Dyddiau Du/Dark Days

One of the nice things about having time to spend in Venice is being able to see the several lengthy films included in this year's biennale. The UK’s representation is particularly film-heavy. England and Wales, for example, have produced beautiful, filmic works that are both well worth sitting through their 40 and 45 minutes respectively.

England's Steve McQueen has envisioned the giardini post-art. Emanating the eerie feeling of a stadium after a match, in this film, the giardini - evacuated - have been given over to a secretive world; human, animal, insect. The camera records with extreme attentiveness, layering a rich tapestry of shiny pebbles, confetti, leaves, and brightly-coloured insects. Huge ships suddenly appear, bizarrely, from behind trees, and the ground is covered with a band of thinly scouring Giacometti-like dogs that walk lightly among the piles of rubbish and leaves like shadowy spiders, barely touching the ground.

While McQueen's film takes the biennale's structures, both physical and imaginary, as subject matter, and is largely silent on any considerations of national representation, John Cale's work is an intimate confrontation with his home country, Wales. As the title, Dyddiau Du/Dark Days, alludes, the film suggests a fairly ambivalent bond. It is in turns both nostalgic and condemning. Building slowly between five screens, placed at awkward angles to each other in the cool dark of a disused brewery, its flickering, disjointed scenes show a ghost-like figure playing at an old upright piano; the floor of a disused slate quarry; Cale’s face contorted in effort as he climbs a Welsh mountainside. A soundtrack, aching, haunting, fades in and out. At times, the screens are left entirely blank.

Legendary for his part in the Velvet Underground, John Cale debuts as a visual artist with Dyddiau Du/Dark Days. The film, like McQueen’s, requires some staying power. Each screening is around 45 minutes in length. If you leave early, lulled into a false sense of security by certain wistful, quiet scenes, or overcome with frustration at its halting progress, you miss the sudden, brutal ending; the axis on which the film's underlying sense of unease turns.

John Cale's Dyddiau Du/Dark Days screened in a disused brewery on the island of Giudecca. The screen shots below are from the work.

Dreaming of the Vertigo - John Cale

Dyddiau Du Wales - John Cale

Maes-y-wern - John Cale

Send me away - John Cale

The making of Un-Pretty - John Cale