Sunday, April 26, 2020

Revolve (1977)



A couple days ago Amy emailed to say that the Holt/Smithson Foundation is making some of its films and videos available between April 24-April 25, including Nancy Holt's Revolve (1977). Yesterday and the day before I watched Revolve and, as I had feared, was taken back to the cancer ward of my youth -- where I was given a decent chance at recovery, while the subject of Revolve, Dennis Wheeler, was not.

At 70 minutes, Revolve features an off-camera interviewer (Holt) and a seated Wheeler (behind his typewriter). There are as many as three cameras at work in this b&w production, two of which are operated by sisters Marian (Penner-Bancroft) and Susan (Penner-Wheeler), one from the side of Wheeler, the other from behind him. The third ("dead-on") camera feels unmanned.

I watched the video twice. The first time with an ever-growing sense of awe (I was familiar with Wheeler's life and work, first as the then-recently deceased uncle of my high school friend, Karen, later as the subject of a long poem by Tom Wayman, later still as the co-author of a film we were shown in Grade Seven called POTLATCH...a strict law bids us dance (1975), even later as the author of a penetrating essay on the work of Robert Smithson ...), the second time as a notetaker:

"so many inputs and outputs"

"black abyss that opens up and you have to comprehend your own death"

"live in the midst" (said more than once, proprioceptivity)

"we're so tied to wheels"

"the veins of the hospital, the veins of my body"

"it's not like being acted upon; you have to become an agent"

"cyclical"

"within the domain of his own life experience"

"image" therapy

become "porous"

There's more, some of it based on Wheeler's readings and what he gathered from them.

At one point Wheeler tells Holt how he returned to the Tibetan Book of the Dead after attempting it years earlier (when he found it more or less gobbledygook), only to come away from it this time with an understanding of its structure, its movements. Attention to structure is present in a lot of Wheeler's work, and indeed was the subject of his book Form and Structure in Recent Film (1972).

Had Wheeler read much Barthes or Foucault during his lifetime? I am sure he was aware of them. He knew so much, was so impressive in is thinking. Revolve has a lot to say, and says it well. I would recommend it to anyone nearing fearing hearing death. Experiencing this video has helped me to understand how I went so long without it.



1 comment:

  1. I'd like to see this film, I'd also like to learn more of Dennis. I have sparse memories of Dennis when I was a kid growing up across the street from the Wheelers on Edinburgh Street in North Burnaby. Dennis was a fair bit older and I was more familiar with his younger brother Russell - who was a few years older than me. I really liked Russell and would try to keep up to him and the other older kids - tagging along but never quite keeping up. We lived about 6 or 8 city blocks west of the oil refinery.

    Another friend living a few houses east of the Wheelers was also diagnosed with cancer. He successfully beat it and is alive today. Just the other day he mentioned that getting cancer at such a young age - he was in his early 20's - utterly transformed his life. He was a brilliant young lawyer who quit the law business and travelled to India to study yoga and eastern philosophy.
    It's so sad reading about Dennis, such intelligence and promise. I can't help but wonder what might have been had he lived.

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