A shot of what looks like a forest's edge. A bush. A person. The image is poor, with hardly any light on the screen, almost night lighting, barely perceptible. The outline of a woman appears between two long pauses where the screen becomes black. A woman is walking; her back to the camera, moving away in a series of still shots, like a slide-show. The woman approaches a fence. The light becomes brighter, revealing a panoramic shot. Panning along a continuation of tree branches, sometimes we catch glimpses of blue sky. This soft succession of shadows and blue is disturbed by the woman's passing in head and shoulders shot. Time seems to have become malleable, slow.

Buena Vista was filmed on the hill in Buena Vista Park, overlooking San Francisco. The tape was produced for the Video about Video exhibition in the United States in 1980.

Buena Vista means good view, but we see nothing, or next to nothing, of this 360ø panorama from the hill in San Francisco. Unlike his other tapes, here, Thierry Kuntzel does not rely on a fixed shot, but in this panoramic of a panorama, the view is hidden by the trees. Yet the camera's movement does reveal something other than this good view. Thierry Kuntzel writes about this work: "Buena Vista" navigates between photography and cinema or video - in a single space. The post-production work consisted mainly of freezing the image, slowing it down, decomposing it." Buena Vista should be seen not in a uniquely linear sense, passing from one image to the next, but rather through accepting the image in its repetition and slow-motion. We observe the progress of the woman framed by a camera that is not always perfectly set up. She seems to be floating or ghostly, almost embedded in the moving panorama: we follow her comings and goings, which finally create a palimpsest, to use Thierry Kuntzel's expression. The panorama of the trees in Buena Vista Park create an interference with the repetition of movements by the character being filmed. Watching the tape, we see the formation of a large number of layers: "under today's traces lie the memory of old traces", says the artist. The use of slow motion draws the spectator's attention to what is perceived as a break in the movement. The attention is fixed on some points which have already been noticed in the moving panorama, or which hadn't been noticed before because of the swiftness of movement. The same spaces become different, once the woman passes through. The picture wavers between recollection and imprinted sensorial image, never as an assumed memory. Buena Vista affronts the troubled instant where the image is about to become memory - a memory that has been transformed by the construction process of perception. This appears symbolically in the work, directly on the picture, as a medallion surrounding the image. This iris-shaped screen directs the choice of vision within the panorama, at the same time rejecting everything happening outside its focus. This circular image, like the reflection of an image on the retina, reinforces the notion that memorisation is imminent - with the spectator absorbing pregnant images from the videographic fluidity. Buena Vista should be grouped with Echolalia (1980). Together, these works give the preamble to the emergence condition of representation: light becomes tangible matter, the echo it creates within the spectator and the effort of vision and attention that it requires.

Dominique Garrigues

[1] Thierry Kuntzel, "Buena Vista", in Communications, nø 48, Paris, Le Seuil, 1988, p. 151.