FILM
Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent is a filmic study of father figures and generational inheritance. A narrative libretto, sung by a chorus of classical busts, guides the viewer through a sequence of vignettes interweaving Mikhael Subotzky’s personal memories with those of his social and historical contexts in 21st century South Africa.
A wide array of historical images and photographs from the artist’s archive are translated into filmic motion by his Sticky-Tape Transfer collage technique, hand-painted stop-motion and digital animation. Alongside various live-action sequences, these strategies unpick the visual mechanisms with which patriarchy self-propagates as the myths of Enlightenment, the Dutch Golden Age and Fathers of the Nations are revealed as constructs inextricably tied to colonial conquest.
The film draws on several key images across its four chapters. In the first, Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632), is incised to spew forth colonial ships from The Dead Man’s Stomach. Concurrently, a photograph of Hermanus Van Wyk, an older man with whom Subotzky has maintained a friendship for nearly twenty years, is reimagined to explore this complex relationship and offer space for Hermanus to speak about his life and family history. His tale of migration, social alienation, incarceration and patriarchal violence provides a counterpoint to Subotzky’s story, across the gaping divide of class and race. Van Wyk’s bare-mattress life-raft is set adrift in painful memories of his childhood. It floats in the subterranean chambers of the animated photograph’s liquidising concrete before falling in with the lorries and buses on the arterial highways of 2020 as they travel together to the “Cape of Good Hope” with the colonial ships on the oceans of 1652.
Two portraits of Jan van Riebeeck, the first governor who established the Dutch colony in SouthAfrica in 1652, intermerge in the film’s second chapter, The Dutch Gangster, which links the constructs of 17th-century European thought with particularly charged historical moments in the colonisation of South Africa. A photograph Subotzky took of his father walking into the ocean during the early stages of Motor Neuron Disease (ALS) provides the ground for a painful conversation between father and son in the third chapter, George Fading. These narratives are recapitulated in the final Chorale, where Subotzky and Hermanus come together in a live-action denouement to build and ceremonially burn a match-stick ship at the feet of the statue of van Riebeeck, which still stands on the Cape Town foreshore.
Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent presents a complex expression of memory, myth and contested historical narratives. The sepsis of patriarchy is exposed in both the individual and social bodies as an invitation for the collective thought needed to break generational cycles of violence.
SCORE
Composer Jonathan M. Blair was commissioned to provide the original score for Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent. He recognised the narrative potential in an early text that Mikhael Subotzky had written and helped shape it into libretto form. Over almost three years, Subotzky and Blair met frequently to share ideas, visuals and music. These conversations cross-informed the animation, editing and composing work as the project built momentum.
Blair reflects on the process:
During the course of sketching out the composition, I took the content of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung and the formal expectations of Bach’s cantatas through a process of fragmentation and disconnection. I used transformations such as inversion, stacking, and stratification to find a harmonic language for the project. While particular moments in “Chaos” from Die Schöpfung are quoted recognisably, the opening sequence places the ordering of that ‘chaos’ into ‘disorder.’
The form of the ocean became integral to the musical design. Mikhael and I spoke around Da Vinci’s troubled sketches of fountain water and the historical difficulty that artists found with representing the undulating movements seen from the top of the water’s surface. This led to various stylised motions which reflected the oceanic themes surrounding the Cape, while bowed and scraped percussion and ‘sticky mallets’ were used to mimic the sounds of ocean life: whale calls, crashing tides, and more.
As the piece moves forward from the 17th century to the 21st, the music evolves in reverse, with stratified sections of synthetic material moving closer to common practice tonality, culminating in a Bach-style chorale. Several electronic instruments were commissioned from New York artist Sam Irwin, alongside ones created by my mentor, Michael Norris. These are utilised to create textured meta-orchestrations of the voices and instruments.
Finally, physical sounds from the city of Cape Town are integrated and transformed to blend with the orchestration as musical devices that are not immediately recognisable. These become surface ‘tears’ in the musical fabric that mirror Mikhael’s Sticky-Tape Transfer technique. Similarly, the orchestration of the string parts creates a transparent sheen that audibly ‘drips’ around musical structures in a nod to Mikhael’s ‘moving paintings.’
Biographical information was drawn from conversations with Mikhael and embedded into the
musical forms. For example, Klezmer tunes burst into argument at the emphatic inclusion of ‘God’ in the text, and a reference to the traditional Pesach song Chad Gadya prefaces Mikhael’s conjoined herm-form conversation with his father.
With a cast of singers from Cape Town Opera, I conceived the vocalisation as fragmented aria-esque solos, choral sections, and multiple dialogues between voices. The vocal writing asked the singers to retain the inflection of their South African linguistic context while still carrying the musicality of the western canon. Each singer was recorded individually, and the melodic contours given to them imitate the scratches, slashes, swipes, and swirls of Subotzky’s animated transformations. Later, these begin to unify and blend as the piece moves towards its concluding Chorale. However, like the film’s narrative, the composition never resolves itself, a kind of musical polaroid that is never fully fixed.