Private disclosures in public systems: Reflections on Vera Frenkel’s work The Last Screening Room: A Valentine (1984)
This text was written to accompany a screening of The Last Screening Room followed by a Q&A with Frenkel held at Trinity Square Video in February 2024.
In Vera Frenkel’s work The Last Screening Room: A Valentine, speech operates in many ways: as confession, storytelling, and narration. Discretion across these modes is key - the work exists in a dystopian setting where the Canada Council is a subdivision of the Ministry of Health, and storytelling is outlawed. The only festival still celebrated is Valentine’s Day, a holiday which also functions as the only reprieve from blanket censorship.
On Valentine’s Day, citizens are permitted to record an ‘electronic valentine’ which may be kept temporarily or submitted to an archive overseen by the Ministry of Culture. Acceptance to this archive doesn’t guarantee longevity – the tapes themselves are fragile, and subject to damage if watched. The video is made to be one such ‘electronic valentine’ and is narrated to us by a public servant with the invented title of ‘privacy guarantor’, played by Frenkel. The privacy guarantor listens to the stories of inmates in a women’s penitentiary but is required to immediately forget them. In breach of these rules, Frenkel’s privacy guarantor forms alliances with one prisoner, a suspected storyteller in possession of a contraband map who was discovered on the road to Napanee. The privacy guarantor tasks herself with listening to and recalling the woman’s story in pieces, and in documenting the tale in a valentine for safekeeping. As she prefaces this valentine, the narrator informs us that the story is about storytelling, memory, and received ideas, but as the narrator continues her voice echoes and distorts, eluding a straightforward re-telling.
When I first saw this work over the summer when accessing Trinity Square Video’s own archives, I was taken by the video’s hypnotic pacing and immersive meta-narrative. The story itself is slippery in a way that resonates with the process of history turning into fiction with age, or how memories shift through repetition. The responsibilities of the ‘privacy guarantor’ evoked many parallels, such as with doctor-patient confidentiality in medicine and psychotherapy. The Last Screening Room also anticipates a later work by Frenkel, The Institute, or What We Do for Love, a website and installation that places artistic work and the healthcare system in dialogue. My initial reactions to The Last Screening Room related the ‘privacy guarantor’ to other feminized caring professions, and I wondered if the gender of the imprisoned storyteller and privacy guarantor related to the gendered expectations of care work. In a conversation I had with Frenkel this past October, she mentioned that this work emerged from thinking about the roles of women, but that the casting was also practical – limited resources meant having to perform both roles in her own work.
In considering this work now, 40 years after it was made, I’m cognizant of The Last Screening Room’s engagement with history, especially in its ties to artist-run centres in Canada in their formative years. Trinity Square Video factors into this for its acquisition of the work in 1984, but Western Front in Vancouver also figures heavily into The Last Screening Room. Towards the end of the tape there are several images of artists who were part of the community of Western Front, and this footage was captured when Frenkel was in residence there and created the video Stories from The Front (& The Back) in the early 1980s. Colonial history is also a structure that’s adopted within the fiction of the work, with artists being the fugitive and oppressed population. Contemporary viewers will likely recognize that outlawing certain kinds of storytelling, as with the suppression of Indigenous cultural practices, has long been part of the history of Canada. While the storyteller in Frenkel’s work doesn’t specify this public policy, the work highlights the relationship between artistic activity and power, and questions how artistic activity can either question or confirm existing power structures.
Institutions that make narrow determinations of what an acceptable narrative is are not so far removed from institutions that tell you what a person is, and The Last Screening Room seems to express suspicion for these forces of control. If the history we remember is markedly different from the history that we have to be persuaded to remember, then the same must be true of art history. What does it mean when storytelling is absorbed by authority, and what vocabularies of disobedience get applied to the stories that challenge an accepted view? How does this shape what you say in public versus what you say in private? In The Last Screening Room, all stories pose the risk of potential consequences to both the teller and the listener. This danger is exceeded, however, by the risk of not remembering at all.