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In another film I caught at the Arsenal, Fritz Lang’s SCARLET STREET (1945), notions of work and action are markedly peripheral. A darkly comic and plotty post-war noir, SCARLET STREET takes place in densely urbanised Manhattan where work is compartmentalised and distinctly avoidable. Instead, the characters in SCARLET STREET covet their goals via forms of performance: the con, the act, the art of persuasion. Nobody takes: they just make you think you want to give. An unhappily married bank teller (the inimitable Edward G. Robinson in a rare leading role) woos a young lady (Joan Bennett) by pretending to be a famous painter. The lady, for her part, and with the help of her slimy boyfriend (Dan Duryea), seduces him in the hopes of conning him out of his supposed riches. Through a well-crafted series of confusions, Bennett ends up acclaimed as the creator of Robinson’s amateur canvasses—that is, before the inevitable tragic ending in which the three leads end up, respectively, insane, murdered and in prison. Notwithstanding the film’s moralistic end point, Lang’s vision of an America in which individuals progress by cultivating images of themselves rather than actually doing anything seems powerfully prescient—especially in the way it shows art, that most individual of actions, to be just as appropriable and interchangeable as currency in an image-based economy.

What gets somewhat shortchanged in Lang’s construction is what in fact these characters wish to acquire with their images. Unlike the characters in Ford and Ray, these New York small fry are governed neither by any sense of duty, nor by any well of insatiable passion: Robinson’s desire for Bennett is legible and proportionate, and Bennett and Duryea have no grand aspirations to come up in the world; they’re just seeking an easy road to a better life. More specifically, what they all seem to be seeking is an easier, more pleasure-filled state of being—essentially, just play. This is perhaps what distinguishes SCARLET STREET from JOHNNY GUITAR, although both contain certain progressive notions characteristic of the best of America’s classical post-war cinema: in GUITAR, performance becomes a kind of expression of potential action (or active potentiality); it’s a channelling of energy. In SCARLET, however, performances aren’t charged, they’re driven—a hair-fracture distinction perhaps, but it’s what makes GUITAR’s performances essentially dramatic (despite its camp) and SCARLET’s performances essentially comic (despite its tragedy). While GUITAR’s characters, as I already argued, want “everything”, SCARLET’s just want lightness; they just want to play.

Within the carefully structured world of Lang’s classic narrative, however, this ostensible end goal can only emerge in the margins, usually as behavioural sidenotes: in the way Bennett lounges about the penthouse she’s conned out of Robinson, in the lighter (and lazier) moments of Duryea’s mannered demeanour, and in Robinson’s gentle infatuation with Bennett. In TULSA (1971) and TEENAGE LUST (1982), two collections of Larry Clark photographs showing across town in the excellent Museum Fur Fotografie (and still on until November 8th), these kinds of languid states of being are allowed to become the whole picture. In fact, broken free from narrative, they even become the principle of linkage between the at times disparate selection of images. One can attribute this in part, of course, to the obvious formal differences between film and photography (although Clark’s photos relate sometimes explicitly to cinema, and he has gone on to make many films), but more pivotal is that Clark’s project is different to Lang’s, and from classical Hollywood cinema as a whole, because his subject is the body. There is a materiality, an interest in flesh and bodily existence here, that is hugely absent from classical cinema (Westerns, as we’ve seen with Ray and Ford, despite their rough-and-tumble physicality, are usually caught up in realms of the imagination above and below the immanent; even film noirs, for all their carnality, are much more about immateriality, about identities and bodies that slip out of your reach or comprehension as easily as light). Since play is something that exists materially much more than narratively (unlike work, with its functions, beginnings, ends, etc), this approach is perfect. Even in his films, which all (with the brilliant exception of KEN PARK), utilise goal-oriented plots, there is still a powerful sense of bodies for bodies’ sake; in the photographs this is seen at its purest.

Clark’s subject in TULSA—the junkies and wasters he grew up with in his Arizona hometown—also seems perfect for exploring the limit of the principles of play. Heroin addiction is essentially a quest for lightness, a passive state of pleasure that negates all concerns—but it’s a feeling of lightness that becomes so irreplaceable and all-consuming that it damages everything else; a functionless state of being, like all play, but one so powerful that it pushes all functions, even the most essential, out of the picture. This is truly dangerous play, consuming and possessing in the same exhaustive way desire does in JOHNNY GUITAR, and it’s played out in a variety of forms in Clark’s photos. The picture shown above is hardly a typical one. The perpendicular arrangement of the fresh-faced baby and the dark-eyed smoker, and the chiarascuro lighting, suggest a planned and somewhat didactically minded photographer (we needn’t expand on the father-child relationship implicable in the choreography here), but Clark seems to stumble upon these kinds of images haphazardly, and they emerge like ruptures of logic in an otherwise anarchic sequence of images (a silhouetted pregnant woman shooting up and a baby laid out in a coffin provide the most blunt of these narrative ruptures).

More commonly we get people lying around stoned, sitting around tables, posing with guns, or American flags, sometimes just plain posing. The gestures in all these photos seem bound together by their very inconsequentiality, their estrangement from any kind of larger purpose, picture or order. A bedroom of guys chuckling heartily is placed in no context, their specific issues of no importance—but the spatial and gestural interplay of their bodies is pushed centre stage because of this. The posed photos seem less about a natural interplay and more about self-dramatisation, creating an image of oneself gesturally. This is is different than SCARLET STREET, of course, because there image creation is a verbal endeavour—Robinson doesn’t have to dress or walk like a famous painter, just talk like one—and also more purposeful; image as a means to a playful end rather than a means of play. This mixture of different kinds of images creates an indeterminance around some of the more extreme ones. Placed beside a kid posing with a gun, another kid (maybe the same one) injecting himself in a bath becomes almost like a pretend, “play” action by association—the physical components of a purposeful effort, but without a purpose.

In the second Clark exhibition, TEENAGE LUST (though the two, spread across one big room, easily blend together), a more positive side to Clark’s vision is expanded upon. Most of the photos depict guys and girls in various intimate and sexual embraces, and despite some disturbing aspects (some of the couples are clearly underage), these are the only photos where tenderness, affection and sensitivity shine through in any way: the couples’ play is mutual, reciprocative and supportive rather than an all-consuming solipsism.

In Clark, bodily impulses both debase and exalt. If there’s a hope in his work, it’s as physical and carnal as his damnation. Sometimes the two don’t seem entirely distinct—but there’s a singularity to their manifestations, and an attentive gaze upon them that suggests that perhaps it’s enough simply to allow these bodies to exist, and play, on their own terms.