From Beyond     (1995)

From Beyond     (1995)

Single screen video with sound
5 mins 29 secs

An assembly of ‘background actors’ who appeared in the film “The Devils” (1971), directed by Ken Russell: Lee Fyles, Helene Jefferies, Myra Sands, Annette Jones, Doremy Vernon, Patrick Cleary, Louise Taylor and Jean Reeve.

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From Beyond : Vimeo version (at low resolution)

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With From Beyond Adam Chodzko continues his exploration of existing cultural artefacts, focussing on the area that blurs their fictions with their realities. As a process of retrieval and memory, it works with an attention that overlooks what is presented, foregrounded and valued in order to look awry, into the periphery, a looking ‘in the wrong place.’ Adopting this gaze creates small ephemeral communities of the people who happen to assemble within its focus.
In 1995, through research and advertising, Chodzko attempted to track down the cast of background actors (at that time often known as ‘extras’) who appeared in The Devils, (1971) a film by director, Ken Russell.  Often casually employed, numerous low paid supporting actors are required to stage convincing crowd scenes, to make them appear real through an accumulation of bodies in the background of action.  Chodzko, uninterested in the starring actors, wanted to focus on the precarious visibility of background actors as they appeared towards the back and edges of the cinematic space.  He investigated their experience of participation as more casual performers than the ‘stars’, with a looser relationship to performing a character and to the overall illusion within the film’s central narrative, whilst still leaving their trace within the resulting imagery.
The crowd scenes in The Devils are particularly orgiastic, chaotic and disturbing.  His memory of catching glimpses of this film as a child when it was screened on TV became Chodzko’s incentive to return to it 24 years later. It was a desire for reassurance that everything within that fiction was really ‘only a film’ and had not somehow leaked into the real, despite lingering uncomfortably in personal memory.
The recording took place in a local community hall to where Chodzko lived in Brixton, London. Through interviewing a small group of these gathered ‘background actors, now 24 years older than their appearance within The Devils  (mostly as demonically possessed nuns), they announce their moment of visibility before walking away from the film, screened behind them, and towards the camera.  The effect is one of both ‘returning’ and turning the overall film as though it is an object, rotating the space of the cinematic frame so that those in the background are now in the foreground, and vice versa. It is a domestic relationship to the original film which includes its consumption and handling at home in a compressed and compromised visual form via VHS rental tapes, rather than within a cinema auditorium and a projected 35mm film.
As with Chodzko’s Product Recall  (1994) it is a process of recovery but also loss;  ‘looking in the wrong place’ from where our attention is intended to be focussed and replacing it with an attention that is ‘too late’. 24 years is not too long to trace those in starring roles, but too long to try to track down those whose relationship with the film was so loose, fleeting, pragmatic and peripheral.
This state of instability, of mixing up the established order of things to demonstrate how precariously constructed they are, is a key concern of Chodzko’s practice. A similar process of staging a background actor reunion party is used in his later work Reunion; Salò (1998), but also his interest in cinematic background is evident in eg; A Place for ‘The End’ (1999).  Many recent works continue to focus on a search for knowledge through some form of scanning of a background, and in the case of O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix  [live] (2020) this activity particularly seeks meaning in a background’s shadows.

 Excerpt from Andrew Wilson, Proxigean Tide, Tate St Ives, 2008
“Given Chodzko’s attention to those areas of life that might otherwise go unremarked or remain unregarded, even forgotten, and also given his weaving of narrative into these areas (symbolic, whether actual and real or fictional and constructed) it is telling that he organised a reunion of extras from Ken Russell’s film The Devils (From Beyond 1995) as well as reunions of those children who appeared in Fellini’s City of Women (The Return from The City of Women 1996) and in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò (Reunion; Salò 1998).”

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Transcript of speech in From Beyond 

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Related works:

A ‘Haywain’ Moment      (2014)      
In culo alla balena!   [“Into the ass of a whale!” ]  (2012)
Involva         (1995)
Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire    (1999 – ongoing)
Nightvision    (1998)
Product Recall     (1994)
We love you here, even though you are there        (2012)
Runners  (2013)
Secretors          (1993 – )
Sleepers. Hole  (2012 – )
The God Look-Alike Contest (1991-1992)
The Pickers    (2009)  
Reunion; Salò     (1998)