MACBETH: THE WITCHES SCENES

Mirosław Rogala’s video is imbued with a sense of things ending, characteristic of Western culture before the turn of the millennium. At the time, there was a heightened interest in the Book of Revelation, which became a tool for interpreting social unrest. William Shakespeare’s plays proved to be a similarly apt repository of symbols to explain reality. While the Apocalypse, which marked an ending, recommended a turn towards the future, Shakespeare’s works pointed towards the past, carrying splinters of the world that could be preserved.

In his interpretation of Macbeth, Rogala highlights the speeches of the weird sisters and gives the computer the power to foretell the future, building up interwoven visions of the end of the world and the world after the end. His narrative bears the hallmarks of dystopia. The witches are hybrid beings dressed in rags, with multiple breasts and beards on one side of their faces. Their moor is strewn with toxic waste, old electric devices and post-industrial ruins. In certain scenes, images of war appear on the screens. The figure of Macbeth is fragmented and pixellated, controlled by witches by means of a computer keyboard. The power is wielded by the technology the demons use to hasten disaster, which is depicted as instant vaporisation. Images disintegrate and fuse with no apparent continuity between them, and the electronically processed speech is out of sync with lip movement. Language and image have lost their function as carriers of meaning.

Making use of motifs present in Shakespeare’s play, Rogala sets the action in the present day. A soldier on horseback, wearing a gas mask, is a parallel to the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, Death, coming to kill with sword and famine. The witches’ cauldron is a computer and the plague takes the form of a virus. The fear of the ending of the human race discernible in the original drama, described by the witch as a sailor’s final loss of erection, in Rogala’s video finds its counterpart in the potential death of a child falling from a climbing frame in a park. Rogala announces the end of society, for whatever remains of Shakespeare’s language is deformed. At the very end of the narrative, Macbeth desperately cries for freedom from the constant disintegration and his face explodes, suggesting that the world has no other alternative to a recurring catastrophe.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz

Couldn’t we predict that artists would grant computer powers to witches’ rather than kings? In this rendition of Macbeth, which privilege the witches’ scenes, Shakespeare’s weird sisters half bearded and multibreasted receive due credit for narrative suspense. “Foul is fair and fair is foul,” they foretell. The ambiguities of destiny, which they issue from junkyard, meet the baneful conjectures of nuclear age technology when a robot joins their chants. Their faces swirl like a witches’ brew; the screen is splattered with computer blood; and, as the red encroaches on his frame, Macbeth curses the calendar.

American Film Institute Los Angeles Video Festival, October 1989

The work features a stunning array of new video and computer imaging techniques, yet, in concordance with video’s pervading themes, these techniques are used to suggest scientific innovation fallen to ruin, computer technology encrusted with dirt and blood and no longer functional. For example, many of the video images are processed to simulate the look of found footage, with specks of “dust,” imitation scratches, and brief graphic overlays abounding. While Rogala suggests that technology may be tired, it is evidently also all-pervasive. The witches weave their spells with the assistance of a robot and consult a computer for prophesies of the future. We perceive the characters solely by way of images heavily processed with media technology, which give the impression that Macbeth and the witches are no longer quite fully flesh and blood and that they themselves have evolved into part of the technological environment. They are pixilated, solarized, colored in, frozen still, and spun around at various times, their electronically processed speech never fully in sync with their electronically processed images. Rogala brings a heightened and immediate sense of doom in Shakespeare by infusing this work with modern-age apocalyptic imagery.

The Brooklyn Museum New York Catalogue
Selected Works from The American Film Institute Los Angeles Video Festival, November 1990