Discipline, uniformity, unthinking obedience – these are the sorts of values being inculcated in the young cadets at a military camp just outside Liverpool, in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s strange new film, ‘Rudiments’. You watch the soldier-children being drilled in formation or practising drumming routines.
Yet there’s also another whole side to the film, with the intermittent appearance of a character seemingly straight out of medieval, burlesque theatre: a sinister, jester-like figure played by a woman wearing a grotesquely padded, hunchbacked white leotard – think a cross between Mr Punch and some straitjacketed mental patient. Leering, mincing, gurning, performing buffoonish antics or lewd sex mimes, she acts as a sort of satirical sprite, an agent of misrule and mischief whose emotional excesses disrupt the atmosphere of buttoned-up authority. Sure enough, the cadets appear to come under her influence, rehearsing pratfalls to the rhythm of crashing cymbals, or singing maudlin pop ballads while she weeps uncontrollably.
This sense of a clash between two different, distinctly choreographed realms is effective, if at times a touch too neat or schematic. Elsewhere, other works continue to combine military themes with jarring strangeness. Photographs depicting what look like clumps of rock or glassy minimalist objects turn out, respectively, to be of American Civil War bullets that improbably collided and fused in mid air, and contemporary, hi-tech sighting prisms – though of course you need to be told these facts in order to interpret the images. In that sense, perhaps the most successful piece, certainly the most self-explanatory, is the performance in the front gallery where drummers, acting in shifts, execute a continuous drumroll for the show’s entire duration – so that you’re constantly immersed in a sort of heady, sonic duality, a mixing of martial precision and theatrical suspense.
Gabriel Coxhead