CAMP? We find this work can't be defined under the misleading label of "provocative art", since its aim is not to reveal a precise political meaning, but to subvert the mechanism of perception of power itself...
a dead-serious ethical position. I want to foreground the gap on which certain images stand, to position the power they claim on its own unstable ground and, yes, in that way, as you say, “to subvert the mechanism of perception of power itself.”
Peter Freund: Specious questions are often the best. Admittedly, CAMP springs from an absurd, almost obscene conceit. After all, how can the image of the concentration camp and a campy performance share the same screen? And yet aren’t these two images decisively linked in our contemporary situation? Both “camps” stand as key reference points marking the outer limits of our ethical and aesthetic universe today.
Stigmart: Where do your materials come from, and how do you go about putting them together? Peter Freund: My archival materials come from any and every source I can get ahold of that responds to the research. CAMP, for example, draws visually from major period sources; among them, excerpts from the 1945 camp footage shot by George Stevens and company for use in the Nuremberg trials and from Busby Berkeley’s 1943 camp masterpiece, The Gang’s All Here. I was of course very interested in the historical coincidence of these two materials. Other footage includes Lumiere’s Arrival of a Train and glimpses from Pasolini’s Salò, Butcher Rules Resnais’ Night & Fog, and Time-Life’s Auschwitz. Texts come from various sources ranging from Adorno, Agamben and Xu Bing to Sontag, Wilde, and Genet.
For whatever reason, certain venues have not wanted to touch CAMP. But the film has had a fair international viewing and has won some awards. Generally the piece has been met with sympathetic responses. Yet there was one screening at which an audience member irately blurted out in the discussion period: “How dare [I] use all that footage from the camps, of the corpses?!” Well, I have to say, the footage simply isn’t there! The viewer’s desperate wish to see corpses, where CAMP in fact shows none, echoes the film’s very point, if I can say there is a point: namely, that fantasy is at work in traumatic memory. This is not because fantasy simply falsifies factual memory. The traumatic often arises from within the texture of fantasy itself. As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that this viewer’s initial outrage targeted the film’s basic conceit and its structural departure from standard Holocaust narratives.
For the archival work, typically I shoot materials only when a conceptual bridge is unavoidable. That was true for CAMP. For me, shooting is another order of (re)production within editing. For a project ostensibly about the Wobblies, History Lesson, I projected footage into a factory space and captured that material as a way to examine the “appropriate surface” for historical projection.
CAMP was presented in a museum show in Bonn, Germany. I spoke with a few of the curators who took the piece after a controversial jurying process. In explaining the controversy to me, one curator made the stunning remark that Germans today still don’t want to acknowledge that the people were “turned on by Hitler."
My research, production, and edit phases overlap. The research process often begins with a vague but nagging sense of urgency about a subject. I move then to examine my urgency and how the subject is already captured. Along the way I land on an expression (word, image, or sound) that seems to completely overtake and dominate what it reveals, where no distance appears between form and meaning. I study the material and take notes.
To produce “provocative art” is a ridiculous goal. My aim, for example, has nothing to do with magnifying or diminishing the horror of the Holocaust. I’m more or less in line with those who say it absolutely defiles the collective memory to try to represent what happened in the camps. My interest is to put a set of basic oppositions in doubt. The fact is that the memory of the camps can be fraught with melodrama and aesthetic enjoyment. The campy performance, on the other hand, can be seen as
I tamper and tinker with the form and thus try to locate a little space for ambiguity, contradiction, incomprehension, desire. Before knowing it, I’m in the throes editing the piece. The recurrent goal is to arrive experimentally at a form that hints at, embodies, problematizes a defining blind spot inside the expressive means.
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