A number of recent video installations by Omer Fast make distinctive use of the same cinematic figure: the travelling shot. ¹ Moving from left to right and back again, as regular as a pendulum, this lateral travelling is a vehicle of transition. It leads us without cut or suture from one scene to another: from apartment to apartment in De Grote Boodschap (the Big Message, 2007), or from a photographic studio to a funeral home in Looking Pretty for God (2008).

Repeated slowly several times, the movement of the shot also figures the narrative as an endless oscillation between description and fiction, or rather between documenting and fictionalising, in the performative sense of two actions - two ways of constructing a story. De Grote Boodschap threads several stories through four scenes, each featuring a pair of characters, drawing them along behind the needle's eye of the travelling camera that links the different rooms (kitchen, living room, bedroom) of the location. The travelling shot in Looking Pretty For God connects a funeral parlour to a photographer's studio, where make-up is being applied to children. Once more, the camera movement connects the narrative told through undertakers' voices to a series of sites that slowly follow one upon the other: from the coffin showroom to the embalming laboratory with its equipment, and then to the photographic studio where children are prepared to pose - corpses in potentia - for the artist in front of his camera, and onwards. But new associations render the narration more complex: the children, for example, are lip-synching the words of an undertaker. Similarly, in De Grote Broodschap, a fragment of conversation serves as a scene shifter. Repeated in room after room, the phrase 'It's not a problem' halts any chronological succession, producing a loop that even the death of one of the protagonists - 'a small bigot and a big addict', in the words of her step-grandson - leaves unbroken. We thus are faced with images that embody not lived time and space, but the rules and organisation of the narrative itself - a narrative that in De Grote Boodschap

echoes the video's refraction of stories of racism, sexism and addiction, constructed through observable power relations between people related by kinship or by neighbourly proximity. In both works the travelling shot as vehicle and figure makes both connection and the means of connection - content and container - visible on screen. In Fast's work the system of enunciation, the 'how' or 'whereby', is never far from the enunciated, the 'what' that it is supposed to tell before disappearing. The out-of-frame is granted equal status to the in-frame, always making manifest its cinematic nature - for example by showing that a studio is being used, or exploiting the camera's ability to traverse walls.

Yet works by Fast, who was born in 1972, do not represent a simple return to the compulsive 'truth to materials' one sees in experimental film of the 1960s and 70s, with their analysis of the components of the filmic apparatus (dispositif), or in installations of the same period that play on reflection or illusion, from Anthony McCall to Dan Graham. ² Nor do his works subscribe to the ethic of 'laying bare' the structure taught by the theorists of the 1970s. Even Spielberg's List (2003), perhaps of all his double-screen video installations the one that most clearly signals its intentions, still produces and sustains the bewilderment that is characteristic of Fast's work: at first sight, we cannot grasp what is being said by the people visible in the image. The context of the presentation of speech - speech on which the artist has 'operated', as if he were an embalmer - generates effects of instability, attenuation and opacity. What is she ranting about, this old lady on the screen, inverting causalities and mixing up times so that she finds herself describing an unspeakable position, one that puts her in a place - the crematorium - from which one does not return alive?

With the feature Schindler's List (1993), Steven Spielberg sought to film the unfilmable, representing the Holocaust in the form of a fiction underscored by a concluding encounter with the real. In making an identical reconstruction of a Nazi extermination camp in Kraków - on the very site of the crime - in order to show the struggle of the 'righteous', Spielberg intended to bring about a catharsis through spectacle. But this leaves out those who actually appear in the film: returning to Spielberg's locations in 2003, Fast found some of the Polish extras who played the role of Jews or Nazis and who also were old enough to have lived through the events themselves. They rehearse these roles in Spielberg's List, their originally elided speech bringing about the coincidence of two temporalities - that of the early 1940s, and that of the early 90s and the shooting of Spielberg's film. The trauma has not been repaired by its cinematic reconstruction. Remembrance of the event becomes overlaid by that of its reconstruction fifty years later: when the extras speak of the casting as 'selection', or when their recollection of the film's shooting mimics their memories of the camps, they come to figure as 'authentic witness[es] to a representation', as Fast puts it.³

The world is thus filmed in its potential to become a mere relic of itself. Again it appears as such, in even more spectacular fashion, in Godville (2004), an installation that interrogates history as 'theme-park' and a form of nostalgiaconsumption, or in Take a Deep Breath (2008), which juxtaposes the first-person account of a kiss-of-life between two mortal enemies with the experience of its reconstruction on film.

Presented on two screens, Godville consists of interviews with three inhabitants of the town of Williamsburg,Virginia, now a 'living history museum' of the American Colonial era. But in this reality-show (in which Thomas Jefferson, naturally, writes a blog), both past and present find themselves robbed of substance by Fast's filmic organisation. The woman and two men interviewed about their roles and lives at this institute of historical mimicry are portrayed as composite subjects, attenuated and spectral, unnerving and incomprehensible even at their most emotional. When the woman, for example, talks of her son's death in the War of Independence, we doubt whether the figure speaking is the character or the woman herself. Their speeches have been replaced by cutting and pasting fragments of sentences, invented words that were never said but which are rather produced by remixing consonants and vowels. This reanimation of language goes so far as to point out, with hostility, the power of manipulation and judgement inherent in the filmmaker's approach. The response the interviewees give to the question of why anyone would want to take on in their daily life the role of an American living in the eighteenth century shows how the current social hierarchy reproduces the patriarchal and religious model of the Colonial era (the women subordinated to the men, the blacks excluded socially and economically and God at the centre). The installation also shows us that the artist (like the viewer or reviewer) is not exempt from the constitutive action of what Michel Foucault called 'micro-powers'; moreover, he or she has the ability to make the video's subjects say anything he or she desires, thanks to the editing tools at his or her disposal.

Jumps in the image sequence express the fragmentation of the bodies and the voice, which is never fully or convincingly embodied. Fast splits apart the two aspects of representation - the signified and the signifying - producing a 'third' narration that offers, as Tom Holert argues in a recent essay, a 'problematisation' of the malleability of meaning not only in the aesthetic space but also in the socio-cultural domain. ⁴ This is made possible precisely by splitting the space of representation itself: the video unfolds on adjacent suspended screens, sometimes with projection on both sides. Omer Fast's works are not just filmic objects, but also installations with multiple screens and soundtracks which result in an expanded cinema that derives its pleasure from its many facets. This is what Fast offers, in radical fashion, in The Casting (2004), where a retrospective narrative of a double trauma (in Germany and in Iraq) told by a former US soldier is juxtaposed with a filmic performance, simultaneously represented by a casting session and a series of sketches in the form of filmed tableaux. With its two pairs of back-to-back screens, Fast's installation offers four surfaces occupied by representations that constantly rework the relation between visual material and verbal utterances without offering any definitive resolution.

As early as 2000, Fast's 20-minute looped video Glendive Foley separated a succession of filmed 'post-cards' of suburban houses in the US (following one another on one screen) from the soundtrack (the production of which is shown on a second screen, broken up into a grid of sub-frames). This second screen captures the artist wearing headphones and recording his voice mimicking birdsong, the buzz of insects and the sound of the wind: sound without words is used as the out-of-frame context for the blank houses. As impenetrable as still images (recalling Dan Graham's Homes for America, 1966), the shots of the houses nonetheless remind us, through minor incidents (a child, for example, passes on a bike), that this is film. The introduction of a temporal dimension into the image recalls, furthermore, the long-exposure of early photography, often staged in cemeteries, which required the subject to remain still. This tradition of the pose, like that of the tableau vivant - evoked in the casting, in the historical reconstruction and in the after-life at the embalmer's - is a question that haunts Fast's work, which is as concerned with the 'passing of the image' as with the pausing of images.⁵

Displacing, cutting, pasting, repeating, redoing, translating - all of Fast's installations thematise filmic procedures, most often by employing multiple screens to juxtapose rather than combine images, sounds, narratives and their interpretations. Exploiting every kind of interplay, gap, lag, mismatch or contradiction in and between image and sound, they generate a vertigo in which the technical-rhetorical devices of narration themselves take on narrative force, engaging the viewer. For as Jorge Luis Borges remarks, 'If the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious'.⁶

In A Tank Translated (2002), the errant subtitling in Hebrew of interviews with four members of an Israeli army tank crew shifts, in the blink of an eye, the meaning and status of the sentences. Each time a translated word pops up on the screen and is replaced by a demilitarised substitute (arms/athletes, munitions/music, tank/taxi, soldier/student, shooting/shocking, stopped/stared…), the fiction constitutive of the real is revealed. Spielberg's List similarly works through the doubling and dissociation, on two screens, of two distinct sets of subtitles that translate the same images and the same sound in different words: every term evoking the camps in one version (i.e. 'gate') finds its match in filmic terms (i.e. 'take'). ⁷ And so one comes to imagine, not without discomfort, the Hollywood director calling out 'Lights… Camera… Action!' on the set of the extermination camp, setting thousands of naked bodies into motion and then, over again: 'Take two!'

There is a word for works that, like Russian dolls, deconstruct both the narrative and narrator by including the forms that enunciate them: 'metalepsis' - a rhetorical figure that has been of particular concern to the French narratologist Gérard Genette since the early 1970s. Modern narrative theory in fact has adopted this classical Greek term to explore under its rubric the different ways the boundaries between narrative levels may be broken: between the narration and the narrative it produces, between the narrative and a secondary narrative nested within it, and so ad infinitum. For Genette, so strange and interesting are the possibilities it offers that in 2004 he devoted a whole book to the topic under the title Métalepse: De la figure à la fiction. There the term is employed to designate every 'contamination' of one narrative level by another, as when for example the person who tells a tale appears within it, or inversely. The device is not restricted to literary fiction and can be seen in theatre, cinema and television - as the book's publisher's blurb has it, 'everywhere where the narrative representation of the world, from Homer to Woody Allen, puts itself into the picture, into play and sometimes into danger'. ⁸ Following its renewed currency in the 1970s, the term metalepsis has been applied to many different scenarios, and finds a number of spellbinding embodiments, such as when the film actor Ronald Reagan appeared in the guise of the most powerful leader of the Western world. Thirty years later, in a world of hyperreality, political 'storytelling', reality TV and performative re-enactments from Homer to Omer (Fast), the figure of metalepsis seems to hold undivided sway, permanently blurring the shifting boundaries between two worlds: 'the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells'. ⁹

It is in this world and of this world that Omer Fast speaks: a world that in its delirious historicism has made the fictional as real as the real. But in Fast's work the figure of metalepsis also, and perhaps above all, is used to inscribe death in fiction. Death appears everywhere in his videos. At the very least, it is a theme in all his works made since CNN Concatenated (2002), in which death appears as the subliminal message produced by the paranoiac juxtaposition of anodyne televisual images. The mass death of Spielberg's List; the death by heritage of Godville; the individual, random, accidental death of an Iraqi civilian in The Casting; death as ellipsis in De Grote Bootschap; death as cosmetology in Looking Pretty For God. And who is it that makes this death presentable, if not the one behind the display of dead bodies restored to the realm of the living? In Looking Pretty for God, the embalmer describes his work as being 'somewhere between make-up artistry, plastic surgery, sculpture, deception, PR and magic'. A fine evocation of the artist.

Look. I know you're scared. I know what you're afraid of. You mistrust your body. [...]You worry that this knowledge will arrive at your very last moment not as a spiritual revelation accompanied by an overwhelming cascade of sensations but as a very public and vulgar betrayal. You're afraid of dying alone but you're even more terrified of dying in public.. ¹⁰

In CNN Concatenated death is signified by a compulsive staccato montage of words, phonemes and pauses for breath sampled from ten thousand hours of images recorded from the 24-hour news channel, all uttered by male and female presenters who are substituted one for another, in one long chain of identical links. A metadiscourse of breath and words takes force rather than form in this montage, which builds the anxious rhythm of an urgent harangue, subliminal and paranoid, uttered in the first person and addressed to 'you', a spectator that is both specific and anonymous. With its look, its stars, its round-the-clock operations, its vocabulary, its intonation and its dramaturgy, CNN is news as theatre, a theatre here infiltrated by Fast. In his pirate compilation these talking heads, stiff while reading the teleprompter but not quite actors, succeed each other on screen in accordance with a mechanical rhythm. This procession constructs a discourse 'between the lines', in the manner of the tradition evoked by the philosopher Leo Strauss in his text Persecution and the Art of Writing¹¹ '[O]btrusively enigmatic features in the presentation,' such as the 'obscurity of the plan, contradictions, pseudonyms, inexact repetitions of earlier statements, strange expressions, etc.,' draw attention to truths the texts are not permitted to express. And this, surely, is the art of Omer Fast, as he addresses us between the lines.

Translated by Dafydd Roberts

— Elisabeth Lebovici