Moon Stealing (1994)
Single screen video
3 mins 39 secs♦
Watch Moon Stealing as low resolution (transferred from VHS) version, on Vimeo.
♦
In 1994 Adam Chodzko regularly smuggled a small Hi-8 camcorder into cinemas in order to try to ‘steal’ any imagery of the moon that might appear within the background skies of feature films. This peculiar and specific form of video piracy was partly driven by Chodzko imagining a future where the only reason people went to the cinema would be to look for the appearance of moons in films. Perhaps his activity anticipated ritual form of mourning, an act of retrieval, since the actual moon had somehow disappeared from human visibility?
Sitting in the auditorium with the rest of the audience, Chodzko would attempt to surreptitiously record a camera zoom into, or out of any moons that appeared on the screen, while ignoring (or overlooking) the intended subject of the scene, the film’s content. Through editing together these illegal moments of wonky entrances into, and exits from, the moon’s presence in feature films the viewer is therefore transported from one cinema, audience, and film, to another. The moon becomes a transition point or gateway, cutting between individual cinematic narratives and fragmenting dialogues between characters. The lunar, as celestial source of light in the darkness of night, has the power to mesmerise, and entrance, catalysing serenity or energy in those that pause to stare at it. Here, as consistent motif in Moon Stealing, this glow appears to bring these disparate (earthly) moments together.
Often the fleeting moment of a moon’s appearance in a feature film would be missed by Chodzko, unable to discreetly aim his camcorder towards the correct location on the screen and press ‘record’ in time. He would then have to return to the same film several times in order to finally capture it’s fleeting appearance. Like a moth’s persistent attraction to a light Chodzko’s cinematic phototaxis, a lunacy, also sometimes ‘misread’ the presence of moons in the highlight of an eye, or a reflection in a pearl necklace or a car’s headlight. The zoom into the grain of the projected film dematerialises all matter and makes any small, circular beam of light apparently become lunar. These projected intense spots of light are also, of course, an echo of the bright beam of a cinema’s projector situated behind the audience.
Finally, a ‘real’ moon (rather than one captured ‘second-hand’), recorded outside the Clapham Picturehouse cinema after watching a film, ends Moon Stealing.
What is it about the visuality of the moon, (when we notice that the moon looks ‘good’), that causes us to stop and say to each other ‘look at that moon!’ in a way that we rarely do with the sun? This momentary pause in order to wonder interrupts our activities on the earth and allows a second or two of silence, calmness and awe, at something beyond us and despite us, before we return back to ourselves to continue our everyday activities.
Moon Stealing is partly an exploration of where our attention is held, suspended or lost. The work is bookended by parts of the 18 second Pearl & Dean animation (used in cinemas from the 1970’s – late 1990’s). Its blue and white graphic imagery and accompanying iconic and ecstatic music crescendo – “Asteroid” – announced the start of the viewing programme, pulling our attention away from the social space of the auditorium to direct it towards the screen and its imminent film. Chodzko extends, stretches and distorts the opening few seconds of the drum roll in the Pearl & Dean intro so that it lasts for the duration of Moon Stealing. In fact it appears that the whole activity of ‘stealing moons’ occurs within this dragged out preliminary event, the opening second of an 18 second ubiquitous branding advert announcing a series of other advertisements that appear prior to the main event; the feature film.
The illicit nature of the Moon Stealing activity, in relation to captured and ‘smuggled’ light, relates to Chodzko’s series Flashers (1996), while the notion of an archive or collection of bright circles or holes, detected or cut into multiple disparate images, then becoming the transition point between them, occurs in Sleepers. Hole (2012) and Sleepers (2016). (The form of the hole appear in many of Chodzko’s works including Hole (as ‘mistake’ in the wall of a museum), Somewhere Else, In Order to Complete Them (geothermal holes in the earth), in Around and cell-a (as holes dug into the ground, revealing or concealing archives) and in Secretors (holes as punctures in gallery walls, seeping fluid)). The sense of looking awry, ‘in ‘the wrong place’, into the periphery of an image, or space, also occurs in works such as Secretors (1993), and in relation to cinema in Loose Disclaimer (2000), From Beyond (1995), Reunion; Salò (1998) etc. An interest in a nocturnal creativity is also shown in works such as Nightvision (1998) and Night Shift (2004) and The Dreamshare Seer (2024-). Knots (2013) begins with a moon (stolen from a Pasolini film) that is perceived in relation to a navel, both imagined by Chodzko as objects inspiring a longing for ‘home’.♦
Moon Stealing:
Excerpt from Chodzko’s log of rushes taken during the moon capturing process: 1994Tape 1
Counter reset to 00:00 at end of Kieślowski section.
00:24 Universal ‘Sky’
06.30 Rain, Night, Roof, Bright Light
10:57: Stargate
11:40 Moon
23:59 ‘He walked toward the light’
28:20 Real Moon: Clapham Common
41: Real Moon: Flat
47:20 Shallow Grave: movement through wood
50:00 Car headlights in wood
59: Natural Born Killers Stars “I see angels”
1:02:27 Sky (brief)Tape 2
Natural Born Killers
Half way through: shamanic part
00:27 Flicker of flames: flaring tree and chanting
04:47 Moon and clouds “some sin, some awful secret thing”
17:44 “ I’m not getting anything off this” as the screen goes blank
22:00 Credits, Leonard Cohen song: people talking in audience.
1:17:48: La Reine Margot : People with torches gallop away from camera
1:19:08: Pearl necklace and grief
1:19:19: Madness of King George: moon
1:30:21: Moon’/Light Him… “They kneel down in front of the whole congregation”
“Do you believe in God?”
1:30:31: Lights as moons: “Look at those big eyes see what you mean to me”
“Let’s just be rational about this.”Tape 3
Ed Wood:
05:18 Opening credits… strong percussion… Move through graveyard….rain….trees
flying saucers, flash of lightening zoom in on light
08:17 Clouds as painted backdrop, laughter, angel : “I’m offering you mortals the bird of peace so you can end this destruction’
11:25. Zoom in to light between people (Good moon!!) “so, when you get in there, shake his legs around…it looks like he’s killing you” Audience laughterTape 4
Atom Egoyan Exotica:
00 14 Walking through grass “It seems so surreal doesn’t it? Cough, then off. “did you find anything”?♦
Related works:
A Plan for the Perfect Night (1992)
Mask Filter (2013)
Nightvision (1998)
O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix (2020)
Secretors (1993 – )
Sleepers (2016)
Suddenly we all began… (2013)
