Originally published in Colin Campbell Media Works, ed. Bruce Ferguson, Winnipeg, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1991.

I first saw a videotape by Colin Campbell sometime in the mid-seventies. Although I do not remember the content of the tape with clarity, (it was, I think, Hollywood and Vine), I do have a distinct and clear memory of the emotional and conceptual confusion that the tape produced. I was unsettled and disturbed; but this play with my emotions, this movement, this shift from the secure place I expected to occupy as a viewing subject was accompanied by a thrill, a sense that the world of representation was being broken up to allow new possibilities to be glimpsed- the possibilities of other dramas, other fictions, other realisms, other subjectivities.

Subversion of the codes and conventions of broadcast television was, of course, the rule of the day in that period of high modernist video. It usually took the form of a theoretically informed critique of dominant ideological forms of representation done in an attempt to "demystify" the seductive nature of the television image. The work that I had been accustomed to seeing in Britain took a sharp scalpel to the everyday fare of broadcast television. Colin Campbell's tape eschewed the inherent sadism of modernist analysis and deconstruction of television; its strategy was altogether more gentle, playful, affectionate and naughty.

The film theorist Christian Metz has written about "the knowing sadism of someone who wants to break open the toy in order to see how it works."' While most modernist video at that time presented the viewer with the broken parts of the toy, Campbell's tape reassembled the parts, but put them back slightly out of place. My disturbance derived from my exposure to a strategy I had not previously encountered—a strategy which avoided the puritanical correctness of most modernist British video art, producing a more complex and difficult play with representation. The tape dared to admit precisely those elements of narrative (desire, identity, masquerade) that high modernism attempted to consign to the scrap heap of ideology. Perhaps the most shocking (and yet fascinating) aspect of Hollywood and Vine was its use of a narrator who not only dared to tell a story in this time of anti-narration, but also dared to transform his screen persona from a man to a woman in an act of arch dissemblance. Hollywood and Vine constructed a world in which nothing was certain, and appearances were certainly deceptive.

This strategy of dissemblance is evident from the earliest unedited black and white tapes. In True/False the artist addresses the camera both frontally and in profile with a confession, the elements of which are repetitively affirmed and denied: "I snort coke. True. False. I collect pornography. True. False." The artist offers us the evidence of his "nature" with one hand, and then countermands the evidential status of his confession with the other.

Self-representation was a mainstay of much early video art in both North America and Europe. Doubtless this widespread concern with self-representation derived from a fascination with the new technology of video itself. Video, unlike film, allows for the live monitoring of the camera image on a video screen. In the course of exploring video technology many artists found themselves working from the elementary video configuration in which the artist positioned him/herself as the object of the camera's gaze and simultaneously witnessed and interacted with his/her live image on the video monitor. The majority of these works merely used the image of the artist as a "prop", as an inanimate object to be subjected to the vagaries of the video system. In tapes such as these, the self-image was used as a device to explore a purely formal analysis of the television image posed in the dichotomy: reality versus illusion.

In True/False, however, the image of the artist is used to raise complex questions about the status of identity, subjectivity, and truth. The work is rich in connotations. For example, the simple juxtaposition of the full face and profile shots evokes the historical discourse of official photography which originated in the mid-nineteenth century in prisons, mental institutions, children's homes and police stations—the institutional "mugshot". Photographic technology and portraiture were taken up and developed by these new Victorian institutions as a means of extending their surveillance and regulation of the population. Official photographic portraits allowed the runaway to be recognized and returned to the children's home, the repeat offender to be identified by the witness, and the insane to be classified by the physiognomy of their illness.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these institutions of social control shifted away from the regulation of criminal or deviant acts in order to focus on the notion of the criminal, the socially subversive, or the deviant personality. In practice this involved movement away from the prosecution of the crime towards an interrogation of the congenitally perverse individual whose hidden truths were revealed through the new sciences of physiognomy and criminal anthropology. The French historian Michel Foucault has described how the new domain of sexuality became the privileged site for the interrogation of the inner truth of subjectivity:

... we demand that sex speak the truth... and we demand that it
tells us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth
about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate
consciousness.'

Furthermore:

... the confession became one of the West's most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell... One confesses-or is forced to confess.'

Within this simple but rich work Colin Campbell lays out a set of concerns which will characterize all subsequent work: a focus upon the relationship between truth and subjectivity rather than the modernist concern with illusion and reality; the use of a confessional anecdotal autobiography which constantly confounds the privileged relationship between the interrogation of sexuality and the truth of subjectivity; the affectionate play with sexually and socially deviant identities—the centre stage of placing the "other"; the use of an involuted narrative which, in a complex double movement, takes us with disconcerting stealth from official history to personal fantasy and from the signifiers of innermost truth to the display of dissemblance.

Much of Colin Campbell's work makes reference to the television soap opera. It also calls upon the conventions of melodrama and vaudeville from which soap opera derived many of its conventions and subject matter. In its early nineteenth century origins, melodrama was tied directly to the preoccupations of the socially and economically powerless—the new urban working class masses who were the progeny of the Industrial Revolution. Melodrama presented urban life, and "the life and people of the streets, of the homeless poor, of the cheap lodging houses, the taverns, the gambling dens, and the cold pavement beneath Waterloo Bridge," all of which were associated with criminality, degeneracy and social and political subversion by the bourgeois citizen.4 It addressed the concerns of the impoverished working class and in this sense provided a radical alternative to bourgeois drama. However, the trials and tribulations of the disenfranchised were represented as a simple dichotomy of good and evil, and plots privileged the role of the cruel hand of Fate as the chief mediator in the world of class injustice.

Colin Campbell's work can be situated in relation to early melodrama through its use of characters who belong on the fringes of the social world and who "represent forces rather than people, and fail to control or understand their circumstances so that fate, rather than heroic transcendence, offers a resolution to the drama". 5 Some examples: the glacier accident in The Woman From Malibu, the plane crash in No Voice Over, the shooting in Culver City Limits, and the death by gassing in Hollywood and Vine. Theatres which presented Victorian melodrama in England were prevented by law from staging literary productions and consequently they developed a visual and musical language of gesture and caricature which down-played the use of the spoken word. In Colin Campbell's work the privileging of the spoken word has more in common with the American tradition of vaudeville where humorous sketches, music, and monologues played the most important role. Nineteen fifties Hollywood melodrama continued, to some extent, the gestural theatrical conventions of the nineteenth century form, but narrowed its focus to subjects concerned with woman, the claustrophobic home, familial and romantic relationships, and the tortuous exploration of unsocializable transgressive desire which threatened the cohesion of family values and, by extension, of society itself. It is here, in so-called "women's movies" of the fifties that Colin Campbell's work finds its greatest resonance.

Laura Mulvey has described the melodramatic heroine as follows: "the presence of this woman, in contradiction with her sexuality, suffering from passion and repression, is in an uneasy tension with the conventions that order woman's image on the screen as erotic object of visual pleasure. Sexuality is presented as a problem and its Hollywood glamour falls away in pieces."6 The inherently subversive quality of the melodrama genre, where sexuality and identity threaten to break the ideological certainty of a world in which everything has its proper place, is precisely the central emphasis in Colin Campbell's work.

Most of his work employs female characters who refuse to obey the inexorable logic of the classic realist narrative. They inhabit a world of their own desires and, since their desires frequently determine, moment-by moment, the course of the narrative, they can be seen as fully active agents. However, while the classic realist narrative requires the resolution of the desire of both its characters and viewers in order to achieve its closure and its "happy ending", (works such as No Voice Over, Hollywood and Vine, and Dangling by Their Mouths) the desire of the female protagonists is endlessly mutable and subject to unexpected interruptions and re-alignments which frequently divert desire from ever fording its "lost object."

In this sense Campbell's work does not provide us with heroes whose journey from a state of confusion, conflict, and ignorance (the problem the narrative sets its protagonist) to a state of clarity, transcendence, and knowledge (the resolution of the narrative in which the world makes sense again) is the trajectory of the narrative logic itself. This radical assault on the narrative economy of the realist film comes about as a result of building a story around the desire of the female protagonist—as is the case in fifties melodrama—but then de-emphasizing the blocks and barriers to her desire which melodrama locates in the demands and duties of the bourgeois family. Because these blocks are re-located in the unpredictable actions of the outside world, in the unknowable and unpredictable course of fate and happenstance (as in the Victorian melodrama), the characters are both protagonists and reactors—a peculiar mixture of activity and passivity demonstrated in a kind of committed drifting. The world becomes an off-screen character which wrong foots the characters who attempt to negotiate with it. As a consequence of this removal of the classic melodramatic conflicts between desire and family and desire and society, the narrative logic is no longer constrained by the need for linear development and characters meet and part in a realm where fantasy is frequently indistinguishable from reality. This difficult relationship between "objective" fact and subjective meaning is heavily underscored by the use of devices such as the shooting down of the Korean Airlines plane by a Soviet fighter in No Voice Over. In this case the story, which has become ever more involved with the desires and fantasies of its chief protagonists Mocha and Miranda, lurches back into the indisputable facts of historical certainty—an event which made headlines all over the world. But even this ending, beyond which the story can no longer proceed, throws up the very problem which news reporting attempts to resolve through its use of the distressing interviews with people who are personally affected by public disasters. How do we make a personal identification with a public event in the political arena? How do we make sense of the so-called "acts of God" which cruelly cut across individual human lives? How can stories end so unsatisfactorily?

In certain works such as Culver City Limits, and Conundrum Clinique, the narrative resolution is provided at the expense of commonsense logic. We discover that the resolution of the characters' narrated story is precisely the impossibility of the story's telling: the narrator describes the circumstances of his/her own death after the event.

This constant reassessment of narrative truth is further necessitated by the use of bracketed fictions, stories within stories, in which we find ourselves realizing our passage from one level of fiction to another some time after the event. In No Voice Over, Miranda is writing a script—a narrated fantasy demanding a beginning, a middle, and an end. She does this attempting to make sense of the events of her own life in which the actors change identities (what motivates Mocha to give up painting and become an archaeologist?), and refuse to attribute significance to the unconscious fantasies which clearly motivate their choices (Mocha's purchase of a postcard of an Egyptian mummy on Mother's Day). As we drift between the various levels of Miranda's experiences we find ourselves within the rushes of the film script she is writing.

The use of anecdotal, confessional monologues in the earlier black and white work carry the viewer along the ebbing and flowing contours of the character's memories, fantasies and desires, drawing the viewer into a complicity in which the narrative becomes a mere pretext for an exploration of the complex and contradictory nature of subjectivity. In the later works such as Dangling by their Mouths, and No Voice Over, the narrative is constructed in episodes in which the characters constantly slip between identities and sexualities in the gaps that separate their partings and reunions. The characters are as equally confused in their attempts to fix their ever changing relationships to each other as are we, the viewers. In this terrain where no traditional narrative economy fixes the desires and directions of the characters and their narrative interaction, subjectivity and meaning shift disconcertingly as we are drawn into a world where all certainties fail, all beginnings can become endings and no satisfactory outcome is ever guaranteed. We are left, defenseless, confronting our own desire for resolution, clarity and ideological certainty about the world and its operations.

Cultural theorists such as Roland Barthes and Raymond Bellour have described the function of narrative as the endlessly repeated re-exploration of the drama of socialization. In storytelling we seek out the uncertain origins of our subjectivity hoping to eventually find ourselves repositioned in the secure and safe social and sexual identities we feared that we might not authentically occupy. It is in its challenge to the established order of storytelling, where our subjectivity is fixed in the limited range of ideological positions, that Colin Campbell's work finds its most radical moment. By opening up narration to the flowing dynamics of desire, and by refusing to constrain this desire in the commonplace identities in which social cohesion ideologically imprisons it, Colin Campbell's videotapes lead us towards the possibility of other social orders, other types of relations between the sexes, other economies of desire, other experiences of selfhood and other worlds of representation.

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a father, why tell stories? Doesn't every story lead back to Oedipus? Isn't story telling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflict with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred). Today we dismiss Oedipus and narrative atone and the same time: we no longer love, we no longer fear, we no longer narrate. As fiction, Oedipus was at least good for something: to make good novels, to tell good stories... 7


Notes
1. Christian Metz, “Histoire/Discours,” Langue, Discours, Société, Ed. Julia Kristeva et all., Editions du Seuil, 1975.
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, New York, Random House, 1976.
3. ibid.
4. Michael Booth (ed.) The Magistrate and Other Nineteenth-Century Plays, London, Oxford University Press, 1974.
5. Laura Mulvey, "Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home", Visual and Other Pleasures, London, The Macmillan Press, 1989.
6. ibid.
7. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, Trans. Richard Miller, New York, Hill and Wang, 1975.