Omer Fast, Nostalia III (2009)
It’s the last weekend for New Yorkers to check out Nostalgia, Omer Fast’s 3-part video installation, showing now at the Whitney.
I went a few Saturdays ago and was pleasantly shocked to find a line out the door. Because it was so crowded inside the gallery, it was impossible to watch the series as intended, starting with I and ending with III. Instead, I went to the very back of the gallery where the last portion, Nostalgia III, was playing in a dark room.
Still from Nostalgia I (2009)
Before I sat down, I asked the security guard if I had missed very much, and she said not to worry because it just started. After about ten minutes I began to have the feeling that the security guard had lied to me. I couldn’t follow what was happening at all. If I had come into the film at the beginning, I should have understood better than anyone what was going on, because that’s how films are supposed to be made, right? My mind scrambled to make sense of what I was seeing. Ok, two men, a woman, they are walking in a…tunnel, they find an old subway train, they wear dirty parkas, clean water seems…scarce, everything looks vaguely post-apocalyptish, then dogs, scary lights, attack, flower barf.
Interview Scene from Nostalgia III (2009)
After awhile the film began to repeat itself. The transition was so seamless, I almost didn’t notice the cut. Especially since the events leading up to the loop had seemed to follow some causality. A school principal had asked her janitor to recount his experience of traversing a secret underground route from England to Africa.
Think about this: a story is written on a roll of paper, a story that has a beginning and an end. You tape the two ends of the story together in a kind of mobius strip. Although this reads as one continuous narrative as you turn the strip of paper in your hands, there is nevertheless a definite juncture, an identifiable location where you taped the beginning and end of the story together.
At first, this is what I thought had happened. The film gave me every reason to feel like this had happened. One event led to the next event led to the next event in a hypnotic and deceiving manner. I had no idea where it began or ended, only that I experienced one full loop. After all, video in museums often “loop” to accommodate viewers who are coming in and out freely.
But as I kept watching, people began leaving in the middle of the film. They muttered to one another, “We already saw this, it’s repeating now.” And why not? After one consumes a narrative, isn’t the thing to do to leave? Don’t we stop walking when land ends?
Curious and apt, the content of Nostalgia III is about migration. Not emigration but migration. Set in a near-distant future, Nostalgia III tells the story of a band of white migrants caught working illegally in a prosperous African country. During the interrogation, the black female principal talks of “England” as if it were some war-torn, poverty-stricken land, with the same hint of condescension, disdain, and sympathy we can imagine England having for Africa.
It finally occurred to me, after many people had already left the room, that all of us made a cut in the narrative simply by sitting down to begin to watch. Wherever we entered the “narrative,” that’s where it started for us, and when that beginning began to repeat, that signaled to us that the narrative was over. The story didn’t make a lot of sense, but at least we got a sense of “how it went.”
This false illusion of narrative is I think what Fast is trying to make us question in Nostalgia III. It is not meant to be a traditional “film” by any means. It is meant to been seen in a loop. It is meant to make us question progression, causality, forward suspense, history. History, it seems, is nothing more than a subjective summary of chaotic, disparate events, which proceed without logic.
How have we “framed” history up until now? Where did we start and where do we perceive its end? Mike Krimper said in a previous article that the current culture of apocalypse is only due to the West’s awareness of its declining status on the world stage. We think, well, if the sun is setting on the West, it must be setting everywhere, right?
How will history be told in the future that the film depicts? How will the prosperous African country narrate its rise and fall? That is something we should all think about.
Additional: Watch Fast’s CNN Concatenated (2002)
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