Attempts Devised Part2

This notion of self awareness inspired by making the audience aware of their 'looking' in my version of "Attempts" invited the old idea of the "flâneur". Introduced by the likes of Baudelaire and later Walter Benjamin who said that 

"Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd. He . . . enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes" 

Though Benjamin himself lamented that the role of the flâneur or wanderer was hindered due to the modernity of the city. Those darn motorcars! This exploration and almost dreamlike spectatorship coupled with your awareness of your own role as one of the crowd. This tour of the city guided my excerpts of "Attempts" is a modern, guided look at the role of the flâneur. 

Early film recorded this feeling of the flâneur and showed the city as a modern spectacle and gave it tactile and poetic quality.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPD2C0K38jY The film "Regen" or "Rain" by Joris Ivens 1929

The Movie Camera

“I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising of bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. 

Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate and and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you”

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

-Dziga Vertov, 1923 p.10 

As opposed to a painting in which the spectator was the unique centre of the world the camera demonstrate that there was no centre.

Going off of this idea of the modern flâneur, the next installment of the play is sent as directions in an email. You are asked to go to a street corner and as you pass the trash can you hear voices of those who have gossiped about Anne during their smoking break. An art installation and a ghost of the past. 

-"Attempts on Her Life" by Martin Crimp Act 4 The Occupier excerpt 

voices: Harriet Wilcox, Acer Su    2011