Chain, the first solo feature by film and video artist Jem Cohen, is a strange mix of documentary and fiction about malls and similar commercial spaces. It’s meditative rather than action packed, and the creepiness it exposes has as much to do with absence as presence. But it deserves more attention than the single local screening it’s getting at Columbia College. I suspect it’s not getting more because it was partly funded by European television, because distributors never know how to package films that merge documentary and fiction, and because it belongs to the netherworld between film and art (it’s playing in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s exhibition “Manufactured Self”). It hasn’t even made the art-house circuit, which is a loss: it’s highly ambitious, has plenty to say, and is far from inaccessible.
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Chain was shot in 16-millimeter over six years in hundreds of malls around the world—Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, Melbourne. That it’s impossible to tell the malls’ locations is part of the point. “I began the project,” says Cohen in his press notes, “by deciding to focus on the corporate and commercial landscapes that I had previously ‘framed out’ in my filmmaking, and to try to understand how these places were affecting the people within them. Wal-Mart, for example, opens a new store roughly every two days and yet the actual sites of such developments often take on a strange invisibility. Their presence can begin to seem inevitable and even natural. Rather than examining this phenomenon through the facts, experts, and arguments of the traditional documentary, Chain tells the stories of two women as this environment shapes their lives.”
The two characters are conceived somewhat didactically as alienated zombies who embody different classes and cultures, convenient pegs on which Cohen can hang his observations and feelings about malls. He sees malls functioning as private, noncommunal spaces that isolate people from each other—one reason he shows his heroines alone, trapped in their own private worlds. (Cohen shot most of the film without the malls’ permission, which may have informed his depiction of Amanda’s fear of being observed and Tamiko’s spiritual isolation.)
Like The Savage Eye, Chain uses documentary images to create a powerful sense of time-capsule reality that’s often ethnographic and apocalyptic in its implications. The fictional reveries seem intended to anchor, understand, expand, and comment on that reality, which they do with varying degrees of success. As the film focuses on familiar, everyday details in the malls, it achieves a certain monumentality by making those details terrifying, forcing us to feel we’re in free fall, annihilating our sense of where we are.
Directed and Written by Jem Cohen
With Miho Nikaido and Mira Billotte
