I checked out the bill viola book from the library and was very excited to read it. within the first page I find an interesting note. In it it mentions a work called Anthem, talking about an 'archaic scream
of a girl in the empty concourse of the Union Railroad Station in Los Angeles' and I was confused. I found the work on youtube and it chilled me to the bone. he had slowed down the audio of a little girl's scream and it sounded so inhumane but also very humane at the same time. I haven't even watched the whole thing yet and I am emotional. It really hit me. If I were to make video work this is the kind of work I would want to do.
The whole quote from the book:
Anthem is a post-industrial lamentation, structured on the single piercing scream of a young girl as she stands in the vast chamber of Union Station in Los Angeles. Viola relates this structure to the form and function of religious chants, particularly Gregorian chants (using a harmonic scale in a resonant hall) and Tantric Buddhist chants (ritual exorcism and conversation with demons). The original scream is extended in time and shifted in frequency to produce a scale of harmonic notes that comprises the soundtrack, to which Viola juxtaposes images of materialism -- industry and the worship of the body, giant oil pumps and the beating human heart, cars streaming along a freeway and blood flowing through veins, modern surgical technology and tree branches in an ancient forest. The anguished scream cuts through the corporeality of the body and contemporary culture as a living organism. For Viola, the piece is a ritual evocation of "our deepest primal fears, darkness, and the separation of body and spirit."
of a girl in the empty concourse of the Union Railroad Station in Los Angeles' and I was confused. I found the work on youtube and it chilled me to the bone. he had slowed down the audio of a little girl's scream and it sounded so inhumane but also very humane at the same time. I haven't even watched the whole thing yet and I am emotional. It really hit me. If I were to make video work this is the kind of work I would want to do.
The whole quote from the book:
p.13 The scream I have just spoken of, this expression of the body in the face of an overwhelming emotion, this archaic scream of a girl in the empty concourse of the Union Railroad Station in Los Angeles, occurs in Anthem, 1983, in response, as it were, to the escalator that moves rhythmically , smoothly, and with the utmost elegance. This scream is violence, as Jean Genêt defines it: “Violence and life are virtually synonymous. The sprouting corn breaking through the icy soil, the sparrow’s beak piercing the shell of the egg, the impregnation of a woman, the birth of a child - all testify to violence,” The girl’s scream goes right through us, repeating itself and constantly starting afresh. The scream is the will to live.
------The piece centers on a single piercing scream and on the extension of this scream by a little girl eleven years old under the engine shed at Union Railroad Station in Los Angeles. This initial cry, which only lasts a few seconds, is prolonged in time and its frequency is profoundly transformed and multiplied by the use of slow motion. This spasm of sound is the invisible container of a stretched-out time and space, a universal breath. Thus, although the picture shows the little girl to be the source of the sound, the shriek extends well beyond the contours established by her body, spreading and flowing like a dark fluid, and mingles with all the sirens in the town, with every shout and with the noises of the rising irrepressibly from below. These are mnesic images, "all centered on the theme of primitive fear of the dark, materialism and the harmful separation of body and mind" (Bill Viola).-----