Johanna Billing: Pulheim Jam Session, 2015

A solitary walk in the street, even with stopped-up ears, is a continual conversation between us and an environment which expresses itself through the images that compose it: the faces of people who pass by, their gestures, their signs, their actions, their silences, their expressions, their arguments, their collective expressions (groups of people waiting at traffic lights, crowding around a traffic accident or around the fishwoman at Porta Capuana); and more—billboards, signposts, traffic circles, and, in short, objects and things that appear charged with multiple meanings and thus ‘speak’ brutally with their very presence.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’,” 1965 1

 A concert piano in a barn, the spectre of industrialism shown as plumes rise from fossil fuel and wind turbines stand tall behind fields of corn and turnip. Simultaneously a country road fills up with cars. These images present space, time and event. Contradictions and tensions are evoked and explored; humans in counterpoint with the machine, the environment in tension with need and desire, and the car as organism with its own sphere and systems. Amongst these ‘things’ that ‘’speak’ brutally with their very presence’ according to Pasolini, the playing of a piano suggestively teases at a distinction and difference between human activities - the role and site of culture as both another form of production as well as expression.

Pulheim Jam Session is a film about a place, but it is also about the logic of staging and playing out of an event. A car jam and a jamming session are two distinct kinds of activity, both with their own freedoms and constraints. In its initial incarnation Pulheim Jam Session was a participatory act as part of the project series Stadtbild.Intervention. 2 60 cars carrying over a hundred people from the Pulheim region of Germany, situated within commuting distance from Cologne, took part in constructing a traffic jam. During the 70s Pulheim's 12 disparate villages were reformed and became ‘Pulheim’. It was therefore never conceived of or built as a city and as a result consists to a large extent of in between spaces - country roads, farms and fields with little public transport overview. This has lead to a strong car dependency among the residents and the number of cars per household runs at a high average of 2.7.

In the event and ensuing film a car jam appears. Despite the obvious frustration inherent in the
experience of traffic congestion people have busied themselves; eating fruit, doing crosswords,
playing music, running in fields and talking of course. This moment of cosy sociability takes place in front of power stations in a part of Germany that is known for its contribution to post-war industrial prosperity. Meanwhile, in a barn nearby, Swedish artist and musician Edda Magnason 3 is improvising on piano. Forty years earlier in Cologne, in the same year as Pulheim's reform, the American pianist Keith Jarrett held his live improvised concert 4, made famous due to a live recording. These two historical events, connected by their geography and by people’s memories and experience of the area. For Billing these connections as well as the idea of a recording serving as an aide-mémoire, bound these events into a space constructed between document, memory and repetition - creating a shifting mode crossing boundaries; spatially, temporally.

Magnason plays whilst the apparatus of the film set is laid bare. The recording of this live and improvised performance provides the logic and the rhythm for the structure of the work, allowing this ‘soundtrack’ generated from within the film shoot itself, to dictate editing - overlaying all frames it enables the two events to interconnect. The act of looking happens from within the experience of the music, from here it is as if the field is moving, dancing to the sound of the piano. Enchanted by the music the viewer looks at the traffic jam from afar and the cars with their polished bodies and shiny metal look strangely unfamiliar. Something odd occurs as the machine becomes more machine-like whilst at the same time the residents and their actions become ever more human.

The close affinity between humans and cars was addressed by the French director and comic Jacques Tati in Trafic (1971). Billing names Trafic, in its almost surgical interest in cars and their peculiar humanisation, as an inspiration for her project in Pulheim. It caricatures modern mobility and reveals that human contact can only achieve any depth once the car has come to a stop. Four years prior to Trafic, Jean-Luc Godard created one of the most famous traffic jams in film history in his film Weekend (1967). Godard and Billing connect through a sociological interest in the phenomenon of the traffic jam and the intertwining of private and public space.

The project was produced by the Cultural Department of the City of Pulheim (as part of the project series Stadtbild.Intervention) in co-operation with the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and with the kind support of the regional cultural funds of Nordrhein-Westfalen, The Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, The Foundation for Culture and Environment of the Kriessparkasse and nctm e l’arte.

Footnotes

1: See Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico (Milan: Garzanti, 1972). Translated into English as Heretical Empiricism, by Ben Lawton & Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988), 168.

2: Initiated by the Cultural Department of the City of Pulheim

3: Magnason is a singer/songwriter with three solo albums, who recently became known for her role as Monica Zetterlund (1937 - 2005) in Waltz for Monica, 2013, directed by Per Fly.

4: Keith Jarrett, The Köln Concert, (ECM) 1975