Johanna Billing’s did not go to film school, but you would not know that after seeing her recent exhibition, I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm at the Camden Arts Centre. The exhibition consists of the recently commissioned I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009) and five other short films from over the last eight years. 

In all of the works, there is a tension that arises from the co-mingling of people having to enact and relate to the unfamiliar whilst simultaneously being an object of scrutiny by others (whether classmates, an audience, or the artist herself).  This hyperawareness of the performative nature of what they are undertaking is alluring and intimate. And these effects have quite a bit to do with the methods Billing uses to orchestrate the creation her films.

For example, I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (13.29 mins, looped) Billing, using amateur dancers and acting students in Lasi, Romania films the live improvisation led by Swedish choreographer Anna Vnuk and accompaniment by local musicians. All the while, members of the public convene as an audience that is at liberty to watch for as little or as long as they prefer. What we see are a sequence of images of faces full of concentration and the hesitation that can come with finding one’s way when being thrown into an alien experience. Each of the individual participants, whether a musician, actor, dancer, choreographer or transitory audience member, had to function as a member of a particular sub-group to produce a collectively felt experience that resonates through all of its participants. The atmosphere in this film is tinged with anxiety but is ultimately uplifting.

In You Don’t Love Me Yet (2002-2009), Magical World (2005, 6.12 mins, looped), Magic and Loss (2005, 16.52 mins, looped) and This is How We Walk On The Moon (2007, 27 mins, looped) the music and lyrics of American songwriters and musicians are a significant feature in the way that the artist, the film’s participants and the viewer come into contact with the material. For Billing, music is a central ingredient to establishing atmosphere in her work. It is therefore, perhaps, unsurprising that Billing also publishes music and arranges live performances via the record label (Make it Happen) she runs with her brother. For You Don’t Love Me Yet, the song is from Texan singer-songwriter Roky Erickson which Billing asked several bands to do their own cover version during a live tour. The screen projection documented different live studio recordings that took place in Sweden. Audio recordings of all of the different live recordings were available in the gallery for attendees to sample. The reproduction of the same song in various formats and spaces by different musicians feels distinctly original so that Erickson’s song serves as a springboard to other forms of expression.

Magical World and Magic and Loss are both from the same year and are concerned with transformation and memory; a bittersweetness pervades both films. The setting for Magical World is a dilapidated after-school music club in a suburb of Zagreb, Croatia. A group of children sing along to a melancholic song written by African-American Sidney Barnes (1968) when he was a member of the psychedelic soul band Rotary Connection. His lyrics describe the struggle associated with transformation and asserting an identity in a post civil rights era America. The children, clearly exerting effort as they labour to sing in another language aren’t able to grasp how prophetic this song is to their own position as citizens of a country that is trying to make sense of itself whilst also integrating itself with the European Union. Looking at the children’s faces during the film, there are instances in which there appears to be a knowingness about what they are communicating through the song. The result is both touching and hopeful.

Magic and Loss (2005) is a slow moving and repetitive observation of a group of individuals moving belongings of an unknown person in an Amsterdam flat. The motives for the move are unclear and thus the viewer attempts to fill in blanks and all the while hoping that Billing will eventually reveal some clues to confirm or deny our suspicions. She gives nothing away. However, for those that are familiar with Lou Reed will know that he released an album of the same name in 1992 that was produced during period in his life in which he was losing people that he loved.

This is How We Walk On The Moon puts members of a Scottish music collective in unfamiliar territory as they provide the film’s musical score which is an interpretation of the song by New York based musician Arthur Russell. The musicians move into extremely uncharted territory when they are filmed taking part in a sailing course. Billing’s camera runs over clenched hands, rainbows that hang in the Firth of Forth’s North Sea sky and fleeting smiles as the musicians find their sea legs. The anxiety of individuals from a pre-existing collective being transported to an entirely different context is palpable yet the film is infused with many moments of natural beauty and displays of serenity during this collective endeavor.

Billing’s camera observes the proceedings that she has orchestrated. Though each of her films often have recurrent ingredients (collective encounters with the unknown, performance, music, spectatorship), the results are surprising and moving as the viewer recognises parts of themselves in these short films.

However, Where She Is At (2001) stands somewhat outside the other films. Whereas the other films could, loosely, be thought of as musicals, Where She Is At positions the viewer amongst the film’s spectators. This film does not feel like a collaboration with its participants but more a collaboration with a particular milieu (Ingierstand Bath in Oslo). This film shows Billing’s talent for creating suspense from the everyday so as to form a narrative focused on hesitant female protagonist, high atop a diving board. She knows that she is being watched and feels the tyranny of the gaze from her fellow Norwegians (and us). There is only one question that unites the film’s spectators and those watching the film, ‘Will she jump or back out of it?’ Though all of her films show a sequence of events, it is only in this film that a concrete conclusion occurs. This is the film in which one wonders if Billing will make a move into feature length films at some point because this film is suffused with tension and, consequently, is spell-binding.

Billing went to art school and studied sculpture, and perhaps what she does is to in fact sculpt an experience out of the people and materials she chooses to assemble. As to how her participative methodology unfolds in the future projects and whether she continues to adhere to this practice, we will simply have to wait and see.

Contributor details

Deirdre Devers is a researcher of screen cultures, specifically digital games and film. When she is not watching films, she is watching gamers at play or writing about people’s interactions with the screen.