Tim Parchikov.
Just a shot away

The concept of ‘suspense’ is usually associated with the cinema of Alfred

Hitchcock. It was he who made the main techniques of his films the state

of anxious expectation, manipulating the extensibility of slowed-down

screen time, as well as the ability to evoke sympathy for the characters,

making the audience more knowledgeable than the heroes themselves

– this is the viewer who knows that the bomb has been planted, while

people onscreen continue to behave as if nothing happened. But al-

though Hitchcock brought the art of suspense to perfection and also

formulated its basic mechanisms in his interviews, he did not invent it.

The first film with the title ‘Suspense’ was made back in 1913. And this

ten-minute silent tape contains everything needed to create a sense of

anxious anticipation. The only thing missing is the soundtrack, which has

become an integral part of the suspense movie, with disturbing music

and ominous sounds.

However, even in the era of sound films, suspense could be entire-

ly silent and exist not only in the movies, but also in the visual arts (not

to mention literature). At about the same time Hitchcock honed the art

of devising ‘suspended states’, Edward Hopper created suspense paint-

ings. The mutual influence of Hitchcock and Hopper is often mentioned

– according to one version, the director even copied the scenery of the

famous house from ‘Psycho’ from Hopper’s painting ‘House by the Rail-

road’. Hopper’s suspense turned out to be more radical than Hitchcock’s

– after all, film narration, unlike a work of fine art, must arrive at one or

another dénouement, and only a picture may keep its secret forever. In

painting suspense is freed from the detective genre that dominated it

in cinema and literature – no investigation, no solution, no justice, no

opportunity to see how the clock hand moves and the long-awaited

moment will finally come – and remain in the past.

Based on the ‘Just a Shot Away’ exhibition the ‘Suspense’ se-

ries that Tim Parchikov worked on from 2006 to 2013 is not so much a

cinephilic stylization as a study of the anxious state that also excites the

imagination and can be experienced by observation of everyday reality.

The frames shot in various places – Turkey and Iceland, China and Israel,

Venice and the Moscow Region, represent not so much self-sufficient

picturesque ‘views’ as ‘locations’, places of potential action, incidents,

crimes, adventures. It all looks not so much frightening as inspiring –

who among us has not dreamed, especially when travelling, of being ‘in

the movies’. Looking at some of these pictures, it’s hard to believe they

are not staged. But no, even the man in a hat and woman in black with

tragic make-up, characters whose anachronism is only emphasized by

jeans in a shop window, are merely anonymous citizens of Tel Aviv. And

the intricate shot filmed somewhere in Venice, where in the intricate

game of inverted reflections you distinguish the legs of a woman in a

black mini running down an alley, is not a scene from a giallo where the

sensual heroine flees from a sinister pursuer.

It is hard not to recall giallo, the manneristic Italian thrillers and

horror films of the 1960s to 1970s, when looking at photographs from the

‘Suspense’ series. Instead of ‘noir’ black-and-white shots, Parchikov opts

for colour, sometimes of the exaggerated neon scale typical, for exam-

ple, of the great giallo classic ‘Suspiria’ by Dario Argento. Giallo (the

genre takes its name from the yellow covers of detective stories printed

in the 1920s) is also remembered because Parchikov constantly returns

to a special, nocturnal yellow. Yellow tablecloths in the empty cafes of Is-

tanbul and Madrid; a white dog in front of a yellow wall in Rome at night.

Yellow is the traditional colour of anxiety, whether it be the yellow light

in Bruce Nauman’s installations or the maddening yellow-walled prison

cell in Roger Corman’s cult film ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1964),

which pushes Technicolor colour to the limit.

Places of Potential Action

For Parchikov another colour of suspense, besides yellow, turns

out to be the similarly nocturnal neon pink – the colour of plastic chairs

in an empty street cafe in Hainan, Chinese lanterns in a gloomy Beijing

cul de sac, palm trees in Tel Aviv in the evening illumination. Sometimes

these colours are combined – as, for example, in a photo taken in garag-

es on the former territory of the Moscow exhibition centre Art-Strelka: a

girl in a hot pink dress stands by a slightly open garage door in scorching

yellow light. This photo may resemble a frame from the films of Nico-

las Winding Refn, the director who created a kind of anti-suspense.

His characters, and the audience, feel locked in the intolerance of the

hopeless present moment, in frozen time, rather than just shuddering in

expectation.

Parchikov explores this no longer ‘suspended’, but frozen, numb

time in photographs from other cycles also featured in the exhibition.

‘Dead Time’ (2013) is a ‘dead season’ by the Dead Sea, where time literally

crystallizes, settling in sparkling salt crystals on barbed wire that has

turned into a precious lattice. From the series ‘Magnitogorsk. From Stalin

to Putin.’ (2010-2012) included in the exhibition you see only pictures

with the impressive units of metallurgical workshops. No sense of the

desolation and decay that is now commonplace in photographs of indus-

trial cities declining in the post-industrial era. The mighty machinery

works – but as if it does not need people and has no intention of serving

them. The deserted Ford factories looked inhumanly majestic in just the

same way in the photographs and canvases of American artist Charles

Sheeler produced during the Great Depression.

‘Just a Shot Away’ generally gives the impression of desertion. If

characters appear in the pictures they look like phantoms, apparently

lost between cinema and reality. For example, the heroes of the prob-

ably most mysterious photograph at the exhibition, ‘White Mountain’,

two figures in severe business suits amid a landscape that calls to mind

either the classics of land art, the monuments of unknown ancient

civilizations or a lunar landscape. Taken during the filming of an ad,

but omitting the advertised product itself, this surreal shot vaguely

resembles the cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ album (1975),

with two businessmen calmly shaking hands despite the fact that one

of them is enveloped in flames. The famous cover, created by Storm

Thorgerson, also refers to one of Tim Parchikov’s earliest series, ‘Burn-

ing News’, with people holding burning, unfolded newspapers. In ‘Just

a Shot Away’ this series is represented by a photograph of snowmen

with pages engulfed in flames – the suspense here comes down to the

amusement of the experiment: will the paper have time to burn out

before the snow melts and falls from the snowmen’s hands? However,

in yet another photograph from the exhibition, snow and fire coexist

without any mutual threat. The fire is not even locked in the fireplace,

but in the screensaver of the laptop screen on the table in front of the

wintry window. And it seems that the snow will not melt, just as the

virtual flame will never burn out – you can only slam the laptop or close

the window. No worries, no suspense. There is nothing to wait for, time

has stopped and you can just enjoy the view, which has ceased to be a

place. You don’t even have to look out the window. The newest works at

the exhibition are slightly blurred ‘jungles’ of indoor plants on window-

sills in which your eyes can wander without looking out.

Irina Kulik