Arbeit

Artist: Duncan Campbell
(2011)

Working with found footage, photographs and his own filmed material, the films of Duncan Campbell provide accounts of historical figures that, in their conflicted structural forms, acknowledge the limitations of their means. Campbell’s new film, Arbeit, lies within this trajectory of structuralist biopics, focusing on the influential German economist Hans Tietmeyer: former head of the Deutsche Bundesbank and one of the architects of the Euro. Tietmeyer’s biographic particulars and economic philosophies are chronicled in a brisk, professorial soliloquy, which is alternately indicting and meandering. About halfway through the film, an image of the German chancellor Helmut Schmidt begins to be obscured by smoke and a circular pattern of black rings burns through the photograph. The image alludes to Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971), a film composed of a series of such photographic combustions and an accompanying narration that describes the image yet to be seen. Echoing this structure of  (nostalgia), Campbell’s examination of the European financial crisis is both a formal and conceptual treatise on images, history, revision and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.