For Same Old Story, Willie Doherty has employed a professional crew, enabling him to add experimentation with the sophistication of Steadicam to a mix of handheld tracking and long, fixed video shots. The results, two series of short narratives, held on laser discs, are projected teasingly, disorientatingly, just out of synch, in a dark space, on to opposing angled screens to an accompaniment of a soundtrack, crashing with exaggeration and distortion. Feet rush through undergrowth, coming to what might be a bomb crater, a burnt out car. We, voyeurs, pace restlessly with this unseen figure across Derry's bridges. At night, someone keeps survey on a lit window. A trashed house is scanned. The camera sits high above the night-time city as car headlights track between the static light of lampposts.
Doherty's purpose is clear enough. He asks us to ask ourselves are we the voyeurs, or the surveyed? Or are those the roles of the rarely glimpsed figure? Are we breaking his code in writing our story to fit the visual clues, uniting the sequences? Or have we made unfounded assumptions based on the cliches and shorthand references so ingrained by many years of television reporting of "the Troubles"? Trouble is, though the effect is genuinely disturbing, the artist, in employing sophisticated visuals, is entering a world where the big studios can scare us any day. Trouble too is that Chris Marker investigated some of these themes - via stills - in La Jetee, 30 plus years ago.
Runs until October 11th
