WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > THESE STREETS WILL NEVER LOOK THE SAME

UNIT 4
THURSDAY 2 – SUNDAY 5 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 96′ (looped)

Content warning: contains discussion of racism, mental health issues, climate anxiety, climate denial, cancer; depiction of guns.

FREE ENTRY 

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

In These Streets Will Never Look the Same, Mitchell Stafiej navigates the abundant thoroughfares of the USA, observing the country’s natural vistas, urban centres and interstate terrains. From its opening, crawl-like emergence from a tunnel – the great outdoors appearing like a self-enlarging aperture – the film asserts itself as an enthrallingly purist tribute to the phantom ride, the popular pre-narrative genre of early cinema. 

In the phantom rides of the 1890s, the camera – fixed to the front of a moving vehicle – captured and moved through the three-dimensional landscapes before it, giving subsequent audiences the illusion of forward motion. Stafiej’s own dashboard-mounted camera has an almost thrillingly comical fixity, its steady-stare surveillance and intransigent, never-stop propulsion providing various moments with a strange sensation – such as when the car turns as if to follow a unit train in snow, creating an optically sweeping camera movement halfway between a pan and a pivot. 

Stafiej’s work is also one of juxtaposition, not just in the way it limits the variables so that the variations in environment are emphasised, but in the cuts between them, which simultaneously renew the film’s energy while giving a sense of premature, mid-scene interruption. These abrupt edits contain unseen mileages, untold dramas, jokes. A shock-cut to a crashing thunderstorm ensures our attentions never drift too far. Elsewhere, the sound of a passing car continues into the next shot, hauntingly situating these images within an ephemeral narrative. In this sense, These Streets Will Never Look the Same lends new meaning to the term autofiction. The picture accrued is impressive in scale, modest in perspective: the partial viewpoint of a Canadian artist trying to make sense of these iconographies and the ironies found within them. 

This is America: a project under constant construction whose violences are at once invisible and felt. The film’s broader strokes are anchored not just by the stop-start rhythms of local radio, whose soundbites and adverts reveal a scarred and deeply agitated nation, but also by Stafiej’s decision to mostly proceed slowly enough for viewers to digest the immense and often ambiguous wealth of data coming through his windscreen. As a mournfully double-edged graffito on a fuel island canopy at the site of George Floyd’s murder reads: ‘WHERE THERE’S PEOPLE THERE’S POWER.’