There were WWI centenary commissions aplenty in 2014, but with the Tower of London poppies now gone, it feels as though the time for such memorial gestures is coming to a close. Except at the Imperial War Museum, that is, where meditations on conflict are an everyday occurrence, and where the magnificent, Great War-inspired short film by sisters Jane and Louise Wilson is part of the current contemporary programme. ‘Undead Sun’ has multiple layers of meaning and is testament to the time the Turner Prize-nominated artists spent in the IWM archives. Here they researched the development of optics technologies, such as aerial photography, and read first-hand accounts of cameramen working in the battlefields.
‘Undead Sun’ was filmed at the Farnborough wind tunnels, a former aircraft testing facility. The players are costumed but there is none of the nostalgia of re-enactment. The action happens in vignettes: figures with heads and bodies covered in camouflage rags interact with the wind tunnel’s great propellers; a soldier assembles a fake cannon (a reference to the decoys used to confuse the enemy); a wooden horse lies gutted on the ground. In the final scene, a soldier methodically rips the uniform from his body until he is naked. His movements are unhurried as he throws scraps on to the barbed wire in front of him then walks away. The only voice throughout is that of the female narrator, reading a composite script: ‘On the ground you can hide if you imagine the view of yourself as seen from above,’ she says in a strong German accent. ‘The elimination of the shadow is the essence of invisibility.’ These scenes are interspersed with block-colour animations of aviation experiments once conducted in the wind tunnels.
Meaning happens here at the point of abstraction; personal stories and historical moments are alluded to but never made explicit, and the result is a compelling, unsettling and quietly forceful narrative. The viewing room is standing-only, and the screen is partially obscured by iron-mesh walls, reinforcing the ideas around visibility and camouflage that permeate the film. The worry is that this effective yet potentially alienating set-up might keep people from taking the 13 minutes needed to watch the film, but they should – it’s more than worth it.
Ananda Pellerin