The Globe and Mail
Gallery Going by Gary Michael Dault

Gunilla Josephson at Archive, Inc.
300 King Street East, Toronto

Chief among the three video works by Gunilla Josephson now at Archive Inc. Gallery + Art Library is her 68-minute magnum opus, The Blood-Red Heart of Johanna Darke (link to video).

The principal videography for this feature-length video was accomplished three years ago, but the continual editorial fine-tuning to which Josephson has been subjecting the work for the past two years has given this highly ambitious piece a wondrous richness, timbre, pace and density.

The name of the Josephson’s heroine, who is and is not the artist herself, is both an echo of “noir” or blackness in the conventional literary-cinematic sense and also, at the same time, makes inescapable reference to Jeanne d’Arc — though the voices and visions of Josephson’s Joan impel her to try to save France in a quite different way.

The video is about a young woman who, in Josephson’s words, while “lost in the city of history,” is compelled to depart “the hothouse steam of her upbringing by the Grey Nuns Order in Quebec” in order to fulfill her destiny, as she sees it, as a member of the French Resistance in Paris in 1939. Through what the artist calls a “time warp” wrought by Johanna’s “own compulsion and belief,” the girl straddles space and time, arriving “time-capsuled” by train (by bullet-train!) to the Paris of 2003, still determined to play a role in the Resistance.

Clearly believing, like legendary French new-wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, that movies ought to have a beginning and a middle and an end, “but not necessarily in that order,” Josephson, working with novelist-husband Lewis DeSoto and composer-pianist Eve Egoyan, has put together an aggregation of seamlessly beautiful, constantly moving tableaux made up of unforgettably vivid images and passages.

Johanna makes pilgrimages to Notre Dame Cathedral (sometimes it’s a hand-held model and sometimes it’s the real thing) to receive Resistance “instructions” from Joan of Arc; she rallies round the cause with a Pierrot companion/familiar who steps out of Watteau’s commedia dell’arte painting, Gilles, in the Louvre; she helps to blow up a train — at least I think she does — and finally, in the end, languishes in prison, awaiting death at the hands of the Gestapo.

What is bemusing is how little of Johanna Darke’s story and its meaning can be circumscribed within this bald plot outline (if plot it can be said to have). Josephson’s video lives within its own hues and visual textures. Her painterliness (for she was a painter-sculptor-installation artist before turning to video) is everywhere apparent in the work: Scarcely a minute goes by during which you don’t feel the need to stop the film at look at an image at length, as if it were a still photograph. The video proceeds (often hectically) by means of its sheer onslaught of visual inventiveness. Sometimes you lose track of it, but it never seems to matter: Josephson floats you along on a foaming sea of images and ideas, marshalled to the music of high poetry.