This #FilmFriday’s feature is Julian Charrière’s film, Iroojrilik, 2016. Click the link below to watch on Vimeo for 24 hours from Friday, June 26 until Saturday, June 27. Join us on social media and tag @SeanKellyNY to share a pic of your at-home screening.
Charrière’s film captures the structures of the Bikini Atoll ́s atomic-industrial architecture decay. The nuclear legacy of the Bikini Atoll began in March 1946 when the US Army and Navy began joint testing of the effect of nuclear weapons on naval warships, a program known as Operation Crossroads. It was the first of many to be conducted in the area. Bikini Atoll is one of the 29 atolls and five islands that comprise the Marshall Islands, a sparsely populated, low-lying Pacific island country consisting of approximately 70 sq. miles of land spread out over 750,000 sq. miles of ocean just north of the equator.
Iroojrilik is unquestionably the most unique and comprehensive perspective on the maritime ruins of Bikini ever made. Rather than analyzing individual vessels or buildings, the cumulative impression is that of an Atlantis or lost civilization – architectural features of one ship fuse together with those of others, making it appear as though a submerged megastructure has been discovered. The film employs a series of elisions and substitutions. Through the use of montage, mixing sunsets and sunrises, it proposes an uncertain distinction between daybreak and nightfall: the first light of a new day in Pacific history and the waning of another. Pictorial energies shift and sway between construction and destruction, transporting the viewer to a ‘non-place’, or the beginning of a brave new world.
Julian Charrière, Iroojrilik, 2016. 4K color video with stereo sound, sound by Edward Davenport, 21’3’’ (loop) © Julian Charrière Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York