ENTER THE VOID

POPULAR CINEMA HAS DRILLED US ENDLESSLY IN THE spectacular destruction of metropolises at the hands of supervillains, but for decades in America’s cities, far more mundane systemic forces have been hard at work. Christopher Harris’s still/here (2000) is a landmark film for precisely portraying the sense of absence in devastated urban neighborhoods, through an intricately woven tapestry of sound and images of predominantly African-American northern St. Louis, a city that as a whole dropped from 900,000 to 300,000 in population in the second half of the 20th century. After a rapid-fire Bolex montage of streets, Harris’s mesmerizing black-and-white 16mm feature counterpoints often eerily still shots of damaged and fallen buildings and grassy lots with a haunting mix of audio clips and recorded monologue, phasing in and out of commentary and meditation modes.

But while arrived at a millennial moment soon crowded with apocalyptic “ruin porn” and urban reappropriation of “retro” architectural spaces (and sometimes, perversely, ersatz versions of the destroyed original spaces), Harris’s gaze is distinct for its lucid compassion. A St. Louis native who left the city at 18— is his MFA thesis film from the School of Art Institute of Chicago—Harris has depicted the aftermath of wealth being extracted from this space and the inscription of racism in the landscape. Lives were lived: we feel them in the brick walk-ups, in the Victorian-era houses (of the sort re-created on a backlot), in the church with a tree growing through it, in poster with Angela Bassett.) A stunning segment of lyrical voiceover recounts a dream—or maybe a memory—that suggests a vanished world, Atlantis style, and reflects back to us our shock, wonder, incredulity. (The filmmaker has identified the woman in the voiceover as “my avatar—that’s me.”) Harris’s photography oscillates between walk-through vistas that evoke the open air and a poster-like flatness suggesting the very pages of history. (“To place yourself in the past, touch the screen,” runs the text of a hands-on exhibit, during the film’s detour montage of the Missouri Historical Society.) Here is a work that demonstrates that when social and economic imperatives effectively say that history does not matter, they are saying that don’t matter.