Cyprien Gaillard, Nightlife, (Film still) 2015. 3D motion picture, DCI DCP 14:28 min. Copyright Cyprien Gaillard. Courtesy Sprueth Magers
Watching “Nightlife”, the latest film from the French artist Cyprien Gaillard, on a gigantic screen, surrounded by sound and equipped with 3D glasses, is a truly seductive experience.
The video opens with Rodin’s emblematic sculpture “The Thinker”. To be precise, it is a cast of the sculpture that stands in front of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The camera tracks slowly around the figure before flying away to wander through desolate urban landscapes inhabited only by an unusual plant life.
Indeed, the flora is oddly animated, moved by a powerful gust, as if dancing lasciviously under the coloured lights of a nightclub. The slow-motion swaying seems to respond to the heady chorus of Alton Ellis’ song, “Black Man’s Pride” (1969), which is sampled and looped throughout the video.
Rolling between Cleveland, Los Angeles and Berlin, the sequence series seems to document a nocturnal acid-trip ramble in hostile post-industrial cities. Driven by a rebellious will, the plant-life seems to try to flee the waste-ground of concrete gates, barbed wire and modernist architecture.
We could leave it here: a mesmerizing video developed through new technologies of immersion, very entertaining and simply beautiful. However, some patterns that emerge in the video suggest a more complex reading. Indeed, within this hallucinatory vision, the artist orchestrates a collection of symbols which work towards precise narratives and moments.
Cyprien Gaillard, Nightlife, (Film still) 2015. 3D motion picture, DCI DCP 14:28 min. Copyright Cyprien Gaillard. Courtesy Sprueth Magers
Outside of Alton Ellis’ refrain, the absence of text in “Nightlife” prevents us from immediately understanding the historical context that could allow us to shape a jumbled narrative.
As mentioned before, the video begins with Cleveland’s “The Thinker” statue, which was bombed in 1970 and remains in the same destroyed state today. This act of vandalism was claimed by ‘’Weather Underground’’, a 1970s activist group that demonstrated against U.S. government’s policy during the Vietnam war, and also wished to form a “white fighting force” to ally with Black Power.
During an aerial sequence of the video, the camera flits around fireworks launched above Berlin Olympiastadion; incandescent patterns echo the dancing palm trees seen in previous sequences. This massive architecture was built under Hitler for the occasion of the 1936 Olympic Games being held in the German capital.
During the competition, the Afro-American athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals, jeopardizing Nazi ideology for which the sporting event otherwise constituted astounding propaganda.
The Olympic committee gave each gold medal an oak sapling, an ancient symbol for Germany. It is one of the only known survivors of this tree, planted by Jesse Owens at Rhodes High School in Cleveland, which we see in the following sequence of the video. Surrounded by buildings, the huge oak is surprisingly inert, lit by the beams from a helicopter, mimicking a movie scene when the authorities search for a fugitive. Alton Ellis’ lyric, flipping between two opposites in different versions of the refrain: “I was born a winner / loser”, suddenly reveals its significance.
Cyprien Gaillard, Nightlife, (Film still) 2015. 3D motion picture, DCI DCP 14:28 min. Copyright Cyprien Gaillard. Courtesy Sprueth Magers
In this context, the frenetic dance of the plants in the filmed streets becomes a strong allegory. The flora captured by the artist are all non-indigenous species, notably the Hollywood Juniper or palm tree and other “exotic” plants which populate as well as symbolize Californian cities. Huge numbers of palm trees were imported to Los Angeles for the 1932 Olympic Games, turning the city in an “exotic” perpetual holiday resort. An artificial mise-en-scène is reinforced in the video by the red, green, blue and orange lights under which the plants appear like cheap plastic bouquets from a karaoke bar in a coastal resort. A hopscotch through histories is being played between these three locations, using signs from which genealogies of struggles emerges (whether these be monuments, emblematic buildings, sculptures or trees).
Thus, Cyprien Gaillard’s film builds a dialogue between the imported plants attempting a “riot”, and episodes of Afro-American history of struggle. The fictive moment arrives before the state of ruin, when ‘’wild nature’’ takes over the derelict building, slowly eating it, hand in hand with time.
This echoes a favoured pattern in the aesthetics of Romanticism, but Cyprien Gaillard foils its codes. The strange, the supernatural, the magic, a taste for the exotic and the taming of nature, once inert suddenly appear animated, in action.
“Nightlife” is a multi-layered assemblage, illustrating mastery of the mis-en-scène, rich in both beauty and meaning. Indeed, the artist builds a complex narrative of symbolic and historic significance, while we are, on the surface, watching plants being subjected to a violent wind.
Text by Gauthier Lesturgie
Cyprien Gaillard, “Where Nature Runs Riot”, Sprüth Magers (Berlin), until 18 July 2015