In Free Fall is made up of three sections, produced between 2009 and 2010. Hito Steyerl's work responds to the banking crisis of 2008 with what seems at first to be a metaphor: the air crash. The montage that begins it is an adrenaline rush of images set against a jaunty tune by Talking Heads. We shift from soothing shots of air safety demonstrations to a dizzying array of sensational crashes taken from Hollywood movies, mixed in with shots of real accidents. The artist talks to three different people as she examines her theme, moving from one section to the next. In the first part, 

After the Crash, a former employee of Trans World Airlines (TWA) is filmed at the airport in the Mojave Desert where decommissioned planes are stored and recycled. “The scrap value of an airplane might be 3,000 dollars, but I can turn around and use it in a movie for 8,000 dollars and not lose the scrap,” he explains. In the second part, Before the Crash, Steyerl gives a prepared script to actor Imri Kahn, whom she films in front of an embedded blue-screen background. The story he tells focuses on one specific airplane, the 4X-JYI, a Boeing 707-385C built for TWA in 1965 that was subsequently acquired by the Israeli army in the 1970s, before being bought back by the USA and ultimately blown up in the making of the movie Speed in 1994.

Steyerl uses Sergei Tretyakov's essay, “Biography of the Object” to segue into a personification of these machines with multiple lives. The year 1929, when Tretyakov's essay appeared, not only witnessed the twentieth century's first stock market crash, it also registered a record number of plane crashes and saw the release of the aerobatic film Hell's Angels directed by Howard Hughes, who would later acquire TWA. Another of the TWA Boeing 707s met with an even more unusual fate. The 4X-JYD played a leading role in the Israeli intervention to rescue the hostages being held captive by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine at Entebbe airport in 1976 before continuing its life as a cinema at the Air Force Museum in Hatzerim. Meanwhile, the remains of the 4X-JYI were sold to Chinese recycling companies.

The third part of In Free Fall—The Crash —looks at the last surviving traces of aluminum. In the 1990s, this aeronautical waste material was recycled to make various products, including DVDs. Kevan Jenson, a director of photography employed by Steyerl, explains how the crisis in the movie industry, accelerated by the system of digital distribution, caused him to lose his job. “There was a lot of need for veracity in film,” he says. “And one of the best ways to do it would be to put a television in what you're doing. That makes things seem real.”

The shift from the stylistic mode of the movie to the omnipresence of screens mediating what we see, where the nature of the “reality” they lay claim to is opaque, is a permanent subtext in In Free Fall. A laptop screen creates collage and mise en abyme effects, a mash-up of documentary scenes, fiction films, TV music programs, and air-safety clips, capped with a piece of cheap digital animation that sends a DVD marked with the yin/yang sign into cosmic space. “Metallic aluminum is incredibly stable. It's so recyclable. That means it can be melted down and reused again and again ... forever ... resurrected into something new,” runs the musical montage. In In Free Fall, Steyerl puts forward the idea that people have been exposed to widespread objectification, the result of a series of crises that keep us in a permanent state of free fall. She becomes an air hostess with a vacant stare performing a synchronized safety demonstration together with Imri Kahn. Between the Steadicam shots, floating with zero gravity over the gutted planes, and the inopportune remixes of images and sound that transform the follow-up story into a high-wie work's visual language integrates the loss of any steady base. The idea would be explained the following year in a theoretical essay with the same title: “Time is out of joint and we no longer know whether we are objects or subjects as we spiral down in an imperceptible free fall.” [1]

[1] H. Steyerl, 'In Free Fall. A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective' e-flux juornal 24 (April 2011), reproduced in H. Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 26.

Marcella Lista, August 2020