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Zygosis

A film by Gavin Hodge and Tim Morrison. 1991. VHS video. 26 minutes. Color. Available from First Run / Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, 21st Floor, Brooklyn NY 11201. Website: http://www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A. E-mail:
ballast@netins.net.

I should explain at the outset, since (unfortunately) the title of this film does not, that this is a biography of a German political satirist named John Heartfield (1891-1968). In recent years, there have been countless discussions about the corruption of "photographic evidence" because photographs can now be changed "seamlessly" (undetectably) with clever software programs. One of the classic examples of this was a composite image on the cover of TV Guide magazine in 1989, in which the head of Oprah Winfrey was digitally transplanted on the sexier torso of actress Ann-Margret. (The public might never have noticed had it not been for the latter's husband, who recognized his spouse's ring.) In the wake of that controversy, I was reminded of "doctored photographs" from the days before computers, in which, through a process called "photo-montage," various political foes could be extracted from photographs of historic scenes, as was done by Stalin when he removed Trotsky from a view of a rally with Lenin. I also thought of the related (yet radically different) effects that were achieved by Heartfield, who was a well-known practitioner of montage for political causes. Actually, while Heartfield is in fashion at the moment, as recently as a dozen years ago, he was more or less unknown, at least in the U.S. Before and during World War II, he had courageously opposed the policies of Adolf Hitler (twice fleeing for his life), but Heartfield himself was a Marxist and an outspoken opponent of Capitalism, and thus was despised or neglected–cut out of our own books on the history of Modernism–until after the Soviet Union collapsed. His big revival came about in 1991, more than twenty years after his death, when a major touring exhibition enabled his original work to be shown in Germany, England, Ireland, Scotland and New York. As an exhibition catalog, a lavishly beautiful book was produced. It is interesting that this documentary film about Heartfield was also made in 1991, so, although there is no indication of that, perhaps these two events were linked. Unlike Oprah Winfrey's gloss, Heartfield's doctored photographs were anything but seamless. They were outrageously blatant distortions, made by juxtaposing bits of unrelated photographs, the cut-and-paste equivalents of caricature and editorial cartoons (although, in terms of Heartfield's work, it is probably better to think of them as editorial assaults or assassinations, which he does with no shortage of humor). To my knowledge, this is the only film about John Heartfield; it is also greatly interesting, largely because of the way it was made. It doesn't just talk about or show Heartfield's method; it emulates it. And I think that's what pushes it over the edge. It often feels as if it were edited by John Heartfield himself, although of course that is not literally true. I am not alone in thinking that this is an extraordinary film: In 1991 and 1993, not surprisingly, it won three very deserving awards at American and international film festivals.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 19, No. 1, Autumn 2003.)

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