A Bench, Moving, Still...

James Merle Thomas

Produced over the past decade, Swedish artist Johanna Billing’s films feature untrained musicians and performers engaging in everyday actions. Assembling quietly in classrooms, rehearsing and performing songs in foreign languages, or learning to sail a boat, Billing’s subjects are purposeful but enigmatic, their quotidian performances presented with little to no commentary. The challenge and pleasure in deciphering these films—which are usually screened as repeating loops in minimally designed settings—rests in appreciating their uniquely spatial qualities, and their densely layered historical and cultural references. Carefully edited montage subtly frustrates narrative filmic structure, while allusions to architecture, institutional structure, and social organization are often echoed in the pedagogical architecture of the installations. Benches, chairs, and screens obliquely function like classrooms, lecture halls, or all-purpose rooms, further reinforcing a sense that the artist is creating—both in her films and in the spaces where we view them—a sense of community, collective experience, and open-ended participation. Heavy in difficult-to-define affect, Billing’s films conjure feelings of nostalgia for the specificity of place, evoke a sense of youthful curiosity. Her subjects—Croatian schoolchildren singing in English for the first time, young Scottish musicians learning to sail, or suburban Germans taking naps in their cars—appear at different moments hesitant, purposeful, awkward, tense, and self-aware, their performances suggesting what Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini once referred to as the “plenitude” of life, a “cinema of poetry.”

These intimate qualities, formally achieved through close-up shots of faces, hands, and gestures, are further reinforced by Billing’s meticulously captured field recordings, and by her nods to obscure musicians (Roky Erickson, Sidney Barnes and the Rotary Connection, Arthur Russell, Wildbirds & Peacedrums, Franco Battiato) whose songs —whether employed as offscreen themes or explicitly rehearsed and sometimes reinterpreted live by the film's performers— structure each project's sensibility. In Billing’s hands, these songs function less like “covers" or “soundtracks,” and more like mediating devices, whose poetic force subtly shape the themes of collaborative action, cultural memory, and shared experience that define Billing’s oeuvre.

With Pulheim Jam Session, an event staged over several days in 2011 in and around the city of Pulheim—a semi-rural gathering of twelve small towns and villages between Cologne and Düsseldorf in the North Rhine-Westfalia region of Germany—Billing has continued this strategy at a scale larger and more logistically complicated than in any of her earlier projects. Her invitation to participate in the long-standing cultural initiative Stadtbild.Intervention, which commissions artists to create new public projects focused on the city’s identity, has culminated in a film and accompanying soundtrack album based on a large public action Billing called Pulheim Jam Session. While the film consists of two interrelated motifs that play on the metaphor of “jamming”—a piano performance staged in a barn for no visible audience save the camera crew and a group of roughly sixty cars, choreographed by the artist into a Saturday-afternoon traffic jam on a country road cutting through a field—the soundtrack is derived from the film and has been further refined by the artist into two complementary tracks.

As the film (and record) begins, Swedish artist and musician Edda Magnason plays a grand piano in a rustic barn, its overtones ringing loudly through the large space as birds chirp nearby and cars pass audibly on an adjacent street. Her improvisational style, fluid and meandering, veers between slow modal themes, repeated and fragmented chords, and barely recognizable snatches of melody. When she begins to sing along, one senses that she is joyously “driving” the instrument—working the sustain pedals, alternately pushing and pulling at volume and tempo, lingering on and shifting through phrases. Throughout the film, shots from different perspectives construct our sense of the space (Magnason’s face and hands bathed in bright light, side views of the tarp-covered piano, a trailer parked nearby inside the barn), and the scene reveals itself as performance: we see and hear a three-person film crew, who document her playing (their activities remain audible on the soundtrack). This scene-within-a-scene reinforces a creeping sense that Magnason is operating both an instrument and a vehicle, underscoring (or jamming on) the making of the film itself: elsewhere in the film we witness the musician as she climbs into her car in a parking garage, drives through Pulheim and into the barn. Later, in a sequence that strikes at the supposed unity and permanence of such a large instrument, the piano is unceremoniously disassembled, packed into a truck, and driven away. Played on a (semi)mobile piano in an old barn that has been repurposed for parking and storing vehicles, Magnason’s jam is juxtaposed against yet another car-based event that similarly discloses the details of its production: a traffic jam choreographed by Billing on a nearby country lane. On a narrow road dividing two large fields, a few dozen privately owned Opels, Mercedes, VWs, Volvos, and Citroëns drive in a single file, then slow to a stop, their drivers turning off their engines in no particular order. Children squat between vehicles; people sit on top of roofs, picnic, gaze upon the windswept landscape; as with Magnason’s performance, this jam is similarly mediated. Crew members, visible throughout the film, hold microphone booms above and near the cars, seemingly recording everything and nothing in particular.

Pulheim Jam Session figures into a rich history of cinematic pileups, among them Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 Weekend, which features a seven-minute scene of a traffic jam in which motorists play games to pass the time or circus animals, like their human counterparts, impatiently pace in their cages on top of circus trucks; and Jacques Tati’s 1971 Trafic, in which a prototyped recreational vehicle (a severely modified Renault R4 hot-rodded into a hilarious camping contraption) perpetually breaks down along the semi-rural roads and parking lots of the newly-emergent European suburb, as bored drivers pick their noses and dance slowly next to their stopped vehicles. The success of these two earlier jams—the former couched within a densely layered and darkly humorous critique of French bourgeoisie culture; the latter a testament to Tati's ability to temper his comedic brilliance with a sensitivity for cinematic ambivalence—rests in Godard’s and Tati’s respective abilities to vividly depict the creeping malaise of late modernity through an iconography of cars and bored motorists. A third cinematic reference even more explicitly links improvisational piano playing to traffic. In Five Easy Pieces (directed in 1970 by Bob Rafelson and produced by the legendary BBS production company), Jack Nicholson’s protagonist Bobby, a coarse oil derrick worker, exits his car trapped in a jam, climbs aboard a nearby stopped moving truck whose contents include a detuned upright piano, and— while still wearing work boots and a hard hat—prodigiously executes a Chopin number during a freeway traffic jam.

While Billing’s jam shares comic aspects with these films, Pulheim Jam Session also quietly circumscribes a loosely-defined set of social and historical conditions specific to the mid-1970s modernization of the once-bucolic Pulheim region. Between 1966 and 1975, several thousand villages and townships that dotted the West German rural landscape were absorbed into increasingly larger entities in a process known as Gebietsreform (regional reform). Intended as an update of the regional planning structures that dated to the 1920s, these reforms were enacted through a language of efficiency, lean governance, and the drastic reduction of overlapping or redundant government services. By the time of its incorporation January 1 1975, Pulheim, a modest town of a few thousand citizens, found itself linked to eleven adjacent smaller villages in ways that suggested, yet never fully embodied, a new urban neighborliness. Instead of harmonious collectivization, the Gebietsreform transformed Pulheim into a curious in-between space, a cluster of dense villages, industrial farms, and suburban extensions with a very close connection to the Autobahnen A1 and A57, creating commuter-friendly 30-minute drives to the nearby major cities of Cologne, Leverkusen, and Düsseldorf for working, shopping, and community. Billing's research reveals that the city of Pulheim, which today has approximately 54,000 inhabitants, claims somewhere between 2.7–2.8 cars per household, one of the highest per capita concentrations of automobiles in northern Europe (compare to an average of 1,1 cars per household in Germany as a whole).

Ultimately, the musical touchstones for Godard, Tati, and Schneider remain firmly rooted in the classical: The continuous tracking shot of Weekend’s traffic jam is complemented by an extended 360-degree rotating scene of a piano performance of Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 18, performed by Godard’s longtime friend Paul Gégauff; Trafic's recurring gags include a service station that gifts customers large plaster busts of classical musicians. In Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson’s “Bobby,” the drifter-driller who obscures his upper class origins and musical talents while honky-tonking it with Karen Black, is later revealed to be the accomplished pianist Robert Dupea—his middle name is Eroica lest we miss the point—a prodigal son with an innate knack for Chopin, who belongs to a dynasty of classical musicians who record Bach interpretations at the CBS studios in Los Angeles with Gould-like ferocity. Although Weekend’s Mozart performance takes place in a barnyard, most of these references remain more or less subterranean in Pulheim Jam Session. Magnason’s playing, a warm, expectant, and sonically open style of modal piano feels more directly indebted to the independent German label ECM, whose recordings of Keith Jarrett's improvised solo piano concerts dominated the jazz landscape of 1970s. All of this begs a question at the heart of Billing's project: what would the soundtrack to Pulheim’s Gebietsreform sound like?

By way of the artist’s explicit acknowledgment of these local influences on Pulheim Jam Session, we are invited to consider the latent connections (harmonics, as it were) resonating between Pulheim and Jarrett, who might have passed at least near, its small villages as he crisscrossed Europe in the early 1970s, delivering a series of groundbreaking solo piano concerts to packed houses in Lausanne, Bremen, and Zurich. Crammed into a ivory-colored Renault R4 with Manfred Eicher (the founder of the ECM label) after a 700 km ride from Lausanne, with a stopover in Bern, Jarrett arrived at the Cologne Opera House late on a Friday evening: January 24, 1975. Suffering from debilitating back pain, the pianist was dealt a jalopy: an old, tinny-sounding Bösendorfer baby grand with semi-functional pedals and questionable notes on both the lower and higher registers. Although he almost canceled the concert, Jarrett decided to take the stage. The recorded 68 minutes that followed would forever transform his career: The Köln Concert, released later as double album in 1975 on ECM, would go on to become the best-selling solo jazz album as well as the all-time best selling piano album. The Cologne recording of Jarrett’s extended vamping and circular phrasing—at times modal, at others maudlin and pop-tinged—is thoroughly colored by his idiosyncratic “driving” performance style, which included audible singing, grunting, standing up, scooting the bench, and banging along with the instrument.

What, then, might one infer from the relationship between the cinematic references Billing has acknowledged, the music that links these two performances, and the quiet, almost unremarkable ambience of Pulheim and its confederation? While classical music in both Godard and Tati’s films points at the absurdities, still very much at play circa 1968, of various cultural divides, then Billing’s latest projects regard the Köln Concert as the music for a decidedly later moment. Jarrett was, after all, stuck with a mess, had to coax and improve a poorly-functioning machine from a standstill. With the recording of this improvisation, the avant-garde spilled out onto everyone's turntables: a soundtrack for sitting in traffic, in an old Renault, on some unremarkable stretch of road. Your back hurts, you have to eat a late dinner, and work in less than ideal conditions, but, somehow, you make the best of it all. Your song, like the car, goes both nowhere in particular, and everywhere. A bench, moving, still...