top-notch
technical specs, they warn, will be even more affecting). They dismiss
any notion that they have succeeded where Kubrick failed, and instead
insist that their work is merely one of many potential approaches that
the film invites. “I hope it will give you a sense of the different
roles and identities, and of a movie in the process of ‘becoming',”
Jane offers.
Their dalliance with mainstream cinema, however, doesn't end with
Kubrick. The sisters, who began their careers by drawing at their
granny's Newcastle kitchen table, have been commissioned by Film Four
to write and direct a short feature, with a full-length movie possibly
not too far behind. Does this mean that after 15 years at the cutting
edge of the art world, creating tricky, non-linear, non-narrative
installations (exemplified by their busy 2003 multiscreen work A Free
and Anonymous Movement), the girls have finally, well, grown up? “No,”
Jane says. “It's not so much that we have grown up, but that we've
diversified.”
They say that they will not be branding themselves as the “twin movie
directors”, but that twinhood remains an issue. They play it down
whenever possible, and here claim that, despite nipping in and out of
each other's sentences with remarkable ease, their interpersonal
shorthand is nothing spectacular (“Any couple has that,” Louise says).
They admit, coyly, to being in separate relationships (Jane has a two-
year-old son), saying: “We're happily ensconced in our private lives -
but not together!”
It's in art that they are apparently inseparable: the sisters were the
only pupils at their school studying art A-level. They then attended
separate art schools, but for their final shows exhibited identical
work, featuring themselves apparently killing each other. They then
studied an MA together at Goldsmiths College in London. “We make light
of it,” Jane says. “But it's also a dedicated commitment. It's not
always straightforward, and not always easy.” “But the important
thing,” Louise adds, “is that we're still making work.” Jane nods, and
then, like a reflex, perhaps unconsciously, drops in the last word,
“Together.”
Jane & Louise Wilson and Stanley Kubrick: Unfolding the Aryan Papers
is at the Gallery at BFI Southbank, London SE1 (www.bfi.org.uk/
gallery), from Fri to April 26
-----------------------------------------------------------
Actress finally plays Kubrick role at gallery
Louise Jury
12.02.09
She was cheated out of her part in movie history when Stanley Kubrick
abandoned the film in which she was to star.
But Johanna ter Steege, 47, will be written back into the Kubrick
story when she attends the opening of an art installation tonight.
The Dutch actress spent months working with the American director on a
Holocaust drama in 1993. But when Steven Spielberg released
Schindler's List the same year, Kubrick ditched his film.
Now artist sisters, Jane and Louise Wilson, have trawled the Kubrick
archive to create an installation inspired by the unfinished movie,
Aryan Papers.
The artwork, called Unfolding The Aryan Papers, incorporates
photographs of the actress taken by Kubrick.
The installation can be seen at the BFI Southbank centre from tomorrow
until 26 April.
Padraig L Henry
pomo fashion show) to the Wilson twins' "Aryan Papers" installation:
When silence speaks loudest
Sue Hubbard
Published 26 February 2009
New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2009/02/aryan-papers-holocaust-kubrick
Can you treat the Holocaust as an appropriate subject for contemporary
art? Not if you use it to give weight to an otherwise thin idea
[Johanna ter Steege, filmed recalling her work with Stanley Kubrick
on the never-made Aryan Papers]
In 1976, the late film-maker Stanley Kubrick travelled to New York to
try to interest the Jewish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer in writing
an original screenplay for a project on which he was working, about
the Holocaust. Not a Holocaust survivor himself, Singer declined,
saying he did not know the first thing about it.
The project was shelved until Kubrick read Louis Begley's short novel
Wartime Lies, about a young Jewish boy and his aunt who manage to
escape from Poland by pretending to be Catholics. In 1993, Kubrick
made a deal with Warner Brothers to make a film called Aryan Papers (a
reference to the documentation required to fend off deportation to the
concentration camps). The film was developed and went into pre-
production. Sets were located, costumes were designed, and Julia
Roberts and Uma Thurman were considered for the main role of the aunt,
Tanya. Eventually Kubrick settled on the Dutch actress Johanna ter
Steege. Yet the film was never made.
Being of Jewish-European origin, Kubrick had been fascinated by the
Holocaust his whole life, but was extremely sceptical as to whether
any film could do it justice. When Frederic Raphael, who worked with
him on the script of Eyes Wide Shut, suggested the subject of Thomas
Keneally's Schindler's List, Kubrick's acerbic response was: "Think
that's about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn't it? The
Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler's List
is about 600 who don't. Anything else?"
Kubrick, like many Jewish thinkers and artists of his generation, had
a very real anxiety about how to represent the horror of mass
extermination artistically, echoing the German critic Theodor
Adorno's belief that to write poetry after the Holocaust was barbaric.
Kubrick, according to his widow, sank into a depression while working
on Aryan Papers. He also learned that Steven Spielberg had started
working on Schindler's List. He therefore shelved the project and
concentrated instead on Eyes Wide Shut.
Now the British duo of Jane and Louise Wilson, who were nominated for
the Turner Prize in 1999, have made a new work - Unfolding the Aryan
Papers - based on research they conducted during a residency at
University of the Arts London's Stanley Kubrick Archive. The Wilson
twins have worked together for more than 20 years on research-based
projects that have focused on, among other subjects, the dilapidated
former Stasi headquarters in Berlin, Greenham Common and, in their
"New Brutalists" exhibition, the murky waters of colonialism. Using
film, photography and sculpture, they have created theatrical and
atmospheric installations that investigate the darker side of human
experience.
This gallery installation concentrates on newly shot footage of
Johanna ter Steege and stills from period images of the Warsaw Ghetto
and other Holocaust images drawn from the pre-production period of
Aryan Papers. The film opens with a shot of the back of ter Steege's
blonde head. The voice-over relates her experience of working with
Kubrick, of how he made a point of observing the way she stood and her
gestures, especially those of her hands. She recounts how he seemed to
have something definite in mind and was looking for not just an
actress, but "a human being".
Shot in the faded 1930s grandeur of Hornsey Town Hall, with its marble
main staircase, brass banisters, heavy wooden panelling and deco glass
lamps, the Wilson twins' film concentrates on shots of ter Steege
standing in the empty corridors and offices of this rather austere
bureaucratic building, either in her petticoat or dressed in period
costume.
But what does the piece amount to, beyond the pleasure of the elegant
cinematography and watching an attractive older woman standing around
in some nice clothes in an interesting building? The Wilson twins say
that it is not really about the Holocaust, as they are "not qualified
to make a film about something so dark", but rather the story of a
woman and an actress, and the narrative of a film that was never made.
Yet there is something uncomfortable about this work, as if the
Holocaust could be reduced to a period backdrop against which to make
a piece of contemporary art. Although Kubrick's motivation for
dropping the original film is not completely clear, it is obvious that
he took the ethical problems concerning this historical subject very
seriously. Johanna ter Steege may have been resurrected from relative
obscurity by the project, but the ghosts of millions of women lost to
the gas chambers hover in the wings of the film, unacknowledged and
unseen.
Adorno worried that attempting to condense the incomprehensible
suffering of the Holocaust into a few lines of poetry would "violate
the inner incoherence of the event, casting it into a mould too
pleasing or too formal", and considered silence as the only
appropriate response to the tragedy. The Holocaust is one of the
darkest failings of the human imagination. In Unfolding the Aryan
Papers, a fairly thin idea is, with postmodern insouciance, given
gravitas by association, diminishing this livid stain on our history
to a stage set for a fashion show, and betraying those voiceless
dead.
"Unfolding the Aryan Papers" is at the BFI Southbank Gallery, London
SE1, until 26 April. Watch it online at http://www.animateprojects.org
On Feb 14, 11:11 pm, Harry Bailey <unhomedivis...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Now here's a little treat:
>
> Unfolding The Aryan Papers
>
> http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2009/unfolding
>
> Unfolding the Aryan Papers is as much about a film that never happened
> as it is a portrait of the chosen lead actress Johanna ter Steege.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Duration17'30"
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Credits
> Directors Jane and Louise Wilson
> Producer Pinky Ghundale
> Director of Photography Alistair Cameron
> Editor Reg Wrench
> Actress Johanna ter Steege
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Artists' statement
>
> Unfolding the Aryan Papers is as much about a film that never happened
> as it is a portrait of the chosen lead actress Johanna ter Steege. It
> begins with images of Johanna taken in 1993 by Stanley Kubrick - they
> are of the wardrobe shoot for the film Aryan Papers. Johanna was to
> play the lead role of Tania, a compelling character. Tania is central
> to the film: she is a Polish Jew trying to save herself and her family
> from the Nazis.
>
> When we visited the Kubrick Archive, we were intrigued to look at the
> detailed research for a film that never made it into production. The
> amount of research is overwhelming and it seems to have overwhelmed
> Kubrick himself. The research left him very depressed and he abandoned
> the project.
>
> The work takes its title from Kubrick's film and, intercut between
> stills of Johanna, are images from the archive of specific scenes
> Kubrick wanted to recreate and images from the Ealing Studios Archive
> of interiors, shot in 1939/40. The film moves into live action with
> footage of Johanna filmed now, fifteen years later, where she appears
> to come to life, recreating stills from the original wardrobe shoot.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Technical information
> Filmed on 16mm and transferred to HDCam. Live action footage edited
> with stills scanned from The Stanley Kubrick Archives.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Jane & Louise Wilson and Stanley Kubrick at BFI Southbank
>
> Jane and Louise Wilson don't want the fact that they are twins as well
> as artistic collaborators to distract from their new work about
> Stanley Kubrick
>
> Kevin Maherhttp://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/vis...
> http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23640112-details/Actre...
Cosmic Gnome
Fashion - Madame Death
Jane and Louise Wilson have long been a rule-proving exception in British
art, perhaps the only artists ever to have exhibited at a Saatchi show who
won't be assigned several years of re-education come the revolution. Their
work has always been full of the things excised by their contemporaries -
references to things outside art, explorations of the pleasures and terrors
of lived space, an aesthetic as opposed to a signature, an exploration of
history and other matter extraneous to the artistic ego. There is something
curious about the fact that, given how distinctive their aesthetic actually
is, it rarely actually gets talked about. The current work at the NFT (or
ahem 'BFI Southbank') is a case in point. Unfolding the Aryan Papers is
based on their work in Stanley Kubrick's voluminous archives, drawing from
an unfilmed project entitled The Aryan Papers, on a Jewish family which
poses as Catholic to escape the holocaust. Specifically, it draws on the
wardrobe shots of the actress who was to play the lead. These shots, and
re-enactments of the shots, play on a screen flanked with mirrors, while the
actress reads excerpts and talks about her role in the unfinished film,
briefly interspersed with production photographs, which veer from famous
images of the Warsaw Ghetto to more snapshots of clothes and haircuts.
The work's self-presentation in interviews and blurbs centres on these
complex stories, and their historical complications and resonances
(occasionally combined with the homily that the original film was stopped
because of its attempt to 'represent the unrepresentable'). There isn't
much, though, about what you actually see in the work. In the sections
filmed by the Wilson twins that dominate the film, what you see is a blonde
woman with her hair in a bun, in a variety of 1940s outfits - dresses, fur
coats, wide black trousers, seamed stockings, high heels - walking around
Hornsey Town Hall. As a purely aesthetic work it's coldly intriguing, slow,
stately, with a heavily erotic undercurrent. In the same issue of Sight and
Sound linked above, a long article wondered why Kubrick's films were so
'unsexy', as if the absence of heat, warmth and earthiness somehow stripped
them of any sexual affect. Unfolding the Aryan Papers is, like Kubrick
himself, acutely aware of Benjamin's 'sex appeal of the inorganic', and the
shots of stockinged legs walking up Hornsey's steps are lingering,
obsessive. Both the clothes and the building seem to suggest a fundamentally
aestheticised notion of the past, and especially of the 1940s. The artists
mention that the town hall 'looked not dissimilar to the production stills
on the costume shoot', but this seems highly disingenuous, looking at the
rustic wooden door that acts as backdrop to the original photographs.
Hornsey is a very astute choice, from a visual if not archival point of
view. If it had been filmed in an international style building of the same
era, the temporality would have be wrong - these are buildings which
frequently look like they were made yesterday, which is certainly not the
case with Hornsey Town Hall's muted, sober Dudokisms, its brick, lacquered
wood and austere palette of browns and darkened yellows, all of which
immediately evoke the mustiness of rationing and municipal politics rather
than the Meditteranean futurism of CIAM Modernism. Now abandoned and empty,
the space as used here verges on austerity nostalgia, albeit with the era's
strangeness and otherness emphasised rather than reduced to commentary on
our consumer choices. The clothes, too, are meticulously and intriguingly
chosen, and the work could easily be taken as a 17-minute film about vintage
dresses, with the succession of outfits having a sharply austere glamour. On
the soundtrack, there is talk about the unfinished, the fragmentary and the
unrepresentable, but this is all basically non-diegetic, and doesn't act as
any kind of commentary on what we see. What is actually on screen is
intensely polished and cinematic, only wrenched out of any context - a shot
of a hand brushing a handrail is invested with an emotional and aesthetic
significance which refers to nothing much. To accuse the project of 'using
the holocaust as a stage set for a fashion show' is blunt, but at least
recognises that in all the material corralled together into the film, the
actual historical event which Kubrick wanted to try and make a film around
(not about) is demoted, unimportant. The documentary images of the Warsaw
Ghetto are more to do with Kubrick's archives than the events themselves.
More, this is a fashion show about Kubrick, and about a particular idea of a
bureaucratic, sinister and coldly glamorous 1940s, rather than about the
unmade film's original subject matter.