Jesper Just: With Mixed Emotions | Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit

Still from "A Vicious Undertow" (2007)

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit opened three new exhibitions this past weekend that are well worth an hour or two of your time should you find yourself hitting Detroit’s cultural drag near Wayne State University. As always, MOCAD’s admission fee is free, although I’d certainly recommend donating a Lincoln or two after enjoying the exhibitions.

Although the biggest draw of the three exhibitions is Art Spiegelman: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, a small yet jarring retrospective of the early work of the creator of Maus, the great surprise of MOCAD’s latest slate of offerings is a collection of three short films by the Danish artist Jesper Just, entitled With Mixed Emotions.I was walking through the Spiegelman exhibit when I was startled by the power of male voices in think harmony from a curtained room in front of me. I found myself moving toward the curtain as if coaxed by the power of those voices into the extremely dark room to catch the end of “No Man is an Island II” (see link to the entire film, below). The song they were singing was Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” and I was shocked that anyone could perform a version equally as powerful as ole Roy’s. I was shaken emotionally by those brief seconds of song before I was even able to see the accompanying images.

Just’s adopts the noir mode of film-making, with dark shadows and shadings and silences where characters are simply looking out into space, in reverie, and the camera often closes up on its subjects at such close proximity that you can see the scales of skin on the characters’ faces and hands. The three films are short. The longest, A Vicious Undertow, lasts about 5 minutes, portraying a woman in her 50s and two young lovers. Ostensibly, the young woman is the daughter of the older, and the film, which offers us no words, effectively tells the story of the older woman letting go of her daughter, giving her up to her future and her lover, and the separation pangs that follow.

But the most stark aspect of the film is that all of the communication takes place through eye contact, waltzing, and whistling. Whistling The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” to be specific. The older woman begins whistling the melody, a low bass or synth providing the underlying rhythm. The young female joins in, making a duet, then the young man, creating a trio of whistles with the two women. It’s a breathtaking a somewhat troubling film, it’s darkness and mystery leaving the viewer bereft of the fate of the older woman at the film’s end.

“The Lonely Villa” and “No Man is an Island II” are just as  stirring. I found myself dazed and somehow exhausted after just 15 minutes of film and music. I returned to the Spiegelman exhibit afterward, but couldn’t focus my attention as I would have like to.

The intersection between music and film often subsumes notes to the dominance of the moving image, and it’s to Just’s credit that while song is the central character in all three films, the images play equal partner to create in the viewer a sense of awe in the unspoken weight of the characters’ emotions, allowing image and music to reach heights of feeling together that could not have been possible alone.

Watch “No Man is an Island II (2004)” in its entirely.

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