‘Growing Up In Americana’ is the umbrella theme for a series of films made between 1998 and 2005, comprising; ‘50/50’, Trilogy 45 (Tri-State), Easy Listening, Episode, and Sense. These films were all made during time spent in New York, and refer to a generation outside the U.S. who have been completely imbued with American culture. Ruth Novaczek (2005)

This series of visual poems constructed from diary fragments and scrapbook musical sounds offers an immediate point of connection for everyone brought up with the glamour of ubiquitous American imagery and hard rock icons. The series captures both the familiar flavours of filmic urban angst and the energy and rawness of American popular music – and at around five minutes each the films are perhaps best seen as audiovisual album tracks – though emphatically not music videos.

This is the world of the dream or nightmare, a twilight zone in which day and night, reality, fantasy and memory merge. The films conjure a poetic sense of residues, traces of schlock Americana echoed and recontextualised through juxtaposition with a fractured soundtrack and self-ironic, gravelly voice-over. The teasing cut and paste of rhythmic and melodic fragments evokes other sounds, other styles – is it punk? is it trip-hop? is it acid jazz? – and is delicately woven together with the artist’s deadpan voice in a kind of laid-back existential rap.

Three tensions underscore these visual poems. Firstly, American pulp imagery is the site of modernist play with the medium. On the one hand, Novaczek offers us fragmented but familiar images from the dystopic worlds of the film noir thriller, the American road movie, dark melodrama and the detritus of urban popular culture. On the other, the films offer a controlled reworking of that material, playing with the quality of the film/video medium, refusing audiences the pleasures of that imagery’s seductive gloss.

Secondly, the hard shell of the noir pulp novel, of the American dream turned sour, is poignantly undercut by a sense of fragmentation and vulnerability. This sense arises both from the material treatment of the images and soundtrack as well as from the intervention of a female protagonist. Novaczek’s hard-boiled hero is a cool female adventurer, making her conquests and taking control of the nightmare fantasy landscapes of urban America, with all the androgynous charisma of a hard-living Lauren Bacall or Patti Smith. For many of us these were our role models, empowering us with the illusion we might take control of our dreams and nightmares. A female sexual energy seeps out from the familiar and conventionally masculinised imagery and soundtrack of Novaczek’s films and begins to recontextualise that imagery, whether it’s through the saturated reds of the iconic (and ironic) roses in Easy Listening, or the dreamscape resonances of a mysterious lime green bag that flashes in and out of frame in Sense. But the soundtrack is more hesitant, more vulnerable: a haunting refrain “my clothes were all wrong” evokes classic anxieties of being revealed, out of place and out of control.

Key to the power of this work is the quality and timbre of Novaczek’s own voice: a rich combination of strength and brittleness, dripping with ennui and new world cynicism. But perhaps the most significant and surprising aspect is the fact that this is a British voice – not some poor attempt at a transatlantic drawl. Novaczek pulls off a major feat in convincingly ‘hard-boiling’ a British voice, setting the exotic qualities of the American icons of our youth within a diasporic and European sensibility: American popular culture is as much ours as anyone else’s, we can own it, play with it and become the adventurers whose voices command it.

Whilst most of the series is constructed from diary fragments shot exclusively in and around New York, Sense begins to explore the tension between old and new world on the visual level as well. We skip continents to Venice, a watery subterranean dreamscape that is itself a mythic landscape – within European cinema a classically doomed site of fear and death, from Death in Venice to Don’t Look Now. The jump from the scary urban wastelands, lakes, roads and dark woods of every noir-esque American film we’ve ever seen to an old-world sinking into its watery grave works strangely well: both spaces live side by side deep within our psyche. The juxtaposition reflects Novaczek’s own history: a transnational diasporic experience of growing up that we all, to a greater or lesser extent, share. But it also shows us how deeply embedded the American nightmare is. Ultimately the power of Novaczek’s work lies in her refreshingly European take on this material, apparently effortlessly bridging cultures and, with a degree of humour and irony, throwing us back to our own darkest nightmares and most glamorous dreams, recontextualising this imagery for a twenty-first century transnational audience.