Alix Lambert's "The Mark of Cain"

Abstract

The following contribution is divided into two parts. The first part consists of a series of video still-images accompanied by a brief essay that describes the contents of Alix Lambert's film, The Mark of Cain. The second part is an interview with the filmmaker and artist. In the interview, Ms. Lambert discusses the differences between documentary filmmaking and conceptual art practices; she reflects on the nature of representation and examines the relationship between the symbolic content of Russian prison tattoos and the new Russian economy; and she compares the persistence of visual forms to the impermanence of meaning. That the two are interrelated is of special interest to Ms. Lambert, whose film records the vicissitudes of a faded visual idiom and reveals the non-identical sameness of form, homologically aligning tattoos and economic order. In both her video still-images and in her interview, Ms. Lambert attempts to make explicit what is inexplicit, all the while admitting to the disruptions, hesitations and gaps in doing so. In her film, a prisoner states that "You can learn a lot about a prisoner from his tattoos." In the hands of Ms. Lambert, we can learn a lot about tattoos from prisoners. And from tattoos, we can learn a lot about the decline of a culture.