Performance art and moving image interweave – and often collide – in Norwegian artist Sille Storihle’s intriguing and provocative doc which uses role-play to examine where performance begins and ends. Debate around performance art always tends to provoke an intense response, and this film pushes all the buttons as it seeks to examine the limits of artistic boundaries, if indeed they exist at all.
An opening statement sets the agenda. “Everything you’re about to see is part of a role-playing game…a game played in a school as part of a course. It’s about the Group Crit – a situation where students share their artwork and get feedback.” The onsite description explains how Group Crit is a pedagogical and cinematic experiment – “a humorous examination of group critique as a teaching form.”
By means of a LARP (live action role-playing game) created by Storihle, students at the Nordland School of Art and Film explore issues prevalent within contemporary public debate. All players develop their own stories within the game based on scripted characters, and then everything is filmed by students in character. Within a set of self-established rules, The Group Crit sets out to challenge traditional forms of production.
In the film, however, the social experiment spins out of control …but of course the “spinning out of control” is part of the game. The students (all in character) don’t hold back from criticising each other’s artworks – and each other – as they debate the various performances, with conversation led by Storihle (acting here as group tutor Solan).
The group discussions are filmed by another group of six students who are making a documentary about Group Crit…with all of this (of course) filmed by Storihle and her crew.
The students (along with director Storihle) are allotted fictitious personae which they themselves develop further and act out in the group critique scenarios. Most of the discussions are conducted in English with the “performances” varying from video footage and art installations through to performance art (a student cries, rips off his clothes and flails in the snow outside the classroom) and paintings.
Responses can be vitriolic and brutal, and sometimes conciliatory. One student accuses another of an “extreme cowardly approach to making work”; another is accused of being overly judgmental, while another supportively says: “Can we respect that everyone is making art?”
All of this is watched over by Lars (performed by another student) and his film crew, with the film’s “storyline” spiralling towards conflict between Lars and some of the students as they accuse him and the crew of getting in the way of the intimacy of their round circle discussions, with the collective experiment aimed at challenging not only the students’ self-perception, but also – as part of the story structure – Storihle’s own authority as a director.
Sille Storihle has a screen credit for Concept, Game Design and Production. The workshop experiment is staged as part of the students’ educational programme and, while examining traditional notions of art and performance it also tests/plays with the audience in terms of having a film crew filming a film crew that is in turn filming the students. Just in case there is any niggling concern that students and film crew aren’t friends, the closing credits footage is B-roll of them all smiling happily with each other.
Norway, 2023, 72mins
Dir/Producer: Sille Storihle
Production: Nordland School of Art and Film
Editor: Katrin Ebersohn
With: Emilie Aagensen, Arjun David Acharya, Ingeborg Augunset, David Haugaard Bohl Andersen, Lise Ulvedahl Carlsen, Rebekka Christophersen, Emil Engesnes Bråthen, Gustav Oliver Gunvaldsen, Ali Jabaly, Thomas Lafuente, Haakon Midtsundstad, Simen Anthony Samuelsen, Sanjey Sureshkumar, Magdalena With Vedelsby, Ellen Vikström.
