Gad HOLLANDER
The Palaver Transcription
Vidéo expérimentale - dv, super 8 - couleur et n&b - 0:37:00 - écriture, montage, réalisation: Gad Hollander - camera: Bob Goodliffe - rostrum camera: Ken Morse - photographie: Andrew Bick - super-8: Gad Hollander - son: Gad Hollander - voix off: Jennifer Chalmers, Gad Hollander - corps: Dina Jacobsen, Gerry Cookson, Gad Hollander - équipe: Duncan Smith, Bayo Abefila, Bob Goodliffe - un merci particulier à: Heather Deedman, Julia Lancaster, Joe Dunton Cameras, Ken Morse - Les photographies de Andrew Bick ont été prises dans différentes villes en Europe au cours des cinq dernières années - Royaume Uni - 2000

"Une voix dans l'ombre d'une fenêtre…" du texte au livre, vers les images, le son et la vidéo. La transcription des palabres aboutit à sa phase finale: une phrase se situant à mi-chemin de l'envie d'écrire et du désir de toucher. Alors que le texte traite de ce qu'Edmond Jabès appelle " l'impossibilité d'écrire " - essayer de saisir l'essence même de l'écriture, la pause dans le langage - la vidéo accorde la même importance au désir impalpable… le désir de parler et de toucher expliquent les digressions successives visibles sur chaque plan et dans chaque syllabe. Le narrateur invoque " une voix dans l'ombre d'une fenêtre " en attribuant ces invocations à une tierce personne (un corps). La voix a une ombre, le corps aussi et deux interlocuteurs se retrouvent face à face dans un espace indéfini, analyste et analysé, dualité d'une même personne à différentes étapes de son existence - la vie, la mort. Le monologue interne du narrateur présumé se fait entendre par le corps d'un suicidé, qui se parle à lui-même dans le passé. Les histoires qui en découlent tournent autour du désir sensuel du narrateur - toucher et parler. Grâce à une série d'anecdotes, nous avons un aperçu de la vie d'un personnage solitaire, un écrivain envahi par son désir inassouvi de voir à travers une voix et pour qui le suicide n'est qu'une fenêtre donnant vue sur son désir.


« Eine Stimme im Schatten eines Fensters » vom Text bis das Buch, zu den Bildern, dem Ton und dem Video. Die Übertragung des Palavers führt zu seinem Schlusssatz : ein Satz zwischen der Lust zu schreiben und zu berühren. Während der Text die von Edmond Jabès genannte « Unmöglichkeit zu schreiben » - Versuchen, die Essenz selbst der Schrift zu ergreifen, die Pause in der Sprache - behandelt, gibt das Video der ungreifbaren Begierde die gleiche Bedeutung…der Wunsch zu sprechen und zu berühren erklärt die aufeinanderfolgenden Exkurse, die man auf allen Aufnahmen und in allen Silben sehen kann. Der Erzähler beruft sich auf « eine Stimme im Schatten eines Fensters » und schreibt diese Berufungen einer dritten Person (einem Körper) zu. Die Stimme hat einen Schatten, der Körper auch und zwei Gesprächspartner gegenüberstehen sich Auge in Auge in einem unbestimmten, analysten und analysierten Raum, Dualität einer einzigen Person an verschiedenen Abschnitten ihrer Existenz – das Leben, der Tod. Den inneren Monolog des vermutlichen Erzählers hört man durch den Körper eines Selbstmörders, der mit sich selber in Vergangenheit spricht. In den sich daraus ergebenden Geschichten geht es um die sinnliche Begierde des Erzählers – berühren und sprechen. Dank einer Reihe von Anekdoten haben wir einen kurzen Überblick über das Leben einer einsamen Person, eines Schriftstellers, den die ungestillte Begierde, durch eine Stimme zu sehen, überkommt, und für den die Selbstmord nur ein Fenster zu seiner Begierde darstellt.


The word 'palaver' is trans-lingual, its meaning implying idle speech, nonsense, a fuss over nothing. But in the word's etymology we find 'dialogue' - from Portuguese palavra, 'word, talk' (originally between Portuguese traders and West Africans), which in turn is derived from Latin parabola, 'parable, speech, comparison,' and Greek parabolé, literally 'a throwing beside, a juxtaposition'. Transcription is, in this context, a "writing over, writing across, re-writing." THE PALAVER TRANSCRIPTION allows these manifold layers of meanings to surface and explores the variety of nuances that emerge in the work's transformation from text to audio and finally to video. The Palaver was originally a text made up of a single, unpunctuated sentence running headlong into a complex narrative, in which anecdotal, philosophical and psychological elements interweave. It evolved into a serial work in a collaboration with Andrew Bick, where the text was cut up into 50 blocks, each linked to a corresponding image. The images are details from larger photos onto which Bick added blue felt-tip markings, usually loops, as visual reference points that served as quasi-punctuation marks, contrasting with the absence of punctuation in the text. The text+image blocks were individually printed on 50 laminated cards, forming a kind of storyboard effect for a hypothetical film. This "storyboard" version of The Palaver functioned as an installation at the Life/Live exhibition at M.A.M., Paris: the cards were attached randomly to a black velvet cloth draped over a table, while a computer voice (with its own "rules" of punctuation) read the text on a loop. Subsequently, The Palaver appeared as a book (Book Works, 1998), in which each page comprised the same text+image block as in the cards series but the order was now fixed to the linearity of the text. Following its publication, I made an audio version on CD (published by Book Works, 1999, in a limited edition). The audio CD introduced "harmonics" into the work by means of a layered reading of the text (male, female and synthesized voices), together with sound effects relating specifically to imagery in the photos as well as the text, and some musical fragments. Though originally designed to be heard on its own, with the book serving as a "score" for the work, the audio version now forms the soundtrack to THE PALAVER TRANSCRIPTION. The video thereby expands that sense of "harmonics" into the visual sphere, presenting a kind of chamber opera in which the work's various elements are continually brought into play. As in a poem, no single element survives without a relationship to every other part of the work, so that the book remains a tactile part of it, like a key prop in a movie. The video attempts to expose an ambiguous region between foreground and background, as well as between the visual and the aural. It challenges us to divide our attention between its parts while simultaneously focusing on the whole, as if continuously calling on a shift in our sensory priorities, drawing our imagination into that nebulous region between memory and oblivion.
While the text deals with what Edmond Jabès calls "the impossibility of writing" - an attempt to grasp the essence of writing, the pause in speech - the video turns on the impossibility of touching, the distance of desire. The desire to speak and to touch informs the narrative and its successive digressions at every frame and every syllable. A narrator invokes "a voice in the shape of a window" while conferring that invocation upon a third person, "corse" (a corpse). The voice has a shape and the corpse has a voice, and the two interlocutors face each other in an undefined space, like analyst and analysand, facets of the same character at different stages of being - alive and dead. The internal monologue of the presumed narrator is externalized in the corpse of a suicide victim, who addresses his own self in the past. The stories that emerge revolve around the narrator's sensual desires - to touch and to speak. Through this series of anecdotes we glimpse the life of a solitary figure, a writer, whose overwhelming desire - to see through a voice - remains unquenched, and for whom suicide is the window through which he observes that desire.

The palaver transcription (2000) - video (37') Festivals/screenings: