gillian wearing: self made¹

An ordinary looking man in his thirties is walking towards the camera holding a carrier bag. It could be you or me, and the streets he moves through, with their off-licences and corner shops, could be anywhere, too — most people living in Britain wouldn’t have to go more than a mile to walk streets such as this. Still, something is not quite right: his expression looks distracted yet also troubled, while the music, an electronic drone punctuated by cries, creates an atmosphere of gathering unease. Suddenly, in the middle of the road, he stops, turns and drops the bag: it’s as if something in him has broken, as if he can no longer take it any more…

It’s a powerful opening, but Self Made immediately retreats from its intensity. We learn that Self Made started with an advertisement placed by Turner Prize winning artist, Gillian Wearing: “Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian.” Hundreds apply, but only seven make it through to the experiment. This involves being trained by Method acting expert Sam Rumbelow, in preparation for acting out a “micro-drama” which will explore the participants’ memories and feelings.

Immediately, I’m suspicious. Are these really the non-actors they are supposed to be? They seem remarkably unfazed by some of the exercises Rumbelow asks them to do, some of which you’d expect to cause nonperformers a degree of embarrassment. I’m suspicious about my feelings of suspicion: isn’t this exactly the response that’s expected of me? A whole series of questions ensue. What is the boundary between performance and everyday life? Is there any such thing as a non-actor, since all of us are engaged in performing our identities?

We’re in that familiar (art)space in which boundaries — in this case between “fiction” and “documentary” — are blurred. For much of its duration, the film puts us into that mode of listless sub-Brechtian questioning which so much art catalogue language routine invokes. The mode is deconstructive, demystificatory, (or it is their simulation): we see the micro-dramas, but only after we’ve been exposed to all the preparatory work that went into them; and afterwards, there are cutaways showing the crew filming the scenes.

Rumbelow comes across as an intensely irritating and creepy figure — more therapist-guru than acting coach, he’s horribly reminiscent of Hal Raglan, the scientist-therapist from Cronenberg’s The Brood who encourages his patients to “go all the way through” their emotional traumas, with fatal consequences. Perhaps exploitation is integral to the Method, and perhaps one of the points of Self Made is to examine this… And perhaps Sam Rumbelow is playing “Sam Rumbelow”, annoying Method acting expert…

Wearing has said in the past that she was inspired by Paul Watson’s 1974 fly-on-the-wall TV documentary The Family, and Self Made clearly follows on from such works as Confess all on video. Don’t worry, you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian (1994) or Family History (2006) in engaging with the problems raised by mediated “revelation” — the issue here is precisely whether we are dealing with “revelation” at all, or whether what we are witnessing is an effect of the filming process itself. (The same questions occurred to Jean Baudrillard, and it’s no accident that some of his classic essays on simulation focus on the fly-on-the-wall phenomenon.) Wearing’s work certainly has less in common with the brashness of twenty-first-century reality TV than it does with the convergence of drama, psychotherapy and social experiment that came together in the 1970s and continued on into the 1980s. At points, Self Made reminded me of a half-forgotten mid-Eighties BBC programme which I believe was called Psychodrama, and which similarly invited the participants to explore traumatic moments in their lives through the construction of dramatic scenarios. In any case, there’s something horribly post-Sixties in every bad way about the techniques that Rumbelow uses to “unlock” the participants’ feeling. In the spirit of confessionalism that Wearing’s work examines, I admit that there are personal reasons for my hostility to this kind of thing. When I was at school in the early Eighties, we had to endure a class called Social and Personal Education. This involved being subjected to some of the emotionally terroristic exercises — such as “Trust Games” — which Rumbelow tries out with the participants here. Ironically, such exercises were at least as uncomfortable and disturbing as the experiences they were supposed to be exorcising, and these teachers were as oppressive in their own way as the agents of previous — more “repressive” — regimes of emotional management. There’s no suggestion that Self Made endorses the discourses which inform Rumbelow’s practice and the film’s most unsettling scenes — both concerning violence — at least raise the possibility than untapping and manipulating buried feelings may be catastrophic. At one point, Wearing conspicuously uses montage to highly charged effect, undercutting the sense — the illusion — of unmediated verité. The participant James is re-enacting/re-imagining a scene that took place on a train. He challenges one of the men who bullied him when he was younger. Almost immediately, he appears to consumed by a tempest of rage. He raises his fist to hit the other (non)actor and for a moment it seems as if he has struck his head with full force. We then realise, with a sense of relief that still doesn’t mitigate our horror, that Wearing has cut to James punching out a dummy. The film’s climactic scene is even more shocking. This returns us to Self Made’s opening shots. By now, we have learned that the man walking the streets is called Ash. This time, however, we see what he had turned around to do: kick a pregnant woman in the stomach. Even though we know this is an illusion — after all, we have seen it being constructed — the image in itself is so sickeningly transgressive that no amount of alienation effects can dissipate its power.