SUSAN HILLER, Matt's Gallery

Susan Hiller The Last Silent Movie 2007 (video still)

Courtesy the artist and Matt's Gallery, London

London - On the topic of materials and their ability to conflate time, Susan Hiller’s work, The Last Silent Movie (2007), is another instance of an artist’s subtle slight of hand. Recently screened at Matt’s Gallery, the work takes simple source materials to poetic ends.

Visitors are ushered into a projection room and invited by the gallery assistant to take a seat. Cued by the work’s title and the darkened little theatre, I got the feeling I was being set up to expect a cinematic experience only to have it thwarted. True enough, the work doesn’t offer any visuals or narrative per se. Instead text appears on screen, introducing the name of a language with the words “extinct” or “seriously endangered” beneath. A short audio clip of the dialect in question follows and subtitles stream across the screen to provide translation. Another name appears, again followed by an audio sample and subtitles. Following this pattern, Hiller weaves together snippets of folk tales, segments of interviews and a few repetitive language exercises for good measure—efforts by anthropologists and linguists to capture these ‘dying’ languages in perpetuity.

Without visuals to rely on, senses get mixed up. The crackling of obsolete recording equipment takes on more weight, and I felt as if I were watching for sounds. The passing of time felt almost physical. The rough voices of the elders and the tentative repetitions of the novice language students seem to scratch their way along history. They talk of losing the right to speak their native tongue, of how their voices have been hushed, misinterpreted, or done away with, yet the smooth fluency of their tongues elevates their speech and makes me anticipate the nostalgia they seemed to promise. (In one instance no translation of the language exists, so it becomes simply a beautiful, haunting melody.)

Even as outsiders, the audience is implicated. We are forced to read the text on screen to comprehend the sound, words that can never adequately translate the nuances and inflections of spoken language. Just as the text offers a point of entry, it becomes an imposter, a colonizing force. Just as the screen displays a way in, it provides evidence of what has been taken away.

The sparse nature of the work brings the complexity of language back into focus, assigning equal weight to its practicality, its sensual power and its political might. Our desire to experience what is being said directly—unmediated by text—transforms what might otherwise be a conceptual or academic exercise into a shared, physically felt experience of loss. In less capable hands, this work may have been conceived of as a sound work, kept as a sentimental, politically correct statement. Thankfully Hiller knows how to let material speak for itself.

Liz Bruchet