Sam Taylor-Wood : Brontosaurus

1995
Video projection and sound
Jay Jopling, London

Sam Taylor-Wood also talks about Brontosaurus with Marcelo Spinelli

For Brontosaurus, she asked a male friend to dance naked in front of the camera for half an hour, to fast techno music. Taylor-Wood then put it into slow motion, and added melancholic classical music, so that the movements of the dancer appear strange and ambiguous.

Marcelo Spinelli: This conflict between "high" and "low" cultures also appears in this other piece, The Brontosaurus, but the other way round, somehow; where you do the opposite. Perhaps you could talk a bit about it?

Sam Taylor Wood: That was also a friend of mine, and I asked him just to dance. I filmed him for about half an hour. I put on a tape of really fast kind of jungle-techno music and had him dance naked for half an hour, which he said was extremely tiring. More tiring to dance naked than to dance with clothes on. So he dances for half an hour to this really fast music and his movements are really erratic [erotic?] and really quick and all over the place. He's a good dancer. But the other thing he kept doing was that every time he got tired he went into these slightly classical, balletic poses, just to relieve himself of the exhaustion. And he didn't really know what I wanted to do with the piece afterwards. I just knew I wanted to change it and I wasn't quite sure which way I was going to do this. And so when he started to do this, it gave me more of a clearer picture of what I wanted to do.

MS: You knew you wanted to change the original footage.

STW: Yes. And I knew I wanted to put it in slow motion as well, to slow the whole thing down. I wanted his movements to stop being associated with that kind of music or dance, and so that his movements are completely strange. And so he looks, in some ways, really odd. I knew I was going to take out the original music as well. So, I put ten minutes of it into slow motion and then used this very melancholic classical music over the top of it, so the whole feeling of it has completely changed. Originally it was quite funny, because obviously you were immediately drawn to staring at how his dick moves and just looking at that and thinking, that's hysterical. And when it is in slow motion it has a very different feeling about it; it has an almost romanticised feeling about it, it becomes almost like a eulogy. Like somebody has died and this is their tribute on TV. So, by adding this very serious melancholic music to it, it becomes this extremely highly dramatic piece. But, essentially, it's just someone dancing around in their bedroom having a good time. It's just using very simple tools to change the feeling. Calling it Brontosaurus was just a reference to the small pink fluffy toy in the corner.

MS: But I was also thinking that this is a technique used a lot by television or film-makers. I mean, you mentioned that the Adagio was used for Platoon, or has been used for the Elephant Man. So you know they create, sometimes, this sort of contrast. And also opera is starting to be used for football so that they are almost sort of inseparable now. And it's that similar kind of concern.

STW: And it's also like when they show dramatic footage of terrible scenes in former Yugoslavia. Often you'll see it put to music. And I remember, you know, people starving in third world countries, and they kind of over-dramatise it. They almost manipulate your feelings by having it in slow motion. In one way they are making it more palatable, but also they are trying to play with 'how bad this really is'...

MS: But that's not quite a good analogy: I would say it was more like what Denis Potter did when there were those moments which were really dark and poignant and he started playing some 1940s music, or something like that; and turning it into some kind of music hall or Pennies From Heaven, or something. And [he would] sometimes even break it down to some kind of very camp sort of musical, but it would become even stronger...

STW: Yes. It's true. I did see a bit of footage once, it was off one of those stupid programmes where they show you clips from all around the world of strange television. There was one for Japanese television of an Australian prison riot and some of the officers were really beating up one of the prisoners. But for Japanese television they had put it to jazz. So there was this jazz music with this horrendous thing going on. In that sense it stopped it being so horrible to watch because you had this Dixieland jazz going on over the top of it.

MS: In Brontosaurus, by slowing it down and using this music it's like saying, let's look at it really closely. Because you're not adding anything to it...

STW: No, nothing is edited; I wanted it all to be one take. A lot of the things I've done are literally one take with no editing., so that you get in as much as you asked somebody to do, without manipulating it in the editing of it. That one [was] in real time; I filmed it for about half an hour, about thirty minutes, so for about thirty minutes of footage. Then I wanted to edit it down to exactly the length of the piece of music. And then it was only about four or five minutes by the time I had slowed it down to ten minutes - so it was just a clip of it. With edits it wouldn't have worked at all, really. It wouldn't have had the same sort of drama because it does draw you in when you're just staring at the same sort of image and movements in that way.