Rob Gallagher

Scrupulous critic that I am, I'd prepared for seeing Beatrice Gibson's film - premiered last night in Jean Nouvel's sanguine, perspex-panelled tent/chapel/womb of a pavillion - by rereading B.S. Johnson's House Mother Normal, the 1971 'geriatric comedy' which provides the work's 'formal departure point'. As such, it seems perverse to deny that the book coloured my response - especially given the appearance of copies of the novel in Gibson's film, which was, furthermore, preceded by a screening of Paradigm (1969), one of Johnson's own shorts.

What struck me most was how ethereal, how resolutely disembodied Gibson's portrait of old age felt in relation to Johnson's. The latter is thoroughly carnal, highly attentive not merely to the sexuality of its protagonists but also to texture, pain, heft and stench - in short, to bodily presence. The (albeit beautiful) milky tones and delicate colours Gibson's film favoured, meanwhile, only heightened its air of abstract impalpability.

Of course, there are any number of obvious reasons why Gibson's piece might come across a comparatively lacking in bite - Johnson was imagining what fictional characters wouldn't or couldn't say in a era when standards of living for the elderly often fell hair-raisingly short of adequacy, and his novel is accordingly heavy on outbreaks of obscenity and abuse. Gibson, by contrast, was collaborating with real individuals and institutions on a project more about meaningful engagement than stinging critique. As a consequence there's little here to upset the horses - or the funding bodies.

Which is not to imply that art has to be obtuse, outrageous or unprecedented. Indeed, one of the most intriguing things about the film was that it suggested how much art - and culture generally - has changed over the lifespan of Gibson's interviewees. While the myth of the artist as lone (implicitly male) visionary/iconoclast was still alive and well in Johnson's era, we're - thankfully - now much more open to inclusive, socially engaged, collaborative and multidisciplinary forms of artistic practice.

It was also interesting to note that if the film - openly indebted to Johnson and to Cornelius Cardew - was highly intertextual, so were its participants' testimonies, in which personal memories were often framed via references to literature and cinema. But while the film raised some interesting points about memory and language - and did so, moreover, while being funny, handsome and touching - it went about it in a way that was ultimately just a bit too cosy.