Seminal is a term almost exhausted by overuse. Cabaret
Voltaire was a seminal group. The Cabaret Voltaire inaugurated
Dadaism in the back room of a Zurich tavern 1916, the
owner agreeing to its use in order to increase the sale
of beer, sausages and sandwiches. The entertainment
included music, dance, manifestos, theory, poems, pictures,
masks and costumes by the likes of Hugo Ball and Hans
Arp. Dadaism’s anti-art stance sought to mirror
the confusion wrought by the First World War’s
senseless slaughter.
More than five decades later, Stephen Mallinder, Richard
H. Kirk and Chris Watson formed Cabaret Voltaire
in Sheffield. They were horrified and mesmerised by
the power of the ever-expanding media, fascinated by
the control it exercised and in response they developed
strategies aimed at loosening its grip. Their audiovisual
output should be seen as a meditative protest that connects
directly to the cutup techniques first explored by the
Dadaist Tristan Tzara and later developed by William
Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Cabaret Voltaire simultaneously
enacted and interrogated the corruptive power of the
media. An essential part of that aesthetic was the act
of sampling, both sonically using Chris Watson’s
tapes and visually in the form of edits from broadcast
media, ‘B’ movies, etc... alongside the
sampling, deconstruction and rearrangement of the group’s
own images. In so doing they critiqued afresh the relentless
jumpcut bombast of current broadcast media experienced
by David Bowie’s alien in The Man Who Fell
To Earth.
The liner notes state that “The audio and visual
quality of this programme may be of a slightly lower
standard than is usual today.” The visuals are
indeed noisy, harsh, unforgiving, brutal, lo-fi verging
on no-fi. And how refreshing the experience is, its
very crudeness acting like an aesthetic sandpaper to
roughen the surface of the viewer’s sensibilities,
thereby increasing porousness and ultimately receptiveness.
A range of effects is deployed, including slow motion,
close-ups, light/dark and colour/monochrome contrast,
fast edits, unfocused footage and noise. These techniques
are applied to a wide range of subjects including World
War 2 V.E. day, fornicating monkeys, surgical operations,
a man slowly opening his eyes and holding the camera’s
gaze, oscilloscope close-ups, religious flagellation,
pornography, primitive computer graphics and so on.
The first track, Diskono repeatedly cuts blurred
images of a bridal wear shop window with deathcamp survivors,
a Red Square military parade and a bikini-clad sunbather.
These images are overlaid continuously with linocut-style
images of the group alternately staring fixedly ahead
and burying their heads as if in pain.
The concentrated impact of the media is acted out, revealed
and reconfigured within Cabaret Voltaire’s critical
armatures. All the while, throughout the 90 minutes
of this DVD, Cabaret Voltaire’s music exerts its
dark and nagging pull. Double Vision is a fascinating
document whose message is as urgent and relevant today
as it was on its release in 1982.
Colin Buttimer
4.5/5 |
