Charade
Television's over. Networks are down. The radio is silent. All files erased. Imagine every book, film, play or song is about to be destroyed. What would you save?
A Commission for BBC & Arts Council England 2005. Produced in Birmingham by Kaye Winwood & Alli Beddoe. Also at ICA, London 2007 – original website here. Paper presented to CHART conference, Tate Britain, UK. 2006
Join a network attempting to commit our archived media to memory. Subscribe to the newsfeed and be first to hear about gatherings at locations in central London and our Live Event in Trafalgar Square.
Referencing the final scene of Francois Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451, Charade imagines a future where our most treasured items from the media are under threat of destruction. When forced to rely on our own memories and bodies for storage and retrieval, how would our relationship to these artifacts change? What new forms of ownership and distribution might emerge?
Volunteers attempt to memorize a chosen piece of music, film, tv programme, play or book; through a process of walking, memorizing, remembering and reciting, they each attempt to 'become' their favourite media asset; over a period of one month they meet at ad hoc gatherings at locations in central London; at a large-scale public event in Trafalgar Square all volunteers congregate to recite their chosen piece while wandering together, en masse – a re-creation of the final scenes of Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451.
Originally commissioned as part of the BBC & Arts Council England's Private View in 2006, Charade is a supported in London by the ICA.
From Press Release, 2005: CHARADE: The peer-to-peer distribution of media assets into the public-at-large
"Simon Pope presents a critical reflection on CHARADE – a large-scale, distributed, participatory artwork, commissioned by the BBC and Arts Council England and recently produced for the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Issues to be explored include CHARADE's relationship to current broadcast media strategies, interaction with audience and the sharing, ownership and distribution of media assets within peer-to-peer cultures.
Charade itself draws on the final scene of François Truffaut's film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where figures read to themselves as they walk, deep in concentration, intent on committing to memory key texts from the literary canon. Threatened by a screen-based culture, intent on the destruction of written forms of knowledge, literature takes flight – read, memorized, remembered- walked into the body.
Rather than providing stable conditions for the storage and retrieval of knowledge, our computer networks become troubled, precarious: the fear - of data-corruption, of system-crash, of network-infiltration - forces data to take flight, out of electronic systems, back towards the body. Volunteers becoming a living embodiment of the network's media assets."
Participants in Victoria Square, Birmingham, 2005
Artist's improvisation at Constant VZW's V/J9, Brussels 2006
I’d like to start by describing another place.
A place I can remember, and that I remember through a particular film. And it’s really similar to this actually, looking around this is a really good place and a really good time of year to be doing this particular presen- tation.
The view that we see: it’s snowy,snow driving from the left to the right of the image that I am imagining.
In the distance there are trees, they are closer than the trees that we see here today.
In the middle distance we see a dense woodland, covered in snow. And from out of these trees we see an old man in a long overcoat, he’s huddled he looks cold and he seems to be talking to himself.
He’s walking away from the camera.
Very soon another old man of a similar age and stature seems to come out of the trees.
We don’t see exactly where he comes from, he’s coming out of the snow and he’s walking towards us and he seems to be reading a book and he’s also speaking aloud and so from that point we kind of get the idea
that the guy walking away was also maybe not just talking to himself
but was reciting something in someway.
Maybe going through the same process as the guy walking towards us now.
And then someone I recognize as Julie Christie walks towards me.
She looks different then the press photographs I have seen of her.
She has very short hair, we know films from the mid nineteen sixties, well she looks like a librarian from the mid nineteen sixties.
Very prim and proper with an overcoat and she is speaking French as she walks towards me.
She is coming out of this image.
The camera stops paying attention to the woodland and suddenly starts to pay attention to her.
As she moves to our left, the focus is pulled and we start to see her fill more of the screen.
We see her top half, she’s wearing pink and orange shoes, I can not really describe the patterns or anything of the clothing she’s wearing.
She walks across to the left, the camera pans with her.
And then a guy called Guy Montag who is Oscar Verner, a German actor who in this case speaks English and French in this movie that I am remembering.
He walks suddenly from the left to the right, but because the focus is pulled
he seems to appear and disappear really quickly across the frame.
Our attention is still with Julie Christie, camera pans and now we’re look- ing kind of ninety degrees I guess, looking out across a lake.
The snow now, in stead of blowing left to right is blowing towards us, so it appears to be coming straight down.
There’s a fog across the lake and there are beech trees receding into the fog.
And then across us there’s more then just Julie Christie walking.
This guy, Guy Montag, Oscar Werner, he meets her.
He is dressed all in black.
And he meets her reading a book, speaking English while she is speaking French without reading and they walk together.
The focus pulls and again we get a wide view and we see there’s more then the two of them walking from left to right and right to left before us. They are all talking to themselves.
They are all either reading or they are hunched and dressed against the cold as they walk.
Then it appears to be the end of the film.
And actually my dvd copy suddenly jumps, the ratio of the movie jumps, so it goes from widescreen to fullscreen I think, and it says: The End. Filmed at Pinewood studio’s, I forgot the name of the production com- pany, and that’s all it says.
And there’s dramatic music, the score has been written especially for the movie.
It sounds like a Hitchcock film, it is written by the guy who was Hitchcock’s personal composer for a number of years and was sacked the year before. François Truffaut who’s film this is, employed him to write a similarly romantic score full of suspense, and we are left in suspense as this music doesn’t resolve itself in any way.
It just stops at the end of the movie.
EARLY DEVELOPMENTS
This work came from rehearsing the "recall" of the first paragraphs of Ray Bradbury's book, Fahrenheit 451. I made audio-recordings immediately after walking around the block – in Cardiff, where I was living at the time – of my attempts to remember and recite the text from the novel.
With the support of Arts Council England & BBC