Story for performance #894
webcast from Sydney at 07:50PM, 01 Dec 07

In a small white room in an archive in New York, a woman sits at a microfilm reader. The muffled sound of traffic outside and the quiet whir and click of the machines seems to focus and intensify the silence of the room. She has set the machine to spool the microfilm slowly, so that the images passing across the screen seem strangely animated, each still image rolling slowly into the next. It is hard to look at them, and on one level she is grateful for the way in which the machine appears to have taken control, relieving her of the requirement to decide to stop, or rewind and look again. In this way, each image demands her scrutiny for an equal measure of time, lending a strangely democratic aspect to the process. At the same time, she is filled with a sense of helplessness at the way in which the machine has robbed her of her own volition, relentlessly rolling the images forward like time itself, each atrocity unfolding in an unredeemed narrative of hopelessness.

Taken nearly ninety years ago now, the images have been assembled from towns and villages across an entire country. Some of the photographs have all of the immediacy of the documentary. They are taken in situ, in railway stations, city streets and town market squares, recording the dead and injured where they lay. Others, the ones of survivors, appear to have been taken in photographers’ studios, the maimed and bandaged victims ranged incongruously against the painted backdrops and potted plants familiar to her from the conventions of the respectable Edwardian photographic portrait. She has no idea how to look at these images, unsure whether this strange confusion of codes restores to their subjects some semblance of human dignity, or simply objectifies them even more, rendering them bizarre spectacles of trauma. For the historian who collected them, no such question seemed relevant. For him, the photographs were simply evidence, and the label on the spool of microfilm is labelled simply ‘Photographs of pogrom victims.’

Approximately half way along the spool, a small photograph floats into view. It takes a moment to register its difference, and it has almost moved across the entire space of the screen before she finds the rewind button and scrolls the image back. She leans in closer and looks again.

Beneath a stagy swag of velvet drapery, nailed crudely to a wooden frame that is clearly visible in the photograph, a big man sits astride a child’s wooden hobby-horse. He is wearing a wide sheepskin hat, a white collarless shirt and his muscular legs are encased in a pair of polished riding boots. His large, heavy feet planted squarely on the ground seem at odds with the horse’s dainty hooves, and his left hand, which grasps the reins, is clenched in a fist on top of the little horse’s head. In his right hand, he wields a revolver, aimed at a point somewhere out of the right hand frame of the picture. His face is turned directly and somewhat stiffly towards the camera, as though directed to do so by someone else. His mouth is a straight line beneath his heavy moustache, and his eyes, shadowed by his hat, are impossible to see.

She advances the spool to the next frame, a copy of the back of the photograph. Unlike the other photographs, which are all labelled in Russian, this one bears a small typewritten label in French, identifying the man as an ‘officer’ of the militia of Ataman Struk, the photograph taken in Tchernobyl some time between February and April, 1919. Struk, she knows, was a warlord who controlled the town of Tchernobyl and its immediate surrounds during the years of the Russian Civil War. He and his militia fought for whichever Civil War army would pay him best, and he augmented his funds by terrorising the local Jewish community, compelling them to pay him large sums of money not to molest them. It was said that his favourite way of dealing with those who could not pay was to tie them together and throw them into the Dnieper River.

She presses the button and the spool begins to move again. For the next ten or so frames, Struk’s men play out their bizarre pantomime for the camera. She sees the man in the sheepskin hat again, this time in a group of five men with the hobby-horse posed in front of them, like a little mascot. A man in the centre of the group, wearing a small peaked cap like that of a student, holds the revolver up at chest height, the barrel turned to the left so that it points directly at his neighbour. In another photograph, two small boys in oversized army greatcoats pose beneath the swagged curtain. One clutches a Cossack’s club in his lap, whilst the other, standing to his right, holds the revolver, the weight of which seems to drag his right arm down. Elsewhere, the men and boys are grouped together, the little boys dressed in women’s peasant clothing in a parody of a family portrait.

In the white room, the silence has deepened. Someone says something in a subdued voice to her neighbour, and the softer voices of the librarians buzz at the back of her consciousness. Her mind scrabbles for a purchase on what she has seen, but nothing comes to reconcile the knowledge she can bring from history with this moment in the past when ten men swaggered before the camera of a long-forgotten photographer in Tchernobyl. Who knows what they thought they might be doing, or who they imagined might look at these images in the unimaginable future that would outlast them? Finally, she thinks, it is the relentless taxonomy of the historian that entraps them, forcing them to lie at last in the uneasy slumber of the archive, side-by-side with their victims.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Anne Brennan.