All about Eve's epic women.

THE RAPE OF THE SABINE WOMEN

BY EVE SUSSMAN AND THE RUFUS CORPORATION

80 MINUTES, 2006

With a title like The Rape of the Sabine Women, the viewer anticipates a nasty ending. In the case of Eve Sussman's recent filmic effort, a reference to Jacques-Louis David's painting, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, the camera eye meanders through several visual skeins suggesting subterranean male and female power struggles before delivering an operatic, dust-filled climax that is more Pina Bausch than down-and-dirty ravishment.

Sussman, who served up frisson at the 2004 Whitney Biennial with her video 89 Seconds of Alcazar (2004), based on Diego Velasquez's 1656 royal family portrait Las Meninas, is obviously interested in making electronic connections between epic narrative paintings and potentially epic video art. The Intervention of the Sabine Women, completed in 1799 after the French Revolution, brought David to the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte who commissioned him to paint heroic large-scale portraits. At over 12 by 17 feet, The Intervention of the Sabine Women hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris like a small movie screen.

As demonstrated by the "Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880-1910" exhibition at New York University's Grey Art Gallery in 2006, the links between filmic art and paintings have been in place since the invention of photography. In this show, framed works in oil by Winslow Homer, Frederic Remington, and John Singer Sargent alternated with turn-of-the-century film clips by Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, and the Lumiere Brothers, shown digitally on flat-screen televisions. That each of the early clips is only minutes long helped to underscore the thematic and stylistic connections between one era's media and the next.

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At a running time of 80 minutes, Sussman's recent epic video travels through a layered encyclopedia of art historical and cultural references, not all of which can possibly be decoded in one sitting. My first experience of 89 Seconds of Alcazar occurred at the unveiling of the new Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 2004, where the intriguing, dream-like painting-come-to-life could be seen in multiple doses by roving through the gallery. Despite the visual allure of The Rape of the Sabine Women, being held captive for an 80-minute theatrical screening of interweaving, sculptural images of men and women in various locations including the Pergamon Museum on Greece's Hydra Island, Berlin's S-Bahn and Tempelhof Airport, Athens's Agora meat market and Herodion Theatre, and a modern house overlooking the Aegean Sea proved much more challenging. While well-schooled in viewing experimental, "difficult" films by the likes of Chantal Ackerman, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Chris Marker, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others, I found myself in continental drift while watching Sussman's "video-musical," waiting for a climax that finally comes in the outdoor ancient Greek theatre scene, just a few minutes before the end.

Despite her reference to David's hyper-charged, theatrical painting, which is its own kind of color-based movie, and its Romulus-founding-Rome subtextual thread, Sussman's The Rape of the Sabine Women wanders listlessly through parties of well-groomed men and women holding cocktails and cigarettes, without making contact. Perhaps this is her point; it is Sussman's interpretation of a seething, almost bored-to-the-point-of-aggression undercurrent in male/female relationships. Arranged ostensibly as a five-part opera with an original score by Jonathan Bepler that includes a "coughing choir," sounds of clanging butcher knives, and a bouzouki ensemble, the video begins in a gallery of classic Greek statues. From there, the languid movement proceeds to an Alfred Hitchcock deja vu in disconnected reflections of men and women in the highly modern glass panels of Tempelhof Airport. Conceived by Sussman and the collaborative Rufus Corporation as a "process piece" resulting in 140 hours of video footage and 6,000 digital stills, the five operatic parts are not clearly delineated as such. Referential fragments repeat and return, sometimes in once-removed versions as pixilated clips shot from television screens. While it is tempting to let the camera rip in this way, the value of overshooting must be questioned, particularly when the hermetic end result is still rather long, even for the art-initiated.

Seeing this film looped in the context of a museum or gallery or public outdoor projection/party event would have been preferable, where the most intriguing visuals could be absorbed through repeat glances, reentries, and access to various angles of view. The nonnarrative quality of Sussman's work deserves appreciation in a nonnarrative context. Undoubtedly, given her exhibition record, this work will find its way into a museum collection as an installation.

Sitting in the movie theatre in linear time, the viewer waits for a payoff of narrative meaning, even if it is a dreaded one suggested by the title. That said, the film's operatic conclusion, shot in the ancient open air Herodion Theatre with choreography by Claudia de Serpa Soares, possesses moments of full Technicolor vividness in 1960s-nostalgic crowd patterns combined with smoky references to battle scenes by David, Goya, and even Steven Spielberg.

KATHLEEN SWEENEY is a media artist and adjunct professor at Marymount Manhattan College and the New School in New York City. Her book, Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age is forthcoming from Peter Lang Publishing.