Willie Varela: The World in the Window

Art & Trash, episode 7
Willie Varela: The World in the Window
Stephen Broomer, March 18, 2021

Willie Varela has been making personal, experimental films since 1971. This massive body of work includes environmental portraits, menacing omens, and experiments with abstract light forms. His films are informed by Chicano culture, Catholic iconography and ritual, and mass media, and are thus a nexus of regional identity, faith, and technological experience. They transcend the boundaries of formal and social investigation. In this video, Stephen Broomer considers these themes in two distinctive periods of Varela’s work: a selection of Varela’s diaristic super 8 films, made in the 1970s and 1980s, and a pair of Varela’s later videos, which abandon the quotidian experience of his earlier work to embrace broad concerns of judgment and redemption.

A DVD of Varela’s films and videos, Video Art by Willie Varela, was released by SubCine as part of their Chicano Cinema and Media Art series in 2013. It can be purchased here: http://subcine.com/product/video-art-by-willie-varela/ This work has also been made publicly available on Vimeo.

This text originated as an introduction to Varela on the occasion of his visit to Toronto for the AluCine Festival, a screening programmed by Broomer featuring the works discussed herein.

SCRIPT:

Willie Varela has been making personal, experimental films since 1971. This massive body of work includes environmental portraits, menacing omens, and experiments with abstract light forms. His films are informed by Chicano culture, Catholic iconography and ritual, and mass media, and are thus a nexus of regional identity, faith, and technological experience. In this, they transcend the boundaries of formal and social investigation.

Varela has described his early super 8 films as "domestic in nature ... concerned with the rhythm and the movements, the colour and the light of daily life." Varela's dailyness marks these films as a record of a life of closely examined visuality.
In his early abstract films, such as Becky's Eye, a modulating coloured light suggests, at times, a gradient iris, or an inflamed sclera, and even when these rhythms are slowed, the film remains ambiguous in its content. Becky's Eye is also unique for its ambiguity: light abstraction remains indicative of a concrete thing -- an iris, a lash -- just barely escaping perception. Such abstraction announced one theme of Varela's filmmaking, the expression of feeling, both spiritual and emotional, and of time, both mythic and present, through a transforming light.
This theme carries forward into Varela’s diaries, for example, in March 1979. Elusive, silhouetted figures, refracted light forms, the leaves of houseplants, and the unrestrained bobbing of a caged bird, combine as the collected impression of a single morning, a waking of the world.

Ghost Town is a study of wrecked buildings, Varela's camera panning across the strange beauty of the rusted metal, broken glass, and rotting wood, eventually discovering another symbol of time, a tree that Varela animates by his own dynamic movement.
Recuerdos de flores muertas continues this theme of finding beauty and terror in a ruinous environment. It is filmed in an old cemetery, where Varela bears witness to the wounds, both sculpted and incidental, of sculptures of Christ that are missing fingers and hands. All of this is seen in the shadow of a highway overpass and with the sounds of traffic and plane engines whirring in the distance.
In Progress, among the most haunting of Varela's films, compiles scenes from medical films; observations of street life; scenes of protest in San Francisco, the resonance of Harvey Milk's assassination; and images from mass media (of break dancing, rocket launches, Ronald Reagan), all bounded by the characteristic skip of the television set's signal. Varela's camera captures street musicians and commuters cropped in the sharp and often mirrored surfaces of the San Francisco cityscape. The apocalyptic omens on the television cast a grim shadow, a shadow that is already upon us in the fracturing, dehumanizing witness of Varela's own solitary protest march.

As Varela moved on from super 8 filmmaking, and began to work with video from the 1990s onward, the spiritual and autobiographic concerns of his work remained, in contemplation of sacred and profane experience. His Hidden Presence continues the multiform, 'found' image construction of In Progress. A collage soundtrack of electronic beats, a distorting, looping horn, and a loop of the Velvet Underground, accompanies surreal and horrific scenes of wrestling and crucifixions, as well as diaristic photography.
Willie Varela’s early work had been marked by the artist’s terror and outrage. Varela’s films dealt with scenes of daily life (in El Paso and San Francisco), an autobiographical sensibility (which casts him, like so many artists, under the sign of a bleeding Christ), and plastic manipulation. While these characteristics of Varela’s work have often been set to the service of love, charity and the noble aspiration of trading visions and experiences, they are also marked by a pageant of death, a legacy of wounds, and a fury, provoked by injustice and the devaluation of human life and perception.

This Burning World (2004) is Varela’s response to, among other things, the 9/11 terror attacks. But put more broadly, it is a vision of an ossifying global society, driven toward death, terrorism, environmental destruction, aspiring toward the end of life on earth. Varela gathers images that reflect mortality—graphic medical procedures, pornography, news images of the towers falling. The world that he shows is one of greed and death; there is no reprieve. This stance is intensified through the film’s dual screens, a diptych of onrushing horrors.
Synthesized televisual signals, sometimes forming symmetries, combine with film strips that have been painted a messy, bloody red, to form a recurring visual theme. Against this, scenes of professional wrestling, the fated Kennedy motorcade, Ku Klux Klan rallies, an invasive eye operation, and planes colliding with the World Trade Center, come to embody the title, a burning world of miseries, all the worst of humanity. Late in the video we are confronted with the word ‘redemption’, cast in the commercial lettering of a storefront name; even redemption must be sold.
This Burning World is largely unified with Varela’s other work in video—his rhythms is staggered by a slow shutter, and his manipulation of contrast emphasizes the plastic qualities of digital renderings of light. These acts reflect Varela’s embrace of the elasticity of video time, which can stretch in infinitesimal ways but which soon no longer resembles that familiar imitation of life. They also reflect his embrace of the bleed of video light, which is distinct in its flatness, in its natural consonance with commercial images. This Burning World rejects depth, in part because it has been assembled out of surface-deep images, rephotography and ready symbols; but it also rejects depth in such a way that the dual screens become inflexible, so that the video images assume the impenetrable bah-relief of stone carvings.
  Varela’s use of the diptych form suggests many things: an endorsement of dispersed attention, a citation to picture-in-picture news media, an act of forced similitude or equivalence. Unlike Warhol’s treatment of the diptych, Varela is not ambivalent to these images, which shift between personal observation, archival materials, commercial and news images, a declaration of his defiance and outrage. In practice, the dual screen is polyphonic, occasionally receding into pure abstraction, and the calming effect of these abstract images—of pure white and blue symmetries, or of light patterns and refractions, or even just a pulsing screen—are countered by our confrontation with scenes that devalue life and perception.
But to counter is not necessarily the intention in joining these screens; this is not a game of contrasts between rich valuations of human perception and scenes of despair. The whole of This Burning World is weighted down by heavy omens, that this age of cruelty and menace is still only in its infancy.