Father! these are terrible words, but I have no time now for Meanings.
Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

In the opening shot, the camera captures an accumulation of points of light that merge into one another. Only gradually does this blurred mass solidify – as if I have rubbed my eyes in order to be able to see anything at all – into a fixed image; it detaches itself from the black background and presents a close-up view of an assembled structure with a smooth surface that reflects the light, while the surrounding shadows give it three-dimensional form. This is followed by a black screen that leads into a non-specific filmic space, before the title of the piece – The Chocolate Bar – appears in white letters and is simultaneously announced by a male voice. At this point everything is still shrouded in darkness. However, in the very next shot of this, Bethan Huws’ fourth film, which was made in 2005 and is just under four and a half minutes long, the previously introduced structure is brought to the fore and disclosed as the bottle rack, one of Duchamp’s first readymades. This readymade enables Huws to reveal transitions: between blurring and sharpness of focus as specifically filmic devices; between things that are indecipherable or recognizable depending on the chosen image detail; between the history and the updating of the readymade. The bottle rack changes into an eye before which the film unwinds, and, by making reference to an exterior realm, it also brings into play something that precedes the film. The film as film is opened with the appearance of the readymade.

A young, blonde-haired man, wearing a loose-fitting white shirt and waistcoat, is first seen – again initially as a blurred shape – lying on his back and gazing out beyond the frame of the image. What is his gaze fixed upon? Does he see, as I do, the bottle rack as a skeleton hovering in the black expanse? As soon as the camera has focused on the young man, the regular pattern of his breathing begins to give rhythm to the image (reminding me of Andy Warhol’s film Sleep). Coming from behind, the camera moves closer to his head, as if it were able to listen in to the trains and convolutions of his thoughts. Then it cuts to a steep staircase, filmed from below. A female figure sweeps down the stairs. She is not, however – as one might have assumed from the allusion to Nu Descendant un Escalier – naked. Huws’ protagonist is wearing a long dress with a tight bodice – a traditional Welsh costume. Huws borrowed the idea of putting a black hat on top of the bonnet from a film: Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Welsh culture with its long theatrical tradition, including that of male actors performing in female dress (like Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy), is the biographical and collective store that provides the framework for Huws’ film; the first question asked by the character dressed as a Welsh Lady – Where does he come from, Mars? – at the point where all three protagonists are on screen, seems to refer to the bottle rack, and locates the source of the readymade somewhere off-screen: coming from Mars, extraterrestrially alien. This question suggests the possibility of a narrative. However, in the ensuing dialogue between the young man and the woman (both of whom are played by the Welsh actor Rhys Ifans), all potentially coherent narrative threads lead nowhere. Instead, words and sentences are pushed back and forth, their meaning breaking down, being overturned and renewed with each new articulation. The word ‘Mars’ contains a veritable galaxy of meanings: for example, it is a month in spring in the French language, a god of war in ancient myth, a planet named after its red light reminiscent of blood and fire, and, last but not least, a famous chocolate bar. In her film, Bethan Huws places words and sentences in a minimal linguistic setting that is permeable enough to prevent specific semantics from being conveyed. The text on which Huws’ film script is based was previously installed by the artist in 2003, set out in large orange letters on the high wall of the so-called Kinosaal (cinema hall) in the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle. On that occasion, Huws responded to a concrete spatial situation with the ambiguity of her text The Chocolate Bar, making it possible for the space to be experienced and read in a new way.

The relationships and characters formed by Huws in her text on language and its gaps cannot be reconstructed. The very title of the text – The Chocolate Bar – is ambiguous, a play on words that conveys its reality only in a fragmented form: as a locale and an object, this particular combination of words seems to represent both the film’s setting and the film itself in a programmatic sense. Huws’ work deals in a variety of ways with language and its function of producing understanding and misunderstanding. She is interested in the delays in meaning which occur in everyday communication and the discrepancies caused as a result, in the deferment and constant promise of meaning that is never fulfilled. Significantly, it is the female figure that has here been created as a persona without substance: her obvious constructedness – the combination of male and female, as well as the manner of her dress – prevents her from becoming an object of desire, and her seemingly incoherent and meaningless speech is irritating. By means of her hybrid nature, which is genuinely filmic, the dysfunctionality of language, meaning and understanding is given visual expression, as this incoherence seems to serve as a symbol of creativity and poetic methods per se: of practices that produce something unexpected.

Whereas the first part of the film is shot in black-and-white, in the second part colour is used to continue the dialectic conditions, and at the same time indicates a shift in the filmic reality. Huws instructed Ifans to eat a Mars bar as if this lump of chocolate were “the most delicious thing in the world”. He appears not as an actor, but wearing his own clothes and sitting at a bistro table, where he begins – in a more theatrical manner than when he previously played his assigned part – to devour the Mars bar. He breaks the caramelized chocolate mass into two pieces, rolls these into balls in the palms of his hands and proceeds to stuff them into his mouth. Like the bachelor in Duchamp’s Chocolate Grinder who grinds his chocolate himself, Ifans needs no further assistance in the performance of his autoerotic act; this part of the film contains no articulated text. Huws captures the scene, which explores what can occur after the structure determined by the artist, in a single tracking shot filmed from a frontal and slightly lower angle. The film then breaks off suddenly, before the Mars bar has even had time to reach Ifans’ stomach; the balls of chocolate can still be seen bulging out his cheeks – as if the film were saying, in the spirit of Duchamp: With My Tongue In My Cheek.