‘Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well.’

–Julian Green, Paris, 1983

It kept looking at me. This owl perched on the window still. It was night. And I was in my cot as a toddler looking back at it through the bars of the cot’s wall. Unless I am mistaken this is the first memory I have of my childhood in Wauchope in 1947. Was this Hegel’s owl paying me a visit to remind me that only at dusk time our visible world is perhaps knowable but to a few amongst us ? The owl’s orange piercing eyes were silently dilating just like the owl in the early scenes of Bladerunner. I can also recall hands (very fleetingly) approaching me – I suspect it was my father’s – to pick me up and reassure me that our nocturnal visitor was quite harmless. Ten years later, I witnessed the catastrophic spectacle of my mother receiving the news by telephone that my father had passed away from leukaemia. My poor mother ran screaming hysterically onto the road outside our Tempe milk bar and collapsed into a heap reminiscent of Andre Masson’s calligraphic ink soldiers massacring each other. So much for my Wellesian two-bob Freudianism!

For after all, it was only an owl and in Greek (characteristically) it signified a pun: yes, besides being a symbol for wisdom, the Greek word for owl, also meant a dope. A boofhead. How can this be so? Ah, welcome to my lifeworld as an artist and a scholar: double-binds academic, cultural, existential and linguistic – have been plentiful throughout my life. Being a diasporic being 24/7 is like being caught in a turnstile door, engaged in what Hugh Kenner once described Buster Keaton’s oeuvre, as an ‘art of sinking.’ Or, if you prefer whilst we are talking of Keaton, let us cite here Robert Benayoun’s wonderful description of old stone face himself as ‘a Columbus sailing for Prague.’ You get the picture. Whether it is the academy – or for what passes for one in this country – or the art world – or for both, for insomniacs like me, it is a zero-sum game all round. You just can’t have your cake and eat it too. You just keep on sinking, never arriving, doing what you must do and hoping that you are making some kind of sense to yourself and others of this one shared turning world of ours.

Stop whingeing you might say, but believe me stuck inside that confounded turnstile of life, you start to having a fascination for the doomed figures of film noir – soul mates, to be sure, waiting for the dawn to arrive in Los Angeles, that city in our popular cultural imaginary that W. H. Auden once called ‘the great wrong place.’ Over the years you learn to live with insomnia. What else can you do? And as someone who incessantly reads, writes and produces images, your insomnia is of a particular kind: it is the kind that Maurice Blanchot speaks of, an insomnia, during the day as well as the night. You are forever awake, like life’s ebbing nocturnal tide. Life x-rayed. Insomnia as ‘percussive stillness’ (Blanchot).

I suspect my insomnia emanated from my unbridled cinephilia in the sixties and early seventies. And spending the wee hours as a fringe Push character seated in the crammed Caligaresque decor of the Piccolo coffee shop at Kings Cross. A locale worthy of a German Expressionist painting or play with a cast of unlikely characters – writers, artists, filmmakers, hustlers, blue and white collar workers, etc., sipping their coffees, talking about art, cinema, literature, philosophy and politics, smoking, playing chess and backgammon. With a jukebox to keep us company. And true to what certain philosophers have said of insomnia one’s consciousness would be stripped bare – 24/7 – by oneself. Disembodied, disinterested thought inescapably suggesting an ‘impossibility of hiding in
oneself.’(Emmanuel Levinas). It represents for this philosopher an unabated vigilance for the injustice and horror of the world. Insomnia, for Friedrich Nietzsche, was to be welcomed as ‘wakefulness itself.’ How many of us sail through life as one of Herman Broch’s ’sleepwalkers’. Dead to ourselves and to the world itself.

Whatever the city one finds oneself in – Paris, Sydney, New York or whatever – as insomniac one has their acute lucid moments as well as their weary exhausted ones. That is guaranteed. Melancholia will seep into your life as a constant companion. Depression too. That too is a certainty. And your body will start groaning, coming apart, coming to a stop fitting of Samuel Beckett’s characters. Also, insomnia breeds self-grandeur, so I am told. (Whew that was close!)

And like Emil Cioran you too, as insomniac, may vouch for walking ‘the streets like some kind of phantom. All that I have written much later has been worked out during those nights.’ It is strange, that for me and several of my Push friends, we use to kiddingly describe ourselves after the famous comic book character, that how we saw the world then as spectral figures negotiating our unfilled emancipation in the sixties. Not that things are radically different these days. The insomnia is still with me but now, as Jonathan Crary as argued in his new sharp nuanced polemic 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013),  with the ever-encompassing digital world of ours I have the unmistakable feeling that there are more of us now than before who are tossing and turning in our beds.

John Conomos, July 2013

On the walls of Shipwreck, neon lights spell out quotes: Eva Hesse’s claim that ‘Life doesn’t last; art
doesn’t last’, and John Giorno’s statement, ‘life is a killer’. In both quotes there is not just a reflection on existential dilemmas, but a provision made for hope: life ends, and art dies, but mortality is always the condition for life, and so for the further generation of art. Hesse’s quote ties art and life together: both are directed towards death.

Which is a critique of global capitalism, international container shipping, modernity and the sea as ‘the forgotten space’. My video is a personal reflective performance video that addresses these issues in terms of my own ancestral roots as a post-colonial Australian subject that can be traced back to the Greek island of Kythera in the context of the Mediterrean Sea, hybridity, modernity, memory, space and time. The video features a voiceover that delineates these issues from a subjective point-of-view and in the light of the complex criss-crossing histories, contexts, cross-cultural shipping and trading that has marked the Mediterrean Sea since its first historical accounts of representation.

Credits:

• Written and directed: John Conomos
• Cinematography and editing: Josh Raymond
• Camera assistant: Joshua Heath
• Grips: Robin Hearfield
• Runner: Mitchell Sloan
• Location: Petersham Park, Sydney.

Documentation of The Spiral of Time exhibition at The Australian Centre for Photograph, 2013.

Credits:

Cinematographer: Josh Raymond
Camera Assistant: Joshua Heath
Grips: Robin Hearfield and Quinn Cretney-Ross

Miro On the Beach also features a voiceover where not only is Astruc’s authorial model of cinema discussed but the artist’s post-war Greek Australian migrant background and the overall importance of his exilic imagination since his childhood in a milk-bar in Tempe in the 1950s. It is a video that embodies essential questions of post-colonialism, migrancy, Western representation, spectatorship, memory, space and time. Again, like in the video The Absent Sea, the artist is delineating in Miro On the Beach the intricate links between art, cinema, (post) modernism, the sea, late-capitalism, and the historical avant-garde.

Credits:

Cinematographer: Josh Raymond
Crane operator: Alex Morrison
Camera Assistant: Joshua Heath
Grips: Robin Hearfield and Quinn Cretney-Ross

This is a performance/’trance’ video with the artist walking through a park underneath a row of palm trees. As he is walking  rays of electricity emanate from his eyes and a number of quotes appear across his body. These quotes  concern the modern role of the artist in society, the body, the passing of time, cultural amnesia, space, memory and spectatorship. The quotes emanate from such filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jean Cocteau, and Orson Welles, critics and philosophers like Roland Barthes. E.M.Cioran, and Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.

The video is a distillation of many of the themes, motifs and concerns that characterise the artist’s oeuvre in general. And in particular, it is autobiographically inflected like his prize winning video of 1997 Autumn Song.

Credits

• Written and directed: John Conomos
• Video: Virginia Hilyard
• Editing and post-production: Greg Ferris

The film’s subjective voice-over delineates the filmmaker’s relationship to his mother.  In sum, The Girl From the Sea was influenced by Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1982), Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972) and Rainer Weiner Fassbinder’s encounter with his own mother in the anthology film Germany in Autumn (1978).

Credits

• Written and directed: John Conomos
• Project manager: Virginia Hilyard
• Post-production: Josh Raymond
• Cinematography: Simon Bare and Virginia Hilyard
• Editing: Simon Bare
• Sound: Saun Hay
• Scanning: Isabel Markus Dunworth

The Nocturnal Bench is a meditative essay performance video that was primarily inspired by Bill Brandt’s  post-black and white photography and American film noir. In particular, Brandt’s photograph of the writer Elias Canetti sitting on a park bench at Hampstead Heath has haunted me for years. The video was also inspired by Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton as well. For an installation version of the video as such, it consists of the video itself and three large digital black and white photographs of me sitting at the edge of the bench performing certain gestures emblematic of Beckett and Keaton. The Nocturnal Bench was part of my video contribution to ‘Etudes for the 21 Century’, Robert Cahen and Kingsley Ng, Osage Gallery and Osage Foundation, Hong Kong, 28 November–28 December 2013. The exhibition was the inaugural exhibition for the gallery itself.

It was shot with a Red Epic Camera. Credits: Cinematography, Josh Raymond; Camera assistant, Joshua Heath; Grips, Robin Heartfield; Runner, Mitchell Sloan. Location: Petersham Park, Sydney.

(listen to one-minute excerpt on SoundCloud)

French film-maker, Robert Bresson died in December, 1999 at the age of 92. Although he left behind only twenty hours of screen time, Bresson created one of the most distinctive bodies of work in world cinema. An enigmatic, solitary presence who became a figure of awe and unquestioning reverence, Bresson influenced diverse cinema-world figures like Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Paul Schrader, Eric Rohmer and Aki Kaurismaki. 

Bresson believed in ‘cinematography’, a relentlessly precise expression of human life stripped of traditional cinema’s reliance on theatre, psychology, background music or realism as detailed in his only book, the aphoristic Notes on the Cinematographer (1975).

In this feature, writer and film-maker John Conomos essays Robert Bresson’s ‘magisterial cinema’ which had a profound impact on him as a young film-goer. Composer Robert Lloyd’s score evokes the subtle rhythms and use of space and silence in Bresson’s films.

Cinema of Solitude (as well as dismantling some of the myths surrounding Bresson) is a lyrical, personal tribute to an uncompromising and unique artist who embarked ‘on a voyage of discovery to an unknown planet’. 

Writer: John Conomos
Original music: Robert Lloyd
Readings by Chris Haywood, Susan Lyons and Vanessa Downing.
Sound engineer: Andrei Shabunov
Producer: Brent Clough  

This radiophonic essay/performance work was commissioned by the Features and Documentaries Unit of ABC Radio National, and first broadcast on Radio Eye, ABC Radio National. 

This work is made available for the purposes of critical review, private audition and educational use only, and may not to be sold, broadcast or made available for MP3 download without permission from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

© ABC Radio 2001
© John Conomos 2001.

This lyrical sound collage deals with the author’s ‘milk-bar childhood’ memories of 50s Sydney and of the Greek island of Kythera – whose inhabitants have travelled to Australia since the nineteenth century. It also evokes the island’s rich presence in art, literature and music and recalls a significant meeting between the author and his uncle, who never left Kythera but who has held a strong spell over him since his childhood. 

Writer: John Conomos
Performers: Anna Kypreos, Arky Michael, Doris Younan
Sound engineer: Steven Tilley
Producer: Matthew Leonard

This radiophonic essay/performance work was commissioned by the Features and Documentaries Unit of ABC Radio National, and first broadcast on Radio Eye, ABC Radio National.

This work is made available for the purposes of critical review, private audition and educational use only, and may not to be sold, broadcast or made available for MP3 download without permission from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

© ABC Radio 1999
© John Conomos 1999.

(listen to one-minute excerpt on SoundCloud)

The Bells of Toledo is a passionate cinephile’s idiosyncratic homage to the great Spanish film maker Luis Buñuel. Best known perhaps for his scathing, surrealistic satires of middle class mores in films such as ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’  and The Exterminating Angel, Buñuel was a savage critic of the Catholic Church and the military dictatorship in Spain, and his subjects ranged from urban poverty to sexual fantasy. His career spanned fifty years years, and began with a shocking ‘bang’ – the avant garde short film he made with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou (1929), infamous for its image of a woman’s eye being sliced open with a razor blade and well known to every student of film.

In The Bells Toledo, Australian artist and film academic John Conomos sends a fan’s love letter to a film maker who has kept him spellbound in the front stalls for more than forty years.

Writer: John Conomos
Performers: Virginia Baxter, Ruben Fernandez; William Zappa
Sound engineer/technical producer: Russell Stapleton
Producer: Tony MacGregor

The Bells of Toledo was commissioned by the Features and Documentaries Unit of ABC Radio National, and will be broadcast on Radio Eye, ABC Radio National.  Saturday, 4 October 2008. Listen to the programme here.

© ABC Radio 2008
© John Conomos 2008.