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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 November 2024
A Long History of Madness
Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Mad Meg
Introduction: Beginning Becomes Entrance
This chapter concerns the condition of the viewer or visitor of exhibitions who is, literally, ‘placed’. Time yields its priority to space. The timebased art of cinema is also inevitably space-bound. In the project discussed here, the spatialisation of film is at stake in two different ways. On the one hand, the installation form makes film a spatial art. This will be demonstrated in a reflection on installation, compared to theatre film. On the other hand, once we are alerted to that spatial aspect and the transformation it makes for the viewer, we become sensitised to the spatial aspects of and in the films themselves. The places where the films are set become activated through that reflection. They end up being almost characters in their own right. Moreover, such a space becomes a miniature version of the social world.
The central image-thought work is a film I have made with British artist Michelle Williams Gamaker, A Long History of Madness (abbreviated as ALHoM, from 2011). This was the first fiction film we made, started in 2009. We decided to make ALHoM for a variety of motivations; primarily to get closer to ourselves. Having made many documentaries on issues of migration and identity, we felt the issues that came up in those did not leave us aloof. ALHoM concerns something that is, in fact, very ‘popular’: madness. It stages, performs, enacts and critiques (ideas about) madness and its cultural history. Given that subject, making a documentary was impossible, ethically as well as epistemologically, since the ‘mad’ cannot give informed consent. This was the reason we shifted to fiction. But there was also an occasion, something that made this shift plausible. This was the experience of making, in 2008, the documentary Becoming Vera. This film, the last documentary I made with Michelle, triggered our thinking about the thought-value of fiction. Although I made three more documentaries after this one, Vera stuck in my mind, admonishing me to believe more in the creative and socially productive yield of fiction.
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