Looking into Prager’s work, I found a very interesting interview for Phaidon about her film La Petite Mort, that goes as following;
“They’re your reaction to the tragedies you came across?
They’re a way for me to deal with what I was reading – to make it a little bit easier – but also a way to realise that this sort of thing has been going on for centuries. This is the world we live in – it’s a beautiful and ugly and good and very bad place. La Petite Mort is me exploring one really intense emotion. It’s about the idea of death, or, at least, what it might feel like to die. It describes the moments immediately before and after the event, in a beautiful, kind of surreal way.
That’s where the name comes from?
Yeah, “La Petite Mort” translated directly means “the little death”, but it’s also the words the French use to describe the orgasm. They feel it’s the one moment while living when you’re closest to death because all of your senses have been shut off, bar one. Obviously that’s a very dramatic and poetic way to talk about it, but I really liked it, and thought it could apply to feelings that I’ve had before – not about death necessarily, but those I’ve had when focussed on something really intense, that feels so overwhelming.
Where did the story come from?
The story is completely made up, but certain things are definitely taken from experiences I’ve had, or things I’ve come across, or emotions I’ve felt before that I didn’t really know how to express at the time. It definitely relates to the drama of being a woman – thankfully I’m now able to express those emotions through my work rather than in real life! It’s the first film I’ve done that shows an understanding of the traditional medium, that’s been approached in a more classical sense. Compulsion was a combination of me desperately wanting to do something different to what people knew me to do, and just being bored with what I’d been doing up until that point. I felt as if I’d come to the end of that journey, that I’d got all I could out of it for the moment. So instead I tried to do something completely different, and challenging. Of course that process is time-consuming and expensive, but it’s the only way to do it I think.
There are very few people featured in Compulsion – normally your pictures are people-focussed
Right, but you still feel the presence of someone being there. There’s a human feeling to the pictures, but the viewer doesn’t feel connected to anyone in particular. I wanted the series to seem like the news articles I was reading. I didn’t want it to feel like you knew the people involved. The eyes represent the emotional response. The main idea behind the title of the series was to show the spectator’s compulsion to watch disaster, rather than act. We can’t look away when there’s an accident on the side of the freeway – everyone slows down and looks – but nobody helps. And we can all relate to that. Alex Prager, “Compulsion is at Michael Hoppen Contemporary until May 26. Click through our gallery above to see pictures from the series.”
saratrouble 