It Felt Like A Kiss
Manchester International Festival
July 2nd – July 19th 2009
There’s a dreamlike combination of forces at work here: documentary-maker Adam Curtis, location performance artists Punchdrunk, and music by Damon Albarn and the Kronos Quartet.
Is it performance art? Is it film? It’s difficult to work out from the pre-publicity, which describes it as an “experience”. For our group of nine waiting to enter a disused office block in Manchester, there’s a palpable sense of apprehension.
We’re warned before we go in that we’re about to experience a dream world, but that this dream becomes a nightmare – and that people of a nervous disposition might want to rethink their participation. It turns out to be sensible advice.
Stepping out of the lift on the sixth floor we’re wrapped by total darkness. Warped circus music and a clown dummy appear in the first room we stumble into. The significance of this only becomes clear later. For now, it seems we’ve entered a walk-through, live action ghost train, the purpose of which is to instil dread and suspense.
For a minute I get lost in the dark; a masked assistant tells me to “never go backwards”. It seems significant.
Fragments of Adam Curtis’s work appear on screens as we delve deeper into this nightmare world. A child burning with napalm crawls through the jungle; thumbs press into the cheek bones of a woman’s face. A girl in our group says, “Oh my God.” It is horrible and fascinating.
We come across more dummies, facing the wall, slumped on desks, staring through radiation suits. I keep expecting one of them to be a real person, which thankfully never happens.
It is woozy, disorientating, frightening. We wonder through room after room of 1950s offices, discarded box files, film studios, bedrooms. Strategically placed books with titles like The One Dimensional Man and The Hidden Government hint at the political, psychological, heart of it all.
At last, we sit and watch a fascinating 35-minute film from Curtis. It is full of his trademarks: archive footage culled from newsreel and fiction, sometimes capturing horrific violence, sometimes “forgotten”, intimate moments from fiction. He is concerned with the hidden hand of the CIA in manipulating world events, while 50s America builds an idealistic, desire-filled dream world for itself. It’s the dichotomy between powerlessness and power, corruption and collusion. We’re trapped in a world of fear and desire, he says, while the world burns at the behest of our leaders.
It turns out that we’ve been walking through parts of Curtis’s film, like lab rats, unsure of what’s real and what’s not.
Media is often consumed passively. Here we’re asked to be active participants, to surrender ourselves to raw fear.
After we’ve been chased by a very scary chainsaw-wielding bogey man and forced down another pitch-black corridor (“Now you’re all alone. It’s what you wanted” says the screen) we emerge sweating, hearts racing, and our little gaggle of newly-acquainted escapees try to figure out what it was all about – and calm down. Fear is unrivalled as a bonding experience.
And the clown? At one point, near the end, we’re shown footage of a burning building – a funhouse – in which many people died because passersby couldn’t tell if people were laughing or screaming.
Perhaps if we spent less time entranced by moving images we might get out of the burning building alive, I ponder while lying awake, unable to sleep.
www.mif.co.uk
