 Hello, everyone. Thank you, Martha. Thank you, Aliyah, for organizing today and last night. Taylor Hobson is an almost PhD candidate in history of art at Brynmore College. His dissertation, which is tentatively entitled Expanded Theatres, Reconfigured Screens, Projection in the Installations of Douglas Gordon, Jim Campbell, and Janet Cardiff is in progress. He received a master's degree in art history from the University of Georgia and has worked at the press office of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Hi, thank you, Hommay, and thanks for everybody at the Barnes and everyone participating. This has been a really great day, and it's great to meet everybody. John Ford's 1956 film, The Searchers, holds a unique position as a critical and popular standard bearer of a contentious Hollywood genre. The Western is often cited as an example of studio era Hollywood's irresponsible historical and social revisionism. Here, the American frontier is reimagined as a binary of savagery against civilization, a caricature which excuses travesties committed against Native Americans. Yet The Searchers has avoided much of this criticism, in part due to its characters psychological complexity. Although the film features the genre's token settings and figures including its most famous leading man, John Wayne, the conflicts in which these settlers find themselves suggest a chronic lack of power. The film begins with a home invasion and the murder of almost all the characters initially introduced. Afterward, Ethan Edwards, played by Wayne, goes looking for his abducted niece Debbie, who remains a captive as a presence always just beyond the visible horizon. This search thus faces the aggressive antagonist of the Comanche Raiders, but also of the American wilderness itself. The fears of the white male are not suppressed in characters like the racist and vengeful Ethan, who would rather murder his kidnapped niece, now gone native, than rescue her. A constant sense of alienation and disorientation during the search renders the very achievement of its goals questionable. In such divestment of authority, from its heroes, invites the viewer of the film to interrogate the genre at large. And yet the focus away from fast-paced action might puzzle some audiences. Scottish artist Douglas Gordon recalls his childhood and asking his father how a film could be about nothing. Quote, he tried to explain to me that the film was not at all about nothing. It was about searching and waiting and waiting and searching and hoping when all hope is gone and how this was a very important thing in life. End quote. And this is all to say that the searchers takes its time. If not slowly paced, the film foregrounds its narrative duration in a way that makes viewers reflective. Is this a typical Western? Does it subvert or perpetuate the genre's common social criticisms? The searchers quietly deflects these questions back onto its spectator. Five year drive-by originally conceived by Douglas Gordon in 1995 but only shown in part relies on common home video technology to slow down a copy of Ford's movie. Extending its typical two hour runtime to five years. The time spent searching within the fiction of the film. The proposal suggests an outdoor screening in the American West which is later specified as Monument Valley, Utah. The favorite shooting location of John Ford and one used for much of the searchers. Gordon would thus surround the film with the landscape of its original setting where daylight would inevitably threaten visibility. This spatial condition effectively aligns the screening of the movie with its screened images, further connecting the viewer's experience to that of the film's narrative. In fact, I argue that five year drive-by transfers the searchers' anguish and hope outward and onto the installation's formal elements. Gordon's prolonged screening dissolves the searchers' narrative continuity within an excess of time. The film's opening shot establishes a point of view with Martha, the matriarch of the doomed Texas family. However, this domestic alignment is only the first in the sequence of shots. Martha's gaze pushes outward with the camera, but is cauterized by a reverse shot of Ethan as her implied object. At 16 minutes per frame, this visual dialogue between Martha's gaze and Ethan's approach is lost to the viewer. Gordon's deceleration likewise dissolves actors' dialogue, interactions, or any natural gesture. In lieu of associations between consecutive film frames, Gordon establishes a visual connection between the image within the screen and the landscape without. The open desert, here doubled, plays a role in pacing in the film's narrative. The trails followed in the searchers are swallowed up in the vast and dangerous southwestern landscape, obscuring concrete directionality. The film, too, features a cyclical structure. Its closing shot, for instance, finds Wayne's character leaving the home to which he returned in the first scene, and its framing recalls the opening to suggest a bookended tale of Ethan returning to the nomadic life from which he came. This unfolding of time has a filmmaking analog in editing. For the most part, the searchers avoid quick splicing and frenetic sequences. Instead, the cut as an ellipsis emerges as its characteristic maneuver, one which compresses time. Each gap that separates linear frames in a film reel is an opportunity for a cut away, but also for a connection. The searchers plays with this duality during several consecutive sequences that feature Wayne and his companions, tracking Debbie's captors. Ford's compositions are just different enough through this sequence to suggest a steady passing of time, but for hours, for days, we're not really sure. Suddenly, another cut finds the men among falling snow, and we are caught off guard. Nature tips us off to a more expansive and seasonal timeframe. The next scene, which is back among dry dust, confirms with dialogue that the first shot occurred one year ago. Where Ford used editing to disguise the tedium of a five-year period, Gordon reverses the process, exposing the spectator to that temporal vastness. But what does a restaging of the searchers' diagetic time actually preserve of its narrative effect? Ford's meandering setting remain, to be sure, but the plot of the searchers is far more direct. Ethan simply looks for Debbie. Emotion arises not from twists and surprises, but rather from the stoic persistence in the face of unbearable vastness of time and space. As the days pass, the chance of finding Debbie alive lessens, and so it is the duration of the search that heightens conflict within the film. Centered around its single, unwavering task, the action of the searchers is more accurately in action. Ethan rides, tracks, talks, looks, with only the occasional fight against a swarm of Comanche. And Ford undercuts the excitement of even these scenes, avoiding the frenzy of, say, a close-up of charging hooves for wider composition. Action does not take up space, it is encroached upon by towering mesas. Even the searching becomes more aligned with waiting. Constant traveling also resembles wandering. And yet the searchers is not boring. Rather, its narrative is driven by an acknowledged lack, a search for someone against the odds, odds which become increasingly antagonistic with every passing day. Like the overbearing rocks, the enormity of Ethan's goal sacrifices immediate action for a bigger picture. Gordon recalls his own frustration with the incongruity between diegetic time and the film's duration. Quote, how can one film, which lasts only two hours, possibly convey the fear, the desperation, the heartache, the real searching and waiting and hoping that my father had tried to explain to me? The film's stasis here underscores the mobility that's taken for granted in a traditional projection. Emphasizing narrative pace bites very absence. No longer immersed in the projected world, the once passive viewer film becomes what Laura Mulvey, borrowing from Raymond Ballour, calls a pensive spectator. Without the distraction of 24 frames per second, attention gives way to contemplation of one's own responses to these diffused images and of the time they bracket off in associations with or misremembrings of the original film. Mulvey's pensive viewing makes room within the viewer to consider the nature of cinema. Physically, however, Gordon's screening reroutes attention outward. Without constant stimulation, attention escapes to the world surrounding the image. Gordon further expands this increasingly public space to the natural world. His outdoor environment is anathema to theater experience in general, and yet it is intensely aligned with the searchers in particular. Gordon incorporates the landscape with a site specificity that relinquishes his projection to the desert. Less controlled than gallery-based installations, five-year drive-by recalls the monumental earthworks of Robert Smithson. Most famously, Smithson's 1970s spiral jetty inhabits a similar southwestern setting. Smithson also uses tools of appropriation and manipulation. He mines the earth for his natural materials, which he then rearranges and offers back to the land. The spiral also suffers deterioration from weather and erosion, not to mention its decades-long submersion within the Great Salt Lake. Gordon exposes the searchers to similar environmental challenges. He spotlights his geology with light, another material with overtly entropic properties, one that does not require eons of aging to expose its vulnerabilities. By pairing unsustainable porous light with the aggressively fluctuating western landscape, Gordon invites the destruction of his work. I would argue further that this outdoor placement becomes less significant in terms of geographical location, as much as that location susceptibility to the natural signifiers of time, the rise and fall of the sun on the earth. It is not space which causes the fluctuating visibility of the film, but rather time mediated through space. Gordon foregrounds the natural materials of cinema, bypassing the constructed shelter of the theater. His spectator faces the elements the earth made bare and essential, and viewing is robbed of the safe distance that buffers the theater from its screened past. As the immensity of the film is also made immediate, Gordon's description of Ethan's search resonates five long years. Five years of waning hope, but also an ebbing drive of life. I argue that by dismantling the theater, Gordon activates the drama of the search, defined by its five-year duration, and the anguish and determination it circumscribes. The duration as a hiatus, a waiting, a hoping, a suffering persists, both in the excruciatingly slow projection and in the desolate landscape on either side of the frame. Outside of the searchers, there is now only Monument Valley, whose geography conveys time more than solid matter. The sparse environment is defined by absence. A binary of rock and air testifies to evaporated waters in the footprints of negative space. The valley itself thus embodies the passing of time on an epic scale, biblical as the searchers has been described sometimes. The searchers still images conjure memories not only of the American frontier, but also of Hollywood in the 1950s, which presented spectacles for its audience on its own outdoor monument, the drive-in theater. Five-year drive-by still addresses us. It is long but not interminable. Its pace is still perceptible to a human viewer, even a distracted one who can only extrapolate the larger film. And so how is the searchers seen by Gordon's spectator? The image on screen would often double the surrounding landscape, but even in optimal drive-in conditions, the projection of a warm technicolor earth might appear artificial, oversaturated against its present-day incarnation. A close-up of Wayne fits in here, as Ethan is implicitly surrounded by the same canyons, though now his stoic heroicism tips over into an impotent stillness. Even a triumphant widescreen interior shot is shrouded by the surrounding valley. Despite domestic spaces within the searchers, shelters are never sanctuaries, only temporary refuges from the wilderness. Gordon aligns the domestic interior of 1868 with the movie house that projected its fantastic reimagining in 1956. Time pushes the viewer away from narrative and toward monument valley, where survival infringes upon enjoyment. If ruined in this desert, the spectator paradoxically never leaves the frame of the movie. Rather, the five-year interval immerses the viewer into the time and the space of the searchers. That search and the projection persists despite natural obstacles. Gordon's concept reduces a film to a billboard, a format that drew audiences to its first screenings. However, I would argue that this viewer is more than pensive. Mulvey's spectator is empowered by home viewing technology to pause film, rewind it. Gordon's audience is without control. Pauses simply become instead the new prescribed mode of viewing. Rather, five-year drive-by produces a stranded spectator. Driven out and abandoned, this viewer turns from the uninviting screen to an even less hospitable desert landscape. Thetidium remains a constant companion near towns like Tombstone and Deadwood, names like warnings, hence Gordon's suggestion that we simply drive by. With so little here to orient the mind, one is exposed, endangered, and lost. Yet it is this capacity of time to overwhelm the individual which drives the searchers. Ethan faces his odds head-on in the cyclone narrative of the film with a vow to find Debbie as the turnin' of the earth. And so, despite the alienation, even because of it, the film's desperation, fortitude, and faith become a lived experience. Lost in the desert, Gordon's nomadic cinephile resembles Ethan, who finds his stable home only to witness its invasion, who comes and goes with the wild Western landscape. But time also uncovers hidden artifacts. Five-Year Drive-By allows for the emergence of a marginalized character like the abducted Debbie. Natalie Wood appears only in relatively few frames in the film, but with Gordon's abstraction of the film, her presence as the search's objective grows immeasurably. Shadowed by her image within the Comanche camp, the stranded spectator also becomes a captive one. By relocating the site of projection, Gordon translates without words the psychological tensions of the film's premise to his spectator, who is lost in an open land that also threatens to enter its visitor. No longer captive, captivated, but rather held captive by the expanded film, the stranded spectator lives towards Western, one defined not by a showdown as much as a search. And the searchers renders even that act a passive one of waiting, of hoping, and holding out against time. Accordingly, Gordon constructs a screening that offers the film back to its origin, a vastness of nature that encroaches upon the individual, regardless of identity. Thank you.