Peter Downsbrough

(New Jersey (USA), 1940)

Video: Occupied, 2000

Super 16mm blown up to 35mm film. B&W, sound
18 min.


          

"Occupied", 2000. Film still. Super 16mm blown up to 35mm. B&W, sound,
18 min.

"Occupied", 2000. Film still. Super 16mm blown up to 35mm. B&W, sound,
18 min.

In "Occupied", a visible human presence is dispensed with altogether, leaving the focus entirely on the built environment. The environment is made up of buildings, a plaza, a park, and a horizon, although it is the buildings that predominate. The title, however, suggests a certain irony. The giant building complex – the Cite Administrative-Administrief Centrum, in Brussels – is anything but occupied. Downsbrough’s use of language in this film is subtly reversed from his earlier use of it in the 1970s. Where in his earlier videos the elegant purity of language is eroded by the gritty specificity of the city, in Occupied the film seems to flow smoothly towards a certain resolution in language.