Paper Train
Mystery Train: Japanese subtitles to a film
by Jim Jarmusch, 2002, wax transfer paper mounted on rag,
7.5 x
9.75 inches
"They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when a movie travels from one country to another, the first thing it accumulates is a bunch of them. Words. They appear at the bottom of the picture like mold on cheese, and although they open the world of foreign film to a vastly wider audience, their presence is a constant reminder of our differences, the accent that an expatriate can't seem to shake.
For the past decade, New York-based artist Stefana McClure has been inspired by that very text to create what she calls "films on paper," a seemingly obsessive art project in which she laboriously traces all of the subtitles that appear in a film, on top of each other in layers, and then transfers them to a piece of plain, colored paper. The result is an abstract work, roughly the size of a computer monitor, that captures not the story or cinematography of a film but the shape and placement of its text, the part of the picture you're normally supposed to see right through.
Along the bottom of one of her pieces—a tracing from a film with English subtitles—is an indecipherable, blurry white smear that, when examined closely, shows fragments of letters leaking through. In a piece that's based on a film with Japanese subtitles, the white marks appear not as a stripe across the bottom but as two rows of squares, like the tire tread of a BMX bike, revealing the invisible grid used for Kanji characters.
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She doesn't say exactly how she selects the films to work with, but her choices often seem to echo her apparent fascination with language and culture. In Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch tells three stories set in Memphis, one of which involves a young Japanese couple visiting the legendary hometown of Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. Even those of us who don't speak the couple's language understand the gist of their constant argument about which musician is better, but for the rest of their story, we need the subtitles. For her transfer of Mystery Train, however, McClure playfully used a version intended for a Japanese audience, a version with Japanese subtitles in every story but that one, reversing everything." From PasteMagazine.com, "Life Camera Action: Films on Paper" by Robert Davis (January 22, 2009)Read the whole article here. Stefana McClure at the josée bienvenu gallery.
