Voyage to the Center of the Phone Lines

Video by Michel Auder.

Shot on his phone in 2016, Michel Auder’s latest work delves into stasis and acceleration at the same time: a compressed pack of digital memories indiscriminately flickering across the screen in rapid succession, separated by glimpses of nothingness.

Narcolepsy includes footage shot with a small hand-held digital video camera, mobile phones and underwater devices. The videos appear on one monitor at a time, as the rest remain blank. A transparent rabbit in bed is superimposed on a dog in the snow; hands being washed under a faucet are juxtaposed with an outdoor flood; little girls play with dolls and mothers tend real babies; a spider web holds a captive fly.

In 1970 Valerie Solanas was released from a mental institution, two
years after shooting Warhol. Still unstable, she moved into the
Chelsea Hotel where she penned a death threat to Michel Auder and his
wife Viva. Using a soundtrack by Wagner, Auder surveys the handwritten
evidence of Solanas's threat, before reciting its threatening prose
melodramatically.

The Chronicles capture the natural and cultural beauty of Morocco from its ancient walled villages to its nomadic caravans. Music comes from everywhere. Edited almost thirty years apart, the two Chronicles together are a study in Auder's approach to his memories. The footage is all from the same trip that was a family vacation. Considering Chronicles/Morocco, 1971 a construct of emotional convenience unfaithful to memory, Auder decided to supplement the first version with a fuller account. The two works feature almost entirely different footage. There are, however, sections where one can see where Auder has omitted Viva. The star of the 1971 version is a young Moroccan Adonis who appoints himself tour-guide for a group of Europeans including Michel. The camera follows his charming antics as he flaunts his nubile body and rather blunt but effective skills as a hunter.

Warhol Superstars Viva and Louis Waldon are the main subjects of Auder’s first film with synched sound, Keeping Busy (1969), which was billed as “a film novel about what they did to keep busy.”

The thrill of cocaine becomes a metaphor for the consumption of images in this short montage. The title and lyrics come from Auder´s friend and 2001 Prix Goncourt winner Jean-Jacques Shuhl. The piece is composed entirely of still photographs from a variety of books and magazines that simultaneously reveal and feed an addiction to spectacle. With a source that is once removed, Auder's scopophilia is symptomatic of society at large. The song is performed by legendary chanteuse Ingrid Caven. Suffused with a bittersweet melancholy, Canven's seasoned voice compliments Auder's selection of images which dwell on the themes of death, destruction and desire. The melody is classic cabaret performed by a piano/violin duo who dramatically heighten the works already dark eroticism.

The Course of Empire is inspired by the eponymous series of paintings created by Thomas Cole from 1833 to 1836. A 'text film,' constructed from iPhone images of writings by James Baldwin, Donna J. Haraway, and Arthur Rimbaud, it also features excerpts from Alexander von Humboldt’s slave-trade opus Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804.

In Michel Auder's short video Talking Head, a young girl (presumably his daughter) is occupied with a plastic toy-package of some sort. She talks incessantly about 'a nothing-nothing'; 'a thing that never came back again…. everyone was mad about it and sad about it…but nothing ever happened'. Michel Auder, hiding behind a Yucca (or some such exotic plant), films the girl telling this story. She develops her 'story' circumventing and encompassing this nothing-thing, and she does it in a hypnotizing and repetitive way, like a mantra, using all the permutations possible with a minimum amount of words or facts.