Lombard Street

Peter Christopherson (1955-2010) R.I.P.

2010-11-25T01:31:00.000-08:00

Enter the Void - The Ultimate Trip

2010-11-15T11:44:00.001-08:00

Enter the Void, the new film by French-Argentinian Director Gasper Noé, is a truly remarkable film. Its visceral affectivity is staggering, and is matched only by its total commitment to transforming the current state of cinema. Arguably it is just not like anything ever seen in the cinema before. This film is relentlessly experimental, and is unafraid to totally immerse and disorientate its spectators by placing them in the most abstract, frenetic and artificial of filmic landscapes. It is a classic example of a truly ambitious work of cinema which is completely unhinged from the realm of conventional representation, and operates according to a completely different schema.

Ultimately this is a work that attempts to situate us entirely within the abstract interiority of thought. Surrounded as we are by the banal hegemony of contemporary Hollywood it is tempting to believe that true cinematic innovation is dead - but Noé shatters this belief in the most spectacular way. In the past ten years only a small handful of films have even come close to the sheer immersive totality, visceral power and vertiginous disorientation of Enter the Void, and two of them were by Noé (Seul Contra Tous & Irreversible), the others being Lynch's Mullholland Drive and Inland Empire, Haneke's Cache, and Despentes & Trinh Thi's Baise-Moi. Increasingly I find that most contemporary cinema simply doesn't make me feel anything at all, and all too often I leave films feeling numb, bored and tired. Cinema, in both its 'popular' and 'art' forms, seems to have forgotten that it is primarily a visual medium, and that as such its primary means of expression should bethrough ‘showing’ things rather than 'telling' things. All too often cinema is trivialised by becoming the mere visual adjunct to explicit narrative ends. I often find myself in the cinema thinking, if I just close my eyes and stop watching the film being screened I wouldn't be missing anything, simply because I am being told everything. Moreover, far too much cinema has become entirely divorced from the activity of thought, having settled into a trite set of formal clichés that align themselves with and merely duplicate the patterns of ordinary, everyday, living.

I think that is very sad.

When I go to the cinema I don't want the everyday reproduction of the familiar - I want to be actively disintegrated. I don't want to be immersed in the familiar. I want to be taken out of myself to the point of total estrangement. I want to be transformed.

Enter the Void presents itself as a striking experiment in extreme subjective visual perspective in the style of Robert Montgomery's 1947 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Lady in the Lake.

In Montgomery’s film the camera adopts and sustains Marlowe’s first-person perspective throughout his investigation, with the character only occasionally being glimpsed in mirrors, shop windows, etc. This is a cinematic experiment seldom pursued, having been considered a less than successful filmic novelty in much the same way that Hitchcock's later experiment with continuous editing in Rope had been.

Noe’s other obvious cinematic influences include Kenneth Anger’s magickal films, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ken Russell’s Altered States and Tarkovsky’s Mirror.

(from Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome)

(visual effect from Russell's Altered States)

In Enter the Void the camera forces the spectator to assume the perspective of a young American, Oscar, who is living with his sister, Linda, and working as a drug dealer in a neon-suffused Tokyo. We see this world through his eyes. It is not simply achieved through a point-of-view camera shot, but is developed into becoming the closest approximation of the way the world looks through embodied eyes. Hence the camera blinks, shifts frenetically and goes blurry in odd ways. Behind closed eyelids Noé presents entire abstract worlds of light and static. The first scene with Oscar plays out as a single, real-time shot lasting over half an hour, following Oscar as he settles down in his flat to smoke the powerful hallucinogen DMT (at one point we are told that DMT is similar to the drug released by the brain at the point of death). The scene includes some of the beautiful, detailed, abstract and pulsing CGI 'interiors', designed by visual artist Glenn Jacobsen aka "Glennwiz."

These minutely detailed micro-landscapes composed of unfolding and expanding brilliantly coloured spirals, fractals and delicate tendrils, accompanied by extracts from Coil's alien sound experiments on the early ANS synthesiser, recall Kubrick's 'stargate' sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was described at the time as ‘the ultimate trip’.

As I watched this part of the film (although it is perhaps more accurate to say that I was physically immersed in the film)my body began to be very powerfully affected; I felt an intense feeling of physical anxiety, fear and excitement, as well as a strong sensation of psychological vertigo that recalled some of my most intensely hallucinogenic drug experiences. Noé, by harnessing the spectacular visual CGI work of Glennwiz with Coil’s luminous soundscape, manages to perfectly capture not just the visual micro fabric of the hallucinated interior, but also its weird pace and aural tonality. One is immediately reminded of the quite literal transformative affective potential of cinema when it is used appropriately. Why hasn’t anybody ever truly tried to visually and aurally express the psychedelic experience on the big screen before?

This part of the film, where we are interiorised within the hallucinogenic realm, operates as a kind of preparation for the subsequent exploration of disembodied interior thought and memory. We will move from the abstract and synthetic meditative interior landscapes associated with Oscar’s drug experience to a more concrete and determined set of visual memories, associations and fantasies, but which are no less interior.

Called to make a drug deal mid-trip Oscar makes his way to a club called 'The Void' with his friend Alex, they have a rambling conversation about The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This conversation about the Tibetan mythology of the soul's journey after death (a journey that involves the nightmare of being confronted with versions of your past life as if in a mirror) appears to set out the narrative parameters for what follows; but in fact it is less a crude narrative device than you might initially think. At the club Oscar has been betrayed by his fellow drug dealer and is shot by the police after attempting to evade arrest.

At the point of his fatal shooting his earlier conversation offers an explanation for what it is that Oscar will be thinking in his final compressed moments as the flames from his dying brain are extinguished forever. The conversation about The Tibetan Book of the Dead provide a crude framework for Oscar’s desperate last thoughts. Noé himself has said that it is ‘a dream of someone who read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and heard about it before being shot by a gun. It's not the story of someone who dies, flies and is reincarnated, it's the story of someone who is stoned when he gets shot and who has an intonation of his own dream.’

In exploring one man's apparent spiritual journey after an untimely death, Noé manages to achieve things with point of view filmmaking that are striking in their fluidity and unfamiliarity. In ways that are reminiscent of certain scenes from his earlier film Irreversible, his camera is unhinged, it floats, dances and whirls, stitching together footage taken of reality with entirely computer-generated imagery in ways that challenge our notion of how film cameras can even move. Oscar’s disembodied soul rises up out of his lifeless body and speeds across Tokyo to check on the reactions of his friends and his sister to the news of his death, all still from his eyes - except Oscar now has no eyes, he is disembodied. So the blinking stops, as does the frenetic hand-held quality of the camera; the camera now floats and drifts smoothly across the tracks of Oscar's disjointed pattern of thought alone. This part of the film is entirely engaged in the interior perspective of Oscar's memory.

In scenes that are reminiscent of Resnais' time travel masterpiece Je t'aime, Je t'aime, the events that led Oscar to this place in time, namely his death, are shown in a series of disjointed fragments, again from his perspective, but now with a difference: it is now as if he is positioned behind his past self, watching the scenes play out with the back of his own head in the foreground. We are presented with images of Oscar and Linda as young children with their parents, the close incestuous relationship between the two siblings, the violent accidental death of their parents, the pact they make to never leave one another (which is broken when they are sent to separate foster homes), and the road that eventually leads them back together in Tokyo - he with his drug problems and her falling into a job as a stripper in the ‘Power, Money Sex’ club within her first few days in town.

Oscar's incestuous desire for his sister, which is heightened by the death of his parents, is explored in these often moving, sentimental and occasionally nightmarish flashbacks. Yet there is artificiality about the way these scenes are shot, not least in the self-conscious way the camera is positioned behind Oscar's head in the past and observed from the perspective of Oscar's present spirit self, and in the highly stylized and psychedelic presentation of a CGI Tokyo cityscape.

Massive shifts of time are spliced and linked together, with the film moving back and forth through time at the speed of thought. It is with these rapid edits of time that we realise that we are seeing a visual hallucination of Oscar's past, coordinated together into an abstract patchwork by remembered points of trauma, loss, grief, desire, pleasure and longing. In much the same way as Resnais' time traveller is oriented to repeat fragmented moments from his past through the forces of his desire, grief, guilt and a desperate need to change the past, Oscar is driven to make some attempt to try and reconcile with his sister, to make up for his act of, what he sees as, childhood betrayal. Yet this desire for reconciliation is corrupted and confused, and has now become suffused with incestuous sexual desire for the sister/mother.

If, as I’m suggesting, we are to read these interlinked moments as the compressed interior thoughts of Oscar as he lies dying, as the film progresses we are inevitably moving ever closer to the oblivion of the void. Oscar’s thoughts become more disparate, looser, weirder and more abstract. As we progress the scenes become harder and harder to recognise as the movements of the film as thought - perhaps they are closer to being the movements associated with the primal instinct towards survival, Oscar’s desires, fears, hopes and his force of will to remain in being.

The third, and perhaps most impressionistic and challenging, part of the film, deals with the aftermath of Oscar's death. The perspective we adopt once again floats the camera through walls as Oscar watches in mute helplessness as his body is disintegrated and the most important people in his life fall to pieces in the most repellent ways. For me, one of Noé's greatest achievements emerges from the fact that by this point, as a viewer, you have become so immersed within the interior perspective of Oscar through the visual medium of the film that Noé is able to somehow convey the emotional state and thoughts of a character who has absolutely no voice and no way of communication. This aspect of Oscar has become pure observation and abstract movement between images, yet he has distinct and recognizable emotional responses to the world around him that he sees, yet cannot affect. You realise at a certain point that this is being achieved through us having become immersed within Oscar as his brain dies. We are Oscar at the point of a profound mutation, perhaps the profoundest mutation of all, namely death, the void. Again, at this point one recalls the startling final sequences from Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Throughout the film, from the point Oscar has been shot, there is a relentless rhythm associated with the continued movement into the saturated pulsing/strobing realm of light and flames, almost as if one is circling around oblivion, as the last circulations of blood pulse around the brain and the final synapses fire. The linkages between images where we are plunged into oblivion match onto these neurological pulsations, and we become unhinged, floating and driven by the desperate surges of desire that had fundamentally animated Oscar's brief life. We float through the venal amphitheatre of the 'Money, Power, Sex' club, as grubby, nihilistic and bestial as the club 'Rectum' in Irreversible, before Oscar's spirit floats through the hallucinogenic sex chambers of the 'Love' hotel in the final moments of the film. Both ‘Money, Sex, Power’ and the ‘Love Hotel’ operate as ciphers for Oscar’s mammalian instincts and desires, with the latter signalling the complete realisation of the fantasy psychedelic neon model of the ‘Love’ Hotel that we glimpse earlier in the film. Here what Oscar feels as a purified love towards his sister (i.e. purified of money and power), his desperate need to reconcile and make amends for having abandoned her in childhood is identified through the only matrix of desire he knows, sex. In weird scenes reminiscent of a Murakami novel, all of the characters from Oscar's present life are engaged in passionate sexual acts where the energy generated by their sexual organs floats from them like psychedelic ectoplasm. He discovers his sister and his best friend Alex fucking in this spectral set of love chambers, and in his final moments, in a move contextualised by his recent reading/conversation about The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Oscar 'decides' to become transubstantiated into one of Alex's sperms and to reincarnate as his sister's child. Oscar becomes his father as he fucks his sister, and then becomes his own seed which impregnates his sister become mother. This vertiginous spiral of desire signals the last mad moments of Oscar’s life, his desperate desire to continue to cling to existence as he nears almost total oblivion.

In the final scene (again, a scene which directly echoes the final scene from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) we see Oscar reborn as his sister's child, his sister having now become his mother. This is profoundly illusory. This is the hallucinated spectacle of the dying Oscar as he swirls vertiginously around the void, desperately clinging hold to his past and seeking a way, any way, to persist in being. Ultimately, I think this is another of Noé’s films about the primal human desire, in the face of suffering, misery and death, to persist in being, to find a way to adhere to life. Think of his butcher in Seul Contre Tous as he considers killing his daughter and himself at the end of the film, as he contemplates ‘entering the void’.

Whilst Enter the Void offers no false condolences about the unremitting nature of material reality (about this it is almost Gnostic in its view of the world), and whilst it might appear to offer the Buddhist no-exit sentiment regarding the wheel of life (we will persist in being come what may), ultimately Noé offers the certain exit to the void. All we see, all we hear, all we feel, and all we think during this film are the compressed moments of Oscar's dying, expanded and cinematically laid out, and his desperate efforts to reconnect the fragments of his life, his desire and his hopes into a persistence of being. But Oscar must die, and like we all must, he enters the void. I suppose one might understand this as an ugly, yet ultimately optimistic, form of nihilism.

I think that what is finally so remarkable about this film, and what places it alongside classic transformative films such as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Resnais’ Je t’aime, Je t’aime and Lynch’s Eraserhead, together with other recent masterpieces such as Lynch's Inland Empire, is that this is a highly accomplished and ambitious film which explores the everyday, damaged and corrupted, spiritual dimensions of subjectivity. Oscar is no idealised hero-protagonist, like us all he is fucked up, confused, damaged and damaging, but the peculiarities of his interiority are no less compelling for that. I believe that this is a realm to which cinema is uniquely suited to explore, yet so rarely does. I left feeling that all cinema should be about grasping this vital possibility for exploring the labyrinthine qualities of spiritual interiority, and I left with an overwhelmingly powerful desire to immerse myself in this thrilling and spectacular film again. And I just don’t say that about too many films anymore.

Herzog: Ecstatic Truth

2010-11-05T03:26:00.001-07:00

The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (Herzog, 1974)

Herzog has described his 1974 documentary The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner as one of his most important films. Ostensibly a "documentary" made about the Swiss ski-jumper Walter Steiner's mammoth death-defying and record-breaking leaps made during the championships in Planica, Yugoslavia in March 1974, Herzog transforms the material on Steiner into a powerful meditation upon the capacity to ecstatically transcend the apparent limitations of the human condition. As Herzog, himself obsessed from an early age by ski-jumping, once said - "They dream they can fly and want to step into this ecstasy which pushes against the laws of nature - Ski-jumping is not just an athletic pursuit, it is something very spiritual too, a question of how to master the fear of death and isolation. It is as if they are flying into the deepest, darkest abyss there is. These are men who step outside all that we are as human beings, and overcoming this mortal fear, the deep anxiety these men go through, this is what is so striking about ski-jumpers".

From its remarkable opening sequence, in which we see a ski ‘flight’ played to us at 1/20th speed set to the hypnotic tones of regular collaborator Popol Vuh we immediately become aware that this is much more than a mere documentary. Herzog makes no real attempt to contextualise the event for us, or even attempt to elaborate a meaningful psychological explanation of those individuals who participate. He relies upon beautiful super slow speed camera footage of the skiers in mid-flight , and their often violent and catastrophic landings, accompanied with possibly one of the most beautiful soundtracks ever produced by Popol Vuh. The stunning imagery of open-mouthed ski-flyers in mid-air aiming towards the vast white space of the landing area captures perfectly the sheer ecstasy that the competitors feel from achieving the gracefulness of flight. This documentary miraculously manages to express moments of genuine euphoria and weaves a powerful dreamlike mythology about those who repeatedly attempt to transcend the very limits of the human.

Land of Silence and Darkness (Herzog, 1971)

Land of Silence and Darkness was Werner Herzog's first feature-length documentary, made in 1971. Herzog has said of this film that it "is without doubt one of the most essential and important things I've done". It tells the story of Fini Straubinger, at the time a leader of, and advocate for, the deaf and blind in Germany. Straubinger developed a unique tactile form of communication which she uses to talk with and teach some other deaf-blind people who have language-learning capacity. Like many of his other characters, Herzog portrays Fini and the other deaf-mute people as lonely outsiders isolated from society, suffering from an inability to communicate their existence.

It is a film utterly driven by an obsessive compulsion to communicate, seeing it as touching upon the deepest question of what it means to be human, and this is central to its enduring mystery, beauty and power. The film begins with Fini communicating with other deaf-blind individuals who have a comparable grasp of the tactile language, with many of them having become deaf-blind later in life. There are some extremely powerful scenes of them sharing poems at Fini’s birthday party, them taking a first aircraft flight, a visit to a botanical garden and a zoo. However, the film transports us from this realm of silence and darkness inexorably towards a far stranger and mysterious place by introducing those who have been deaf-blind from birth. These individuals are seemingly totally locked into their terrible isolation with little or no way of communicating their interiorty. Herzog presents some of the ways these children are being taught to communicate, but we are told that it is seemingly impossible to communicate abstract concepts such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘love’ and ‘happiness’. Amidst this seeming despair and lonliness Fini is repeatedly filmed reaching out to these children, to touch and to try and communicate with them. Fini's efforts at communication become transcendent and transformative acts. At this point it becomes about communicating the bare presence of others to individuals trapped in a terrible form of lonliness, a dignified communion of lonely souls. Herzog said of it - "In the film one finds the most radical and absolute human dignity, human suffering stripped bare".

At the heart of the film is a seemingly perverse and paradoxical tension arising from the attempt to use the medium of film - a medium that appears to be limited to communicating through the senses of sound and sight - to examine people who can neither see not hear and their efforts to communicate with others and the world around them. The sensual form of communication that is at the heart of the film, unlocking the deaf-blind from their strange and bleak solitude and loneliness, seems to provoke Herzog to try and discover a uniquely 'haptic' form of cinema, a cinema capable of turning the eye into an organ of touch as well as seeing, as well as a cinema capable of exploring deeply spiritual and profound sensations. Arguably, the most powerful modes of spiritual communication in the film comes from those non-discursive touches that create a sensory communion that is more immediate and less ordered, see for example the young deaf-blind boy Harald luxuriating in the pure sensual delight of the shower, or Fini's remarkable tactile interactions with a young deaf-blind man Vladimir and her introduction of the radio which he grasps to his chest as if it were a living thing.

In interviews Herzog has claimed that all of the protagonists in his films (both documentaries and fictional features) are sympathetic points of self-reference, as if he has been gradually filming his own life. The inability to communicate their interiority and their existence reflects Herzog's own struggle to find “a new grammar of images” capable of communicating a deeper and more profound sense of the truth of existence cinematically. In his 1999 “Minnesota Declaration”, Herzog laid out the principles of his personal documentary style, attacking the failure of cinema vérité to go beyond a superficial “truth of accountants” based in objective facticity. Herzog distinguishes between the mundane facts of the surface and a far deeper and more profound “ecstatic truth” that can only be reached “through fabrication and imagination and stylization”.To this end, a subtle stylisation is employed in both The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner and Land of Silence and Darkness, and virtually all of his documentaries (with subjects all too willing to cooperate in the process), whether by staging certain scenes for the camera, scripting bits of dialogue, or even fabricating whole sequences from limited historical facts. To get a sense of how Herzog elaborates "ecstatic truth" in these films it is necessary to draw attention to a number of things which occur there. During the Land of Silence and Darkness Fini Strauber, who has become deaf and blind in later life, says that something she remembers from her childhood was watching men fly in the air at a ski-jumping competition. As she says this an image of a man flying with his skis against the sky is inserted by Herzog. Yet, this strange premonition of Walter Steiner which is presented as an important memory of Fini's occurs before the film about Steiner. In fact it is four years before Herzog made The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner. Herzog has subsequently acknowledged that this "memory" was fabricated, and that he gave Fini the sentence to speak, which he says she immediately understood the reason why. It speaks of Herzog's own attitudes towards ski-jumpers and his intuition that a sensuous link could be formed between Fini and them. Of ski-jumpers he has said - "Ski-jumping is not just an athletic pursuit, it is something very spiritual too, a question of how to master the fear of death and isolation.It is as if they are flying into the deepest, darkest abyss there is. These are men who step outside all that we are as human beings, and overcoming this mortal fear, the deep anxiety these men go through, this is what is so striking about ski-jumpers." By fabricating a memory of ski-jumpers for Fini Herzog is intuitively linking the two together in order to suggest a very deep, almost spiritual, truth about Fini's character. Herzog himself says - "Very early on, I had the feeling that only through invention and stylization would I reach a very deep truth about a character, even in a documentary. So in this case it is made up. But as much as it is made up, it also points to her deepest truth".

Again, at the very end of The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, the beautiful quotation from Steiner that is overlaid over the most astonishing slow motion footage of him landing in the bleak wilderness is fabricated by Herzog (the text actually being drawn from the Swiss writer Robert Walser), presumably because he believes it says something essential about Steiner.

I should be all alone in this world
Me, Steiner and no other living being.
No sun, no culture; I, naked on a high rock
No storm, no snow, no banks, no money
No time and no breath.
Then, finally, I would not be afraid any more.

Again and again in his documentaries we see this process of fabulation, and it expresses Herzog's efforts to mine a deeper and more profound truth than the mere factual. He says - "We must ask of reality: how important is it really? And: how important, really, is the factual? Of course, we can't disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which truth emerges. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."

[These are notes from an aborted talk which accompanied a recent screening of Werner Herzog’s The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner & Land of Silence and Darkness]

Haunted Air

2010-10-06T02:12:00.001-07:00

Haunted Air is a beautiful and haunting new book of found photographs of the festival of Samhain and Hallowe'en collated by the artist, musician and composer Ossian Brown, who was a member of Coil and is a co-founding member of Cyclobe. The book features an introduction by David Lynch and an afterword by Geoff Cox, and is published by Jonathan Cape.

The roots of Hallowe’en lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan festival subsumed in All Souls’ Day, when across Europe the dead were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging ‘soul cakes’ in exchange for prayers, and fires burned to keep malevolent phantoms at bay. From Europe, the haunted tradition would quickly take root and flourish in the fertile soil of the New World. Feeding hungrily on fresh lore, consuming half-remembered tales of its own shadowy origins and rituals, Hallowe’en was reborn in America. The pumpkin supplanted the carved turnip; costumes grew ever stranger, and celebrants both rural and urban seized gleefully on the festival’s intoxicating, lawless spirit. For one wild night, the dead stared into the faces of the living and the living, ghoulishly masked and clad in tattered backwoods baroque, stared back.

The photographs in Haunted Air provide an extraordinary glimpse into the traditions of this macabre festival from ages past, and form an important document of photographic history. These are the pictures of the dead: family portraits, mementoes of the treasured, now unrecognisable, other. Torn from album pages, sold piecemeal for pennies and scattered, abandoned to melancholy chance and the hands of strangers.

Coil – Colour Sound Oblivion: Disc 3 Convergence, New York , 2001 & Disc 4 DK Gorbunova, Moscow, 2001

2010-08-19T12:58:00.001-07:00

CSO 3: New York 18/08/01 – Convergence
Mood: Glowing
Personnel: Jhon Balance, Peter Christopherson, Thighpaulsandra, Tom Edwards & Martin Schellard (additional performers Danny McKernan & Matthew Gibson)

CSO 4: Moscow 15/09/01 – DK Gorbunova
Mood: Glowing
Personnel: Jhon Balance, Peter Christopherson, Thighpaulsandra & Tom Edwards

Tracklist (same for both discs):
Something
Higher Beings Command
Amethyst Deceivers
What Kind of Animal Are You?
Blood from the Air
I Am the The Green Child
Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil

The performances on the next two discs are examples of Coil’s second live period, what is often referred to as the Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil live era, one of which is excellent and the other extraordinary. The second time that I saw Coil play was the Persistence is All performance at the Royal Festival, London, on the 19th September 2000. This performance was considerably different from their earlier Time Machines concert, and represented an early outing for their second live manifestation. The set list at the London show was very similar to the two shows on these discs, the only difference was the earlier inclusion of Titan Arch from Love’s Secret Domain, which was replaced at the later concerts by the new song What Kind of Animal Are You? For these concerts the members of Coil were now all clad in what looked like highly reflective boiler suits with loose hanging straps, and they appeared to be made-up to look like they had received head trauma. Depending on the lighting being used, they have the appearance of brutalised cosmonauts having escaped from their straightjackets, or as headless glowing spectral figures haunting the stage.

By this point there had been a clear evolution from their restrained, disciplined and slow ritualistic performances into a much more violent and unconstrained mood, where the magickal intent was clearly somewhat different. Other changes were apparent, including the new set-list, alternative line-up, diverse instrumentation, and the striking visual backdrop. Whilst the two concerts from New York and Moscow in 2001 share an identical set-list, they actually provide some intriguing contrasts, so I thought I would review both of them together.

The New York concert on disc 3, Coil’s only show in the United States, was originally shot and recorded by Don Poe of Muteelation, and had been previously released by him as an officially sanctioned video and CDr. This was a well shot and well edited recording, with the sound and visual quality being of a high standard. For Colour Sound Oblivion Sleazy has undertaken some considerable additional editing, most of which involves blending the performance video with the backing projections to spectacular effect, which raises Coil’s performance to an even higher level of intensity. (Sleazy’s projections for these performances, along with the aural backing track, are included in the double DVD set which make up the final two discs of the box-set). Coil arrive on stage accompanied by Balance’s repeated intoning of Something from Musick to Play in the Dark 2,at which point Balance announces that they are dedicating the concert to the moon. The sound then morphs into the sweeping majesty of Higher Beings Command from Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil. The line-up and instrumentation for this show is slightly different from earlier performances, with Ossian Brown being replaced by Martin Schellard playing heavily processed guitar drones and Tom Edwards adding a very distinctive Marimba rhythm.

Thighpaulsandra can be seen playing one of the group’s rare and wonderful Fenix modular synthesisers throughout the concert, a key piece of sound equipment that largely defines the group’s early live sound, together with the later studio soundscapes of Queens of the Circulating Library and Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil. This beautiful piece of equipment is noticeably absent from the later Moscow 2001 performance.

The next track is a version of Amethyst Deceivers which delivers an interplay between a beautiful deep electronic pulse, that calls to mind the padding approach of a giant feline creature, and Edward’s angular Marimba. Schellard and Thighpaulsandra add stabs of guitar drones and electronic noise to accompany Balance’s heavily processed vocals. This is followed by what is arguably one of the highlights of this particular performance, the new track What Kind of Animal Are You? This piece is marked by a sense of urgency, trauma and intensity, beginning with angular and atonal electronics over which Balance vividly recalls a dream in which he was a large black dog and a man on a cross wearing a crown of thorns. Here Balance’s live vocal performance (unprocessed) begins to reach a new level of intensity, one that would increasingly define much of Coil’s live work. This is a remarkably powerful musical and vocal performance - dynamic, intense and terrifying. As the song’s opening section makes way for the frenetic and swirling electronic insanity of the mid-section, it becomes a kind of transformative ritual centred around one of the key magickal concerns of the group, namely the relation between man and animal. Balance seems to become possessed by powerful forces as he screams of becoming an animal (dog and salamander). This is contrasted by a careful and challenging insistence, signalled by a distinct alteration of the musical dynamic, that when you ‘peel your plastic back, you’ll see’ that man is the animal, that man is divine and that there is no time. It is clear that Balance has once again taken on the role of the intermediary between the dimension of man and animal, pursuing the transformative potential of moving from man to animal and then beyond. With this performance Coil are continuing and persisting with one of the key obsessions evident from the group’s earliest live ‘art’ piece from 1983.

Balance mistakenly introduces the next track as I Am the Green Child, but quickly corrects himself to announce Blood from the Air (from Horse Rotorvator). His vocals, again heavily electronically processed and distorted, are sung over the top of a restrained and disciplined musical performance that sounds indistinguishable from the original studio recording. Balance becomes a demonic messenger, singing of pain and dread, delivering the good news that everything changes and everything dies. Then comes I am the Green Child from Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil, a piece that is all angular marimba, resonant electronics and animal howling. Again Balance assumes a demonic role, emerging from some otherworldy dimension full of anger and vengeful humour. This track functions as dynamic preparation for the second highlight of this brilliant performance, the full-on vertiginous intensity and madness of Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil. The final sixteen minutes mark a controlled descent into an almost inconceivable realm of aural lunacy where Coil elaborate a true cacophonous wall of sound. This is a piece that appears to reveal (to me at least) their obvious concern with discerning and rendering tangible to an audience the invisible barriers and the limits that separate us from other dimensions, to render them manifest and to perform some kind of brief assault upon them. As we draw ever nearer to climax two naked male figures appear on stage bearing a large sheet of metal against which Balance performs the seemingly futile gesture of smashing his head. There is a chaotic sexual eroticism made manifest here, a beautiful masculine fecundity of colour and sound that swells, sweats, throbs and explodes. A fitting climax to a remarkable show suffused with dread, anxiety and ecstasy.
However, as is evident from the frequent stage visits by the venue’s sound technician, Coil’s performance in New York was plagued throughout by a number of technical glitches and failures. This doesn’t seriously detract from what is a quite outstanding concert (and video recording) that was extremely well received by Coil’s US fanbase at the time. But what does become obvious, particularly when you watch both of these performances next to each other, is that the New York show appears slightly disjointed and less coherent. The Moscow performance is, by contrast, the near perfection of this particular live manifestation of Coil. Here the set-list functions as a coherent whole, with the complex dynamics being allowed the space to build and function successfully. The high quality and close-up video recording of the 2001 Russian performance was made by FeeLee and has been previously released on VHS.

Watching this performance the extent of Coil’s desire for it to function as a ritualistic act of cleansing and transfiguration became clearer to me – they are elaborating animal becomings, allowing demonic voices to deliver their commanding messages about death, change and renewal, and summoning the courage to confront the limits, to dwell on the threshold and to attempt to go across (or as Balance says, to ‘go under in the company of animals’).

Coil again appear during the ritual invocation of Something, glowing and bearing the same head wounds as before. Balance announces a much longer dedication, which includes all those suffering from incarceration, either externally or internally imposed, those with the courage to live life as it should be lived free from the constraints of sexual inhibition and prejudice, and finally to madness. As was evident from the earlier New York show, this performance will be all about madness. Balance performs a series of significant invocationary gestures as they proceed seamlessly into Higher Beings Command, summoning the messengers from beyond and touching them down to the ground. The screened projections, which are identical to the New York show, are magnificent and are brilliantly edited with the close-up live footage (which is shot on stage during the performance). Coil’s line-up was slightly different from New York due to the absence of Martin Schellard and his processed guitar drones, which are absent from the overall sound presentation. Tom Edwards remains on Marimba throughout, and Thighpaulsandra is operating without the mighty Fenix synthesiser, which has been replaced by two smaller analogue keyboards and a theremin. The replacement of the Fenix by these different types of synthesiser gives the Moscow concert a very different and distinctive overall sound, particularly during the strange intense bursts of electricity that occasionally surge forth from the theremin.

As they move into the familiar rendition of Amethyst Deceivers (which is accompanied by a particularly beautiful and hypnotic visual projection) the close-up live footage allows us to see the way Balance is performing the electronic manipulation of his vocals with a hand-controller, which is fascinating to watch. The song offers a controlled prelude to the frenzied outpouring that is What Kind of Animal Are You? If anything Balance’s performance is even more intense, mesmerizing and extraordinary than the New York show. When I was watching this I became uncomfortably aware that Balance is bringing something formless and unnameable into being, he goes to the extreme to manifest a seething force or energy of the animal, and what’s more he succeeds. It is a hauntingly affective moment that displays the kind of total commitment and sincerity that Balance repeatedly displayed in his live performances. This was anything but Coil by numbers (‘just join the dots’). Balance uses the vulnerability of his ‘wounds’ to lay bare his own animal limits, and to summon up deep atavistic reserves and to channel them into being. It was at this point when watching this performance, which is so full of atavistic becoming, seething with erotic excess and a frenzied electronic automatism, that an intuitive link occurred to me – these performances were obviously a deliberate aural approximation of Austin Osman Spare’s atavistic and orgiastic animal magick. Spare’s art was always significant to Coil, and one can find numerous explicit (as well as implicit) references to his art throughout all of their work. Think here of the sidereal recordings that begin with Love’s Secret Domain and continue with Worship the Glitch and Black Light District. It should come as no surprise then that Coil should demonstrate an ambition to manifest Sparean tropes within their live work. To me the Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil era appears to manifest something akin to Spare’s Ugly Ecstasy and Seance art; voluptuous automatic sketches of erotic multidimensional becomings, where Spare employs a looping and sweeping autonomous line that traces the emergent organic forms at the very point of their magickal becoming from out of the shapeless non-organic mass, and strange pastels/paintings where an ethereal space, dominated by the colour green, is haunted by terrifying spiritual sirens.

These are works of interdimensional becoming, suffused by the erotic desire to transgress everyday boundaries of the normative and the organic, and they were always more than mere illustration or representation – the works themselves function as the means for enacting that becoming, they are gateways allowing the spaces for other (frightening, excessive and ancient) things to come through. This, it seems to me, was what Coil were aspiring to in these excessive and violent performances - animal becomings, demonic emergences, the activation of the ancient Ids of the world - Sparean and Lovecraftian manifestations.

The focussed discipline at work is evident in the stark change in dynamics as they perform Blood from the Air. This is about as good a performance of an individual track that Coil ever achieved. Balance is lyrically spot-on, and the song is perfectly paced and faultlessly executed. The intense and frenetic invocation of the previous track gives way to a tremendously bleak and powerful meditation on the inevitability of pain, death and transformation. This in turn acts as a reflective moment before we are once again plunged into the mad terrain of Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil. The demonic angularity and aggression of I Am The Green Child, with the stage bathed in beautiful green light and hypnotic vortices being projected behind them, leads to the inevitable descent into the final climactic episode. As we descend into the utter sonic chaos at the climax of the show the following words are repeatedly screened on the projection - GOD PLEASE FUCK MY MIND FOR GOOD. The DVD recording of the final section of the Moscow show perfectly captures Coil’s efforts to transcribe the seething contorted mass of becoming one perceives in Spare’s work into an aural and performative medium.

Here the Ugly Ecstasy becomes realised in the sheer overwhelming force of the sensory assault Coil manage to conduct. Something formless, unspeakable and previously intangible is glimpsed, felt and experienced during these final few minutes. Like Spare’s own magickal work, Coil also display an awe-inspiring degree of absurd splendour and grandeur that accelerates towards a vertiginous outpouring of dark visceral power. This is an environment momentarily transformed by Coil’s performance into a seething mass where everything appears to be fornicating, the automatism of the complex and layered electronic cacophony allows all kinds of things to become manifest from elsewhere. This is an utterly compelling spectacle, and a true marvel to have it captured on screen. As Coil exit the stage the following words are flashed up on the screen - 'RESIST THE THINGS YOU CAN FIND EVERYWHERE' - amen to that.

Coil - Colour Sound Oblivion: Disc 2: Sonar Festival, Barcelona, 2000

2010-08-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

Coil: Colour Sound Oblivion: Disc 2

June 17th, 2000
Coil: Sonar Festival, Barcelona

Personnel

John Balance
Peter Christopherson
Thighpaulsandra
Ossian Brown

Bill Breeze (Viola)

Feeling: Fluffy

Tracklisting:

Everything Keeps Dissolving

Amethyst Deceivers

Circulating

The Universe is a Haunted House/Chasms

Elves

I was fortunate enough to see Coil play twice, both in 2000. The first time I saw them was their first proper concert performance at the Royal Festival Hall as part of Julian Cope’s Cornucopia programme, performed just over two months before the Sonar performance captured on this disc. This was a perfomance intially billed as The Industrial use of Semen Will Revolutionise the Human Race.The anticipation around Coil’s first London performance was immense, matched only by the speculation surrounding their likely setlist and stage appearance. I remember that I was initially quite startled when Coil came on stage, bathed in a deep purple light, as a four-piece clad in hooded white fluffy costumes covered with miniature mirrors, to take up their places at assigned synthesiser stations in front of a backdrop bearing the John Dee Monad from their 1998 Time Machines album.

They proceeded to perform a relatively ‘short’ set, lasting a mere 40 minutes; yet they played three of the most intense, dynamic and astonishing electronic drones I’d ever heard live. But what I also found striking was their overall stage presence throughout their brief performance; there was an overwhelming sense of them performing a predetermined and highly focussed ritual composed of slow and deliberate movements. I remember being struck by the careful and controlled movement of the four members on stage, it seemed highly choreographed and intentional, compromised of slow synchronised movements and pre-established routines around the stage. Visually it seemed to have the same aura and power as Beckett’s late stage masterpiece Quad.

Coil presented themselves as mysteriously coordinated figures, all clad in identical costumes, tracing out a hidden geometry as if in another dimension than that of the real. Their music suggested an inexorable descent through some kind of fabulous portal akin to the journey undertaken by Bowman during the extraordinary psychedelic sequence in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This seemed like a journey in both inner and outer space, as well as being a journey in time. The three pieces of music played that night managed to elaborate very powerful dynamics whilst appearing largely static. This was an experiment in altering our perception of time, and to be an extension to the work previously undertaken in the studio on Time Machines. The performative ritual accompanying this music only added to the sense of a strange elongation of time - slow and careful repetitions across the stage, minimal interactions between the four, indiscernible manipulation of mirrors, crystals, incense, wands, etc, all designed to provide the audience with a very powerful transcendent and magickal experience. The final piece, Chasms, presented a vast backdrop of electronic drones which were punctuated by the most enormous and resonant slabs of electronic sound and Balance intoning as if from another dimension the Crowleyean dictum ‘Every Man and Every Woman is a Star’. By any measure this was an extraordinary and astonishing performance, one of those rare and intense experiences that irrevocably alters you in some ill-defined way.

The live performance on the second disc of the Colour Sound Oblivion collection comprises Coil's second performance from 2000, which was at Barcelona's Sonar festival. For this performance Coil again appeared clad in the fluffy mirrored costumes from the London show. Their set here repeats the pieces they had played live in the earlier Royal Festival Hall show (Everything Keeps Dissolving, Circulating and Chasms), but adds three new songs to the setlist, including a beautiful permutation of Amethyst Deceivers. Coil were joined by Bill Breeze for this performance, playing viola throughout the entire set, adding some astonishing aural flourishes which will be familiar to anybody who has heard his previous work with Coil on the Solstice EPs. Christopherson has managed to successfully edit together two different recordings of the concert, of quite varying visual quality, in order to present a full record of the performance that is somehow faithful to its extraordinarily intense spirit.

As someone who saw Coil’s first performance there is no doubt that some of the highly controlled and mysterious quality of that earlier outing was lost in the transition to a much smaller and more intimate venue, but it still amounts to an extraordinarily odd, strange and entirely original experience. The footage enables us to be up-close and personal with the group as they perform on stage, and we are able to see the levels of intense concentration that accompanied the three longer electronic manipulations being carried out by the group over the top of predetermined aural backdrops.

This is accompanied by some aspects of the same ritual deliberation that had been such a feature of their earlier London performance – mirrors, crystals, incense and coordinated and synchronised movements. Balance appears restrained and intense throughout these pieces. Yet, we also begin to get a sense of what will increasingly become such a central feature of Coil’s subsequent live work – Balance’s unconstrained, unbalanced and totally inspirational performances. The final piece, Elves, (where Coil are joined on stage by a wild ecstatic female dancer) has Balance roaring out, over the top of frenetic electronics, with the fury of a man possessed the words ‘God Please Fuck My Mind For Good’.

The first two concerts performed by Coil in 2000 were truly astonishing, and set the bar extremely high with regard to what they went on to become. Of course they made the decision to proceed, more often than not, with a more ‘traditional’ song-based approach for subsequent sustained tours, yet this was always brutally transgressed by Balance’s anarchic and inspirational improvisations. Coil could never be described as a 'traditional' band. However, watching their 2000 performance from Sonar on this disc, and with my memories of Time Machines Live in London, I’m left with a melancholic sense, had Balance survived his battle with alcoholism, of what else they might have achieved, of what else this astonishing group might have gone on to do as an entity exploring ecstatic passages through time.

Coil - Colour Sound Oblivion: Disc 1: The Air Gallery, 1983

2010-08-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

Coil - Colour Sound Oblivion: Disc 1

August 24, 1983
Coil: Air Gallery, London

A Slow Fade to Total Transparency

Personnel

John Balance
John Gosling
Marc Almond
Peter Christopherson (provided backup tapes)

Cerith Wyn-Evans (cameraman)

“John Gosling, Marc Almond and I performed something called 'A Slow Fade To Total Transparency' (How to Destroy Angels) . . at the Air Gallery on 24th August. This was a mixture of reading by Marc and a performance by John and me. It was videoed and I think it will be released in some form. Also Cerith Wyn-Evans, a super 8 film maker is planning to do a film around the original idea.” (John Balance)

The 1983 Coil performance of A Slow Fade to Total Transparency begins with John Gosling (who appears at the beginning to be wearing some kind of night shirt)and John Balance (who is naked apart from a spiked leather thong) preparing materials for a ritual. Balance, clutching a large syringe, has already wrapped some wire around his head and is in the process of tying a tourniquet around his upper arm. The sound being played at the beginning is from Pasolini’s film Salo, including dialogue taken from the infamous shit banquet where the hapless victims are instructed to ‘Mangia!! Mangia!!’ After a minute Marc Almond begins to read a piece of sustained sadistic loathing seemingly addressed to a former lover over the top of recordings of electronic drones (which are quite indistinct). What follows is an intensely intimate performance by both Gosling and Balance, involving winding themselves tightly in wire, cutting and blood-letting, self-strangulation, smearing with liquids, urination, and performing ritualistic manipulations of various objects, many of which are indiscernible. The performance lasts 23 minutes and ends with Balance affecting a prolonged seizure during which he writhes spasmodically across the floor before being assisted from the room by Gosling.

It is difficult to fully grasp the nature of the intimate and visually arresting ritualistic performance captured on this disc without at least understanding something of its occult context. Both John Gosling and John Balance had been early central members of Psychic TV and The Temple of Psychic Youth, (both appear here bearing the tattoos and haircuts associated with their allegiance to the occult organisation), along with the P-Orridges, David Tibet, Peter Christopherson (who supplies the aural backdrop for this performance) and to a lesser extent Marc Almond (who provides the reading which accompanies this performance). In 1983 Balance and Christopherson were in the process of breaking away from their association with Temple and P-Orridge (having performed a handful of live concerts with Psychic TV in 1982 and 1983), and to establish Coil as a completely autonomous entity in order to go on pursuing their own distinctive and highly focussed path.

As is evident from the early Temple of Psychic Youth video First Transmissions the type of transgressive ritual performed here by Gosling and Balance had already played an important part in the magickal activities of the entire group. The ritual depicted in First Transmissions involves members of the group freely experimenting with different thresholds and boundaries of control, including scarification, blood-letting, sexual experimentation, pain and humiliation. Superficially both the ritual work in First Transmission and this early 1983 public performance by Coil resemble the extreme performance art work of Otto Muehl & Hermann Nitsch of the Vienna Actionists of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

Both appear to involve an aggressive visceral quality, attacking the integrity of the body, obsessed with bodily fluids, and overt displays of ritualistic humiliation, pain and control. However, to over-identify in this way is a mistake. Arguably Muehl & Nitsch’s public actions had much more to do with challenging, through art, the historical specificity of post-war Austrian social, psychological and sexual repression and an entire culture that had been intimately complicit with the Nazis. Their work was a deliberate effort to transgress cultural boundaries in a very violent, aggressive, playful and messy way; their intention always being to provide a cathartic Dionysian conduit for all the repulsive tendencies that Austrians had repressed and which had previously found social and political expression through fascism. Far more relevant to this early Coil live piece is the work of Coum Transmissions in the 1970, who were clearly influenced by the extreme and violent anti- aesthetic of Viennese Actionism, but who were much more concerned with the intrinsically mystical and occult nature of transgressive performance.

Coum Transmissions had positioned themselves throughout the early to mid-1970's as largely indifferent to the art world and the high culture of the avant-garde, and had been more concerned with pursuing a highly focussed and disciplined set of very personal (and magickal) concerns surrounding sexuality, identity and freedom. The desire to pursue some of the mystical and magickal aspects of extreme threshold experiences had been carried through the public performance actions of Coum Transmissions by P-Orridge and Christopherson back into the private and intimate realm of the Temple of Psychic Youth. It is in this context within which the early 1983 Coil performance documented on the first disc of the Colour Sound Oblivion box-set should be understood.

However, the experience of performing this piece was clearly a depressing and dispiriting one for Balance, as he once remarked - “When we played at Brixton and the Air Gallery there was no challenge and I ended up very depressed, as for the most part we seemed to be doing it for a jaded, apathetic crowd of art groupies. That's how it seemed. The whole thing was so incestuous and every move you made, everything you did or said was noted and compared to something previous. I feel Coil can move out of that area and I want it to.”

Coil’s attempt to take their private magickal work on threshold experience back out into the public realm (in the aftermath of their steady break from Psychic TV and the Temple), namely through an art performance, seemingly involves a superficial repetition of surface elements drawn from Vienna Actionism and Coum Transmissions. Only in this sense could it ever be judged as somewhat derivative. However, their concerns were perhaps by this point quite radically different from either one of these groups. From another perspective then, one could say that the public form of the performance was simply ill-suited to their actual concerns. Balance’s remarks reveal him to have been deeply disappointed by the experience of performing this action for an art audience, when the magickal and ritual intentions were always beyond the expectations of the London art world in the early 1980’s. The extent to which this performance was and remains art is the extent to which it attempts to connect with an ancient transgressive and threshold experience associated with the very origins of all art (as outlined by Nietzsche and Bataille) . It entails the vertiginous and ecstatic experience of placing the human subject at the very threshold of the animal through rigorous ritualistic experimentation, to somehow undo the fact of being trapped within the confines of the human and attempt to reach a point of indiscernibility between man and animal. Only at the threshold of the human can one ever achieve anything approaching a dematerialised ‘spiritual’ state where one becomes almost ‘transparent’. This is something that remained extremely important to all of Coil’s recorded work undertaken in private and away from the audience for the next seventeen years, as they 'moved out of one area' and into another. However, it is extraordinary to finally be able to watch this early and intense manifestation of Coil and to realise that, despite the fact it is never repeated in public in this form, it somehow holds the key to much that comes later.

Coil - Colour Sound Oblivion

2010-08-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

My copy of the Coil DVD box-set Colour Sound Oblivion (no. 222) was finally delivered this week.

My wife had ordered this earlier in the year as a surprise wedding gift for me, but when completion of the project was unavoidably delayed due to the civil unrest in Bangkok, it became clear that I wouldn't receive it in time for the ceremony and Sleazy was kind enough to post the following personal message which was screened at my wedding.

In just the short time that I’ve spent so far watching some of the live concerts it is obvious that I needed to attempt to write some kind of response and review of them. Coil has been an extremely important part of my life for the past 25 years, in ways that are very difficult to put into words. Throughout all of that time Coil’s work has been a constant companion and inspiration. I was fortunate to see Coil perform live twice in 2000, in the UK. Both performances have remained with me as amongst the most powerful and moving experiences of live performance I have ever witnessed in person. I feel that this DVD set documenting many of the live incarnations of Coil, carefully and lovingly assembled by Peter Christopherson in the aftermath of Jhon Balance’s death, deserves a careful and thorough personal response. Such a monumental presentation of the group's live work serves as a fitting memorial to Jhon Balance and his collaborators. I think that Coil are somehow not finished or behind us, it is not a question of closure, it is a matter of trying to respond to something that was always untimely and to something that remains spectacularly alive.

In the next few weeks I will post a response to each of the live concerts collected in the box. But I want to begin by describing the contents of the box.

The box and its content are a remarkable object, even by Coil’s previous high standards in this regard (ranging from the early Gold is the Metal box set to the super-limited Racing Green edition designed by Ian Johnston).

Contained in a heavy wooden box are 16 DVDs (14 live performances and 2 discs consisting of the live visual projections (designed by Sleazy) and the backing tracks used on a wide array of the tracks covered live), each in their own card sleeve, which are housed in 4 separate cloth bags made from material which duplicate the costumes worn by members of Coil throughout their brief live incarnation between 2000-4.

In addition there is a facsimile of the booklet from Jhon Balance’s funeral in 2004, a booklet of Christopherson’s own reflections on touring and assembling and editing the DVDs and a personalised dedication. Sleazy makes it very clear in his booklet that many of the concerts captured on the discs were often filmed by members of the audience, and that the quality of some of the footage (as well as sound quality) differs markedly across the discs.

The first disc present a video recording made by Cerith Wyn Evans of the early Coil "performance" from August 24th 1983 at the Air Gallery in London. This was called "A Slow Fade to Total Transparency", and I will post a full response to this in the next day or two.

"What the People Want..." Jacobson's Compassion Fatigue

2010-07-25T03:43:00.000-07:00

In the much-needed discussion regarding the purpose and practical effectiveness of prisons in the UK comes Howard Jacobson's recent diatribe about "what the people want...". Writing in the Independent about the debate concerning the early release of Lockerbie bomber Megrahi, Jacobson opines that it appears as if everybody is being released from prison these days. In the face of apparent efforts to instantiate compassion within the modern penal system Jacobson believes that our brains must have shrunk, and claims, in a piece spotted with clumps of Shakespearean faux-gravitas, that he is suffering from compassion fatigue. Reading his pathetic reactionary musings one might be forgiven for thinking that he is suffering from chronic cognitive fatigue syndrome. I suspect with Jacobson it's fatal.

Beginning with the laziest sketching of Ken Clarke's recent reflections on the UK penal system as little more than 'a declared intention to let everybody out', Jacobsen, in moronic bible-black mode, rants on like a crazed post-apocalyptic Fox news presenter about the need for a return to harsh retributive justice, a ludicrous 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' mentality where notions of eternal damnation together with the ever-present classist stench of an 'us and them' ethos rule the day. His article, despite its malodorous Old Testament hyperbole, just comes over as the insubstantial ravings of an urban middle-class tosser who believes things like compassion, progressivism and enlightenment are mere lifestyle choices, equivalent to dabbling in the Kabbalah, Macrobiotics or Pilates, to be shed once one has become sufficiently jaded and fatigued by them. For the bloated reactionary compassion fatigue sits quite comfortably alongside a bored satiation with full-fat milk, sun-dried tomatoes and modern dance. His piece conjures up the image of Jacobson waking up in the morning, farting out the maladorous remains of the previous evening's dinner party, and saying to himself - 'Enough of these liberal enlightenment ideals, let's see how being a reactionary twat feels!'

Jacobson's moronic reflections on the nature of compassion attempt to accuse it of being gratuitous. But surely all compassion is gratitous...isn't it? Compassion, by its very nature, involves attitudes and actions which cannot be resolved to those either deserved or reasonably expected. Compassion cannot be reduced to suffient reason (despite the fact that Jacobson seems incapable of even the simplest acts of reason) - it is, and always has been, marked by a certin amount of gratuitous and non-instrumental excess. It arguably guards against a slide into the worst excesses of social instrumentalism and barabarism. Jacobson is either too stupid, jaded or fatigued to understand this; rather, in his article we are treated to the sort of ignorant invective we might expect from a dissapointed and embittered uncle who thankfully doesn't visit all that often. Consider the following:

'The trouble with prisons, Kenneth Clarke has been telling us, is that they make no difference; we no sooner let offenders out than they offend again. I propose a simple solution to that problem - keep them in. Where the original offence was serious, the slightest suggestion that they will repeat it should be sufficient to extend their stay. Until when? Doomsday, if necessary.'

or:

'Rehabilitation is a fine ideal, but it is secondary to our own problem.'

or:

'The first justification of the prison wall is that it separates us from those who will harm us if they can. The second is that it enables society to honour the retribution we individually crave but cannot individually exact.'

Now compare Jacobsen's remarks with what Ken Clarke actually said:

'As long as I can remember the political debate on law and order has been reduced to a competition over whether a government has spent more public money and locked up more people for longer than its predecessor...It now costs more to put someone in prison – £38,000 – than it does to send a boy to Eton...The consequence is that more and more offenders have been warehoused in outdated facilities and we spend vast amounts of public money on prison. But no proper thought has been given to whether this is really the best and most effective way of protecting the public against crime.'

Clarke argued that prison should continue to be the necessary punishment for many offenders, but questioned whether 'ever more prison for ever more offenders' always produces better results for the public. He observed that the record prison population and the crime rate in England and Wales are now among the highest in western Europe. Just locking people up without actively seeking to change them is 'what you would expect of Victorian England' and noted that reoffending rates among the 60,000 prisoners given short sentences has reached 60% and rising. He added:

'This does not surprise me. It is virtually impossible to do anything productive with offenders on short sentences. And many of them end up losing their jobs, their homes and their families during their short time inside.'

In the midst of being struck with a terrible bout of enlightenment fatigue, Jacobson seems happy to woefully misrepresent Clarke's contributions to this vital debate and to wallow around in the insubstantial pigshit of his own jaded opinions. He does all of this while believing that he is 'speaking for the people', 'telling it like it is' and voicing 'what we all think'. This is a particular myopic middle-class craving with a long and patronising history associated with paternalism, ignorance and class hatred.

Jacobson closes his piece with feigned disbelief at a quote from a letter by the sister of one of the Lockerbie victims who had the temerity to wish the freed Megrahi 'well'. Jacobson's despicable attitude towards this sentiment is emblematic of his deep and malignant stupidity. For him this person's gratuitous and compassionate sentiment signals nothing less than a 'New Inferno' - 'where there is no underworld, no ascending circles of sinfulness, just a flattened plain of minor miscreants to whom we extend warm greetings.' No Howard...it is simple evidence that other 'people' are capable of not only conceiving of compasison but of actually acting with it without becoming bored, jaded or fatigued. Other people, Ken Clarke included, also seem to have the capacity for thinking about the penal system in ways that offer the possibility of individual rehabilitation, social cohesion and hope, a capacity you so obviously lack.

Kleist: New Website

2010-03-03T03:18:00.000-08:00

Today we’re launching the website for our film Kleist. This film is a small collaborative project, and consists of a photo-roman documentary that tells the remarkable story of the mysterious disappearance of the German physicist Gustav Kleist. I have spent the last two years researching the life of the mysterious German physicist Gustav Kleist, collecting a sizeable archive of rare photographic images and recorded interviews with his wife detailing the mystery of his disappearance in 1942.

The Children are Guilty

2010-02-01T14:30:00.000-08:00

In April 2009 in Edlington, South Yorkshire, two brothers aged 10 and 11 apparently lured two other boys,aged 9 and 10, into the woods where they subjected them to an abject catalogue of physical savagery and sexual sadism.

Watching the media coverage of their trial in recent days has laid bare the appalling cultural abjection to which we have all become subject. It is not the crimes themselves, which no one can deny are savage and appalling, but the utterly infantile and pathetic public, media, political and legal discourse around the case. These abstract and hysterical discourses all express a singular epistemology of ‘the children are guilty’. In 2010 in our seeming state of benign and complacent enlightenment we appear to be happy to asign absolute guilt and responsibility to two boys, aged 10 and 11. Surely this complacency screams of a massive collective failure to ‘think’ this event itself. I spent many hours watching a variety of media outlets report the boys’ trial, and read a great deal that was written at the same time. With only a few exceptions, such as Blake Morrison’s excellent piece (‘Let the Circus Begin’) that appeared in The Guardian at the time of the boys’ original arrest, the majority of the reporting and comment singularly failed to even think about the systemic ‘causes’ that led to such a terrible event. A single assumption has pervaded the discourse - ‘The Children are guilty’ – making it easy to condemn them as ‘evil bastards’ or ‘devil children’.

Evident from the discourse around the Edlington case, is an all too familiar failure to think about the unremmiting and abject ‘reality’ within which these events happened and will continue to happen…a failure to think at all. Can there be any more powerful spectacle of such a monumental failure in the capacity to ‘think’ than the trial itself. TV news and newspapers returned again and again to the pathetic spectacle, communicated through childish and badly executed pastel sketches of the two boys (aged 10 and 11) being brought to account for their crimes in front of the court.

Here the full assembly of the current judicial system confronted two isolated young boys (aged 10 and 11), alone with no parents or family present. No parents present. The spectral figures of parental failure (adults) apparently never having to account for themselves or their children (aged 10 and 11) before the ‘court’, and what’s more, it never really mattering since the only reality which matters to us is one where ‘the children are guilty’. As their mother articulated so brilliantly – ‘It’s got nowt to do with me!’ The accounts of their ‘toxic homelife’ are treated as familiar footnotes unconnected with the events that took place, just some kind of drab aesthetic backdrop to the real spectacle of their culpability, their guilt. It was reported again and again, with overwhelming cynical disdain, that when asked by police why they carried out the attack the boys had replied ‘because we were bored’. Why the cynical disdain? Do we not believe them when they say this? Are we so over-invested in the ‘interesting’ reality we have created,and into which these two children (aged 10 and 11) were forced to exist, that we simply cannot believe that a deep and catastrophic psychic death occurred to these children. A psychic death brought about by the sheer toxcity of their everyday reality that fundamentally undermined any connection whatsoever to the world. Is it not possible that a monumental boredom emerges from the most horrific developmental indifference and neglect, and this this leads to the most savage and nihilistic expression possible? Is it that to think in such a way undermines our almost mystic commitment to the axiom that ‘the children are guilty’?

The failure, by their parents and by us, to apparently be able to even begin to think about what these two boys (aged 10 and 11) did to two other boys (aged 9 and 10), and why they did it (with echoes of the 1993 Jamie Bulger case) is a truly nauseating spectacle.

Michael Haneke’s recent film The White Ribbon does seem to offer us some kind of a way of beginning to think about our failure to think through an event such as the one that occurred in Edlington. But it is an indirect and disturbing experience, often uncomfortable and deeply unsettling to watch.

Set on the eve of the First World War in 1913, and shot in black and white, the film is set in a north German village where a series of bizarre crimes and unexplained acts of violence (two of which are perpetrated against young children, and have clear echoes of the savagery evident in the Edlington case) are being committed. These senseless and savage acts may in fact be carried out by the children of the village, although the film never allows us to become certain of this. Haneke, in attempting to think these senseless acts uses an oblique approach whereby the children’s guilt is never actually assumed or established. This allows Haneke to do something quite remarkable and increasingly rare: to actually look and to think about what else is happening around the children. What is in fact happening to them is equal to, if not more horrific than, the ‘senseless’ acts of violence. It is all the more disturbing for the fact that what happens to them in their everyday lives supposedly has ‘sense’. What happens to them in this community has become so normal, so much part of the sterile homogeneity of accepted everyday reality that no one (no adult) really questions it. Systematic abuse and violence by adults towards children is endemic, the emotional neglect and indifference towards children by adults is rife, and the level of community endorsed repression is startling. The 'white ribbon' of the film’s title refers to the bands of shame that are tied round the arms of the pastor’s ‘naughty’ children who are subjected to his extreme physical and psychological discipline, and even (in the case of the village doctor’s daughter) sexual abuse.

Some critics have theorised that Haneke is attempting to explain the beginnings of fascism - that the generation of children who carry out these senseless and savage acts of cruelty on other children will grow up to be the generation that spawns the Nazis in Germany. But this seems to be a deeply mistaken understanding of the film; what the film is really about is the failures of the present. It is a film about our current failures with regard to our children, the failure to create a world that is not marked by absolutely endemic cruelty, indifference, greed, and stupidity. It is a film about the nihilism of the present. Haneke’s film is an attempt to re-engage the appalling moral complacency of present western societies that have become so sick and intellectually cretinous that we all easily accept a situation where we now have trials where we assign guilt to children (aged 10 and 11) where the fault almost certainly lies in their everyday lives, in the appalling reality we (adults) have created and go on reproducing, and into which our ‘guilty’ children are born.

Deleuze, Cinema and Belief: The Restoration of a Lost World

2010-01-21T04:35:00.000-08:00

A podcast of my recent talk on Deleuze, Rossellini and the politics of belief is available here.

In this paper I argue that Cinema 2 can be read as a powerful manifesto advocating that what we ‘moderns’ need, existing as we do amidst the inhuman homogeneity of capitalist realism, is a renewed form of belief and hope in the world, and that it is modern cinema which has, and continues to, respond to this need. Deleuze asks whether we can go on living without hope and without a grasp on the situations in the world that surround us, and asks what it is that can replace the broken and nullified links of organic representation? For Deleuze the greatness of modern cinema, particularly Italian neorealism, lies in its capability to create other forms of agency and other forms of linkage to the world that are based on new forms of belief.

Capitalist Realism - Belief in the Possibility of a Different Reality

2009-12-11T12:53:00.000-08:00

Review: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
By Mark Fisher

One might be tempted to assume that a book that so devastatingly diagnoses the abysmal conditions of the present would be heavily laden with nostalgic melancholy, perhaps full of bitter condemnatory memories about a different, better world that once was. However, you would be very wrong to make such an assumption. Fisher’s book is not at all a work of nostalgia or mourning for such a lost world, and probably shouldn’t even be described as simply just another piece of critical diagnosis. In short it is a rich, passionate, militant and wholly optimistic polemic that is all too aware of the excremental machine of capitalism that spreads its banal ontological coordinates across virtually every aspects of our daily lives, thoughts, desires, dreams, hopes and beliefs.

Fisher’s brilliant analysis of the critical psychopathology of the ontological homogeneity created by contemporary capitalism is not attended by the shadow of another world somehow lost in the past. The loss of reality that Fisher identifies in contemporary culture does not emerge from an explicit erosion of reality through time, rather, the loss is the terrifying result of the hyper-production, through capitalism, of one overwhelming and monopolising form of reality. Like beleaguered figures in Kafka’s literary work Fisher presents our own horrific ontological confinement within capitalism, often drawn from his own lived experience, where every aspect of our lives seem to have been reduced, banalised, consumed and excreted out onto serving plates at an infinite banquet with only with one injunction – consume more . The tedious festival of capitalist realism described by Fisher reminded me of the Duke in Pasolini’s Salo screaming ‘Mangia! Mangia!’at the victims during the notorious ‘shit’ banquet. Some of the most memorable passages in Fisher’s book concern forms of popular culture which revel in this circle of shit, work which merely reproduces the flat one-dimensional ontology of capitalist realism. The popular hegemony of much contemporary culture reduces the possibility of alternative forms of cultural resistance, shrinking it into an absolute invisible zero point. The world of capitalist realism is overwhelmingly ever-present, it is always there and presents itself as ‘natural’ and as the only reality; but what we lack is any hope for resisting the conditions of the present, for creating new possibilities of life, new realities, new ways of thinking and being. In the absence of such hope time itself has started to collapse. This, as Fisher convincingly argues, is the problem with capitalism realism – it is an ontological problem and it is a problem of belief. Fisher’s polemic precisely consists in attempting to revalorise a militant modality of belief as an alternative to the intolerable inevitability of capital. How can we, he asks, render the world livable and thinkable again without carelessly slipping into the quietude of nostalgia or abstracted zones of ineffective resistance? How do we move from the spectacle of resistance (the shit of capitalism) to truly effective modes of resistance? What would such resistance to the present consist of?

Fisher’s book goes beyond merely identifying the symptoms of our time, and moves into becoming one of the most exciting (albeit brief) and passionate cries for ontological resistance and the effort to create the conditions of possibility for an alternative to capitalist realism. Fisher, like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx and Deleuze, writes for ‘the people to come’, for an indeterminate future, in the belief that it is only by doing so that one can ever begin to truly alter the present. Only by breaking the banal cycle of replication of present being can the reality of that present be exposed as illusory and impoverished, as a nauseatingly petrified form of living death.

We all risk total suffocation but for the occasional appearance of a genuine work of hope like this book, we can only hope that Fisher continues the ongoing effort to construct the new reality with as much precision, passion and belief in the near future.

Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body

2009-12-11T02:35:00.000-08:00

My new essay in Deleuze Studies,Vol. 3, Dec. 2009 here

This essay presents a detailed reading of Deleuze's philosophical analysis of Bacon's triptychs in The Logic of Sensation, and examines claims regarding their non-narrative status as well as exploring their capacity to embody and express a spiritual sensation of eternal time.

Kleist

2009-12-03T05:10:00.000-08:00

Kleist: A Short Photo-Roman - Coming Soon

Francis Bacon – New Studies: Centenary Essays

2009-08-25T15:18:00.000-07:00

Francis Bacon - New Studies: Centenary Essays
Edited by Martin Harrison

272 pages, 260 colour plates
19.5 cm x 25.5 cm
Steidl
ISBN: 978-3-86521-946-6
Publication date: December 2009

Nine original and stimulating essays will celebrate the centenary of the birth of one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, Francis Bacon (1909–1992). Since the artist’s death his enigmatic paintings have inspired new thinking and methods of interpretation, and these essays, written by leading scholars from throughout the world, reflect an impressively wide and rich range of approaches.

With essays from Darren Ambrose, Rebecca Daniels, Hugh M. Davies, Marcel Finke, Martin Harrison, Andrew R. Lee, Brenda Marshall, David Alan Mellor, Joanna Russell and Brian Singer.

My essay is entitled 'Bacon’s Spiritual Realism – The Spirit in the Body'

Anthony McCall - Filmworks

2009-03-30T04:51:00.000-07:00

Anthony McCall’s extraordinary film works seek to de-codify a certain logic of established film or cinema and its relation to the spectator. McCall seems fascinated by the exploration and realisation of a cinematic logic yet unexplored, marginalized or suppressed but absolutely implicit to the form. In McCall’s solid light films there is a concentration upon what he calls ‘the projected light beam itself, rather than treating the light beam as a mere carrier of coded information’. His films deal with the irreducibility and necessity of projected light, he describes Line Describing a Cone as ‘the first film to exist in real, three dimensional space.’. The projected light itself becomes tactile and textural, and often involves varying degrees of complex modulation, permutation and repetition. All involve a certain reversal or at least an alteration of the politics of spectatorship, insofar as we are encouraged to gaze into the light rather than at the projected ‘image’. We are able to ‘enter’ into the film, become incorporated within it, to become with it, to pierce its fabric and occlude it. Our physical bodies are in an active relation to the film works rather than a traditionally passive role. These films dwell upon the nature of time – the invisible force of time - duration, multiplicity, change and becoming, and they force us to become engaged with continuous, overlapping and multiple durations that profoundly effect us physiologically.

McCall’s work not only brings into question our conventional ways of seeing and our way of relating to a sensory image, but ultimately our relation to each other.

‘Haptic Vision’

In his philosophical work on the cinema Deleuze reflects on the type of films that confront us with a certain challenge to our conventional powers of recognition, films that presents a ‘shock to thought’. Such works disrupt our capacity to link certain images through causal, rational or logical relations. The viewer becomes essentially liberated from certain habitual patterns of thought and is able to draw upon certain virtual reserve of thought in an act of co-creation of the projected film object. This form of cinema implicates the body and its alteration in the most profound fashion – the body is freed from certain patterns of control, enabling us to begin to think anew. In the cinema a certain kind of ‘time-image’ can be experienced in this altered body and as such invites a more direct experience of time. Certain time-images within the cinema invite a radical embodied form of filmic contemplation, but for Deleuze this cannot relate to the bodies we have already been given but to the way in which the body is altered and created anew. This new body emerges from a disruption and displacement of the pre-existing body. Certain films challenge the conventional relation of viewer/spectator and cinematic work. A significant part of this challenge is the invention of a new mode of cinematic visibility and sensation - what Deleuze calls ‘haptic vision’. With this cinematic haptics the capacity of our eyes become altered and expanded and begin to function like organs of touch. This haptic form of seeing is to be distinguished from optical visuality, which sees things from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space: or, in other words, how we usually conceive of vision. Haptic looking tends to traverse the surface of the object rather than to plunge into the illusionistic depth of representational space, and as such it is not so much a matter of distinguishing identifiable form as the effort to discern sensation, texture and tactile intensive qualities. Space becomes tactile as if the eye were now a hand caressing one surface after another without any sense of the overall configuration or mutual relation of those surfaces.

This type of haptic space is particularly evident when one becomes literally incorporated within one of McCall’s ‘solid-light’ sculptures, e.g. Doubling Back and Turn. These are sensational forms to literally become lost in, which force us to repeatedly orient ourselves through the tactile exploration of the diaphanous fabric of the modulated form and changing our perspective through movement. There is a type of virtual space whose fragmented components can be assembled in multiple combinations and perspectives. It is clear that these haptic films involve the body much more than is the case with optical visuality. In the smooth space created by these tactile light forms all orientation, landmarks and the linkages between things are placed into continuous state of variation – i.e. a continuous transmutation which operates step-by-step to no pre-arranged or pre-governed schema. There are few stable unified referents since the orientations are never constant, but constantly modulate and change. Interlinkages are constituted differently each and every time according to an emergent realm of dynamic tactile and sensory relationships.

Thinking of cinema as haptic rather than optic is a step towards a consideration of the way in which cinema is capable of appealing to the body as a whole. The body becomes incorporated and enveloped more actively within the projected spectacle. Clearly the relevance of this view of haptic vision to understanding of McCall’s film works probably appears obvious. The surfaces of McCall’s filmworks, e.g. Line Describing a Cone, Doubling Back & Turn, are like magical diaphanous fabrics, sheets of light that display a delicate solidity. As such these solid light projections invite a far more radically tactile kind of vision and response. As viewers of these projections we are incorporated into an experimental or playful tactile relation to the outside, the surface and the inside of the projected image. In McCall’s work there is a reciprocity that occurs with this bodily incorporation into the tactile fabric of the film insofar as the spectator can and does affect the fabric of the film form itself through interacting sensually with it. McCall’s work thus changes both the nature of the filmic visibility through the nature of what he calls the direct and real existence of the projected light in three-dimensional space (or the body of the film) and the effected change in the perceptual attitude and body of the spectator. As one moves around a film like Line Describing a Cone, there is an irrevocable modulation and alteration on one’s perception of the artwork which becomes acutely clear when one tries to perhaps return to a certain position/perspective. What one finds (and it can be a bit of a shock) is that everything has seemingly changed, yet that change has been imperceptible.

The ‘Time-Image’

There is an implicit critique of certain notions of temporality within much of McCall’s work that displays a further affinity with Bergson and Deleuze’s philosophy of time. Time, duration, movement and becoming are very important aspects in all of McCall’s work. Much of his work, for example, contains an implicit critique of the hierarchical distinction between the so-called atemporal artforms such as painting and sculpture and time-based artforms like film and video. McCall embraces the disruptive insights of Performance, Happening or Event based artworks, (i.e. the insight that everything that occurs, including the process of looking and thinking, always occurs in time and that and that many conventional distinctions are quite absurd). There is at the heart of McCall’s film work a profound disruption of conventional notions of time together with an attempt to expand our understanding of temporality and duration. Both Bergson and Deleuze were interested in what they perceived to be the illusory or absurd notion of temporality that has tended to dominate conventional thought and perception. For both thinkers the illusory nature of time has given birth to a proliferation of so-called ‘false problems’. Bergson, Deleuze & McCall struggle against this illusion by attempting to rethink the complexities of real temporality and duration. For all three of them the illusory nature of temporality emerges from a certain thinking of time subordinated to spatial concepts., i.e. the seemingly pre-given understanding of static and homogenous spatiality from which we often derive our interpretation of time. The problem to be addressed by each of them is to rethink temporality on the basis of movement, qualitative change, modulated becoming and coexisting qualitative durations. For them our bodies, our nervous systems, are open to a succession of qualitative changes that are not mapped out as mechanical intervals but as a flow of time, each instant permeating each other. In conventional thought we tend to think of time as an abstract, homogenous element, which we measure through the discreet intervals of clock time. However, these discreet intervals are merely artificial and ultimately interchangeable static points. For Bergson, Deleuze & McCall the passage of time is more than the mere succession of states inscribed within discrete and even intervals. Our experience of time is that of duree, duration, of a dynamic continuation of a past into a present and toward a future. Each present moment interpenetrates the next present moment, with each new present functioning as a qualitatively different moment, each moment pushing into the next in a single movement of becoming. With each present moment something new comes into existence, something unpredictable emerges which then forms with the subsequent moments of becoming a qualitatively distinct ensemble or assemblage of time. So genuine duration is fundamentally indeterminate; the future is truly open and unforeseeable. Time is creation, time is invention, time is becoming. Time makes a difference because each moment brings forth something qualitatively new. It is this aspect which accounts for the radically different qualitative experience of time (e.g. in some circumstances 5 minutes can seem like an hour, and in others an hour speeds by and feels like barely a few minutes). Time is not homogenous but is heterogeneous, and McCall’s work precisely evokes this heterogeneous aspect of time. Repetitions, permutation, virtual stasis, imperceptible modulation, all serve, paradoxically, to render this strange qualitative nature of time something sensible. We literally become lost and enveloped within these works (e.g. this element is particularly evident with Long Film for Four Projectors) Homogenous clock-time dissipates as we become subject to the complex co-existence of multiple rhythms of duration.

It might seem that the Cinema projector just seemingly operates in a manner similar to our ordinary discursive modes of perception, intellection and language; i.e. we attempt to comprehend process, becoming and movement by slicing time into an abstract sequence of static moments, or immobile cuts, and then somehow re-link them back together into a homogenous systematic and rational order. Rather than grasping each particular specific movement as an indivisible whole with its own concrete duration, in which there is no distinction between motion and that which moves (what McCall calls the atemporal and the temporal), we imagine a single, homogenous space-container, within which we situate the moments of an object’s movement as so many static, co-present points, and from this spatial image we develop the concept of an abstract, mechanical time as a regular repetition of homogenous, interchangeable moments. Real movement and concrete duration give way to immobile cuts and abstract time. However, for Deleuze cinema is in fact capable of going way beyond these discursive tendencies of thought and perception, in fact it is capable of fundamentally offering a challenge to them. Cinema has certain implicit resources for rendering real movement and concrete duration visible, which then subsequently emerge as a shock to thought. The type of contemporary cinema capable of presenting a direct and real image of time is what Deleuze calls the Time-Image.

In the time-image what is present is what the image represents (e.g. the incomplete circle in McCall’s Line Describing a Cone), but not the Image itself (e.g. the haptic solid form of projected light in McCall’s Line Describing a Cone). In cinema, as in painting, the Image is never to be confused with what it represents. (McCall himself has noted this odd jarring separation of represented image and what is called the haptic image, in particular in relation to a recent work Doubling Back: ‘I have noticed that the curving lines of the two dimensional drawing on the wall sometimes appear to have an existence independent of the three-dimensional forms in space. Which, of course, is impossible. But, turning around to look at the drawn lines after I have been enveloped within the projected object, I am sometimes surprised at what I see.’

For Deleuze the direct time-image ‘gives us access to that Proustian dimension where people and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one they have in space.’ This passage captures a crucial element of Anthony McCall’s work, of how, when we become enveloped within the haptic image, within the body of the form, we are transported to a temporal zone rather than a spatial one, and this temporal zone is not one fundamentally subservient to conventional notion of space but a direct and real experience of time that has its basis in concrete duration, movement, modulation and becoming. Such a direct image of time appears as a force disrupting chronological space. What is specific to the time-image is the rendering perceptible, the rendering visible, of different relationships of time that are normally invisible, that cannot be seen in the straightforward represented object in the ‘abstracted’ present, and do not allow themselves to be reduced to such an abstracted interval of the present. The time-image goes beyond the purely empirical and discursive succession of time – past-present-future. The time-image displays the co-existence of distinct durations, levels or strata of duration whereby a single event can belong to several qualitatively different temporal levels. McCall’s work precisely encompasses this temporal multiplicity through its presentation of permutated and modulated temporal rhythms in the projected work itself (e.g. Long Film for Four Projectors, the undulating modulation of two lines in Doubling Back and Turn), and then also through the introduction of the qualitatively different concrete durations of different spectators into the complex assemblage of duration already present within the work. There is a kind of ongoing confrontation between the different concrete durations of work and spectator in the creation of a complex assemblage or co-existence of different durations. In this way that McCall film works begin to articulate a broadened and expanded conception of time. For Deleuze, as for McCall, the cinema (the cinematic form) is still at a germinal stage in terms of its investigation of its own resources for capturing and rendering visible certain relationships of time in an image. There are new and yet unexplored powers for capturing the ‘invisible forces of time’, and it is these powers that McCall’s film works evoke, it is these powers that serve to challenge our conventional modes of thought, that provide a shock to thought, and that demand the invention of new ways of looking, relation, and thought.

The Ethics of Time - Resistance in McCall's Work

For Deleuze a significant characteristic of modernity is the degree to which an essential link between humans and the world has become fractured or broken. In his work on the cinema Deleuze claims that we seem to have reached a point in modernity where we no longer believe in the world; we are increasingly confronted with the intolerable quality of the world. This does not necessarily consist in some terrible horror or spectacle (although there is no shortage of that), rather there is a kind of ‘quotidian banality’, the sense that we are living in a bad film – the world just looks like a bad film. We fear that we have become as hollow, banal and as clichéd as the world that envelops us. The world’s common-sense continuities and regularities seemingly appear to be nothing more than parodies of themselves. Deleuze argues that the link between the human and the world must become re-enchanted as an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a distinctly Nietzschean form of faith. But this is not a spiritual faith directed or addressed to a different world, but rather a newly emergent material faith in the real. Time-image cinema must no longer film the world, represent the world, in straightforward terms but must now elaborate a new mode of belief in this world. For Deleuze it is simply a matter of forging a new type of belief within the body. It is the body which provides the new, experimental and vital principle of linkage.

Time-image cinema seeks a radically new and experimental connection between human beings and the world, and such a connection requires very different new modes of thought. It is this quality of McCall’s work, (which McCall himself terms a ‘participatory performance’) that is most evident within its explicit sincerity and affirmative nature. It attempts to enact a new type of sensorial faith in the world through a reconfiguration of the body and its relation to time and space. Connected to this is the way in which McCall’s work has an irreducible communal aspect, i.e. the way that it forces us to think about our interactions with others, but equally importantly the way it seems to render one acutely aware of how we are exploring, haptically, of how we are experimenting and playing with the tactile elements together, as a group. This communal aspect is bound up with the degree to which McCall’s work partakes of the whole historical ethos of happening, event or performance based artworks. George Baker’s essay on McCall indicates the irreducible communal aspect of the work; he terms it the ‘communal process of cinematic incorporation’ where there is an intermingling and sharing of separate bodies around the body of the projected light form. There is in McCall’s work the creation of an entirely new sociality and politics of film, precisely in Deleuze’s sense. It is, perhaps, a sociality and politics of film capable of enacting a form of sincere resistance to the corrosive nihilism that emerges from the everyday banalities of the spectacles produced by the represented world. McCall’s work ultimately plunges us back into an experimental and collective process of cinematic perception by rendering it excessively haptic and physical. There is something deeply affirmative about being in this space collectively exploring the tactile dimensions of these modulating sensory forms, something that perhaps is capable of reconnecting us to a deep and almost timeless aspect of art, something that spans from Chauvet & Lascaux through to modernity. Here we become temporarily freed from the banality of the everyday spectacle of the world, from the banality of the habits of our perceptual apparatus, simply by becoming enveloped within these temporal sculptures of light. We are forced, through wonder, through shock and through sensation to reconsider our primordial relation to the world – to time, space, and to others. These works may allow for the possibility of renewed sense of compassion, and of compassionate resistance.

Found Polaroids

2007-07-29T19:15:00.001-07:00

This website has a wonderful collection of found polaroids.

Haunted Found Photo

2007-07-29T18:50:00.000-07:00

One of the beautiful images found on the BigHappyFunHouse found photo archive

Vertigo: The Gaze

2007-07-25T14:10:00.000-07:00

For me Hitchcock's Vertigo contains one of the most extraordinary examinations of obsessive desire associated with the male gaze. The texture of Hitchcock's film itself has a strange, powerful and sensual quality, implicating us almost physically in Scottie's vertiginous and ultimately hopeless desire, which is expressed at first through an erotic desire for a ideal fantasised woman and then through an obsession with the abyssal absence of the Other. The quality of the first erotic desire is almost traditional, and is certaintly familiar. There is a woman with both a polished and glowing surface, who shines ecstatically with great beauty, but who also posseses a dark and troubling depth. She is a woman haunted and possessed by an atavistic female double. The woman being desired (Madeleine) is mysterious, unknowable, and troubled.

Camille Paglia has written some extremely perceptive things on precisely this aspect of the film:

"Some of my favorite moments in that film are simply when James Stewart is looking, just looking, staring. That includes the first time he actually sees Madeleine, when of course the whole thing is a show put on to dupe him. He's sitting in that fancy San Francisco restaurant as Kim Novak floats by in this magnificent floor-length cape and opera gown. I'm so transfixed when she arrives: It's this long, slow pan as she comes into the restaurant and moves by him. He just sits and stares, and it's the fascinated staring of all men -- all heterosexual men but even gay men -- through history as they watch a beautiful woman walk into a room. I mean it's absolutely primal to me; it's that kind of deep, mythological emotion, the kind of awed emotion that almost can't be expressed...here is something mysterious about femaleness -- coming from the facts of woman's physical nature, the endless mysteries of the shadowy womb, and the power of procreation that even she doesn't understand. Part of what I got from Hitchcock is his vision of woman's un-knowability, her un-reachability, her enormous beauty -- the glamorous artifice with which she cloaks herself but ultimately her incredible, natural sexual power."

But to me the film really appears to subvert this traditional erotic desire, simply because Scottie is being misled. His gaze, his desire, his obsession, is for something that cannot be reached simply because it does not exist. Madeleine is not real, she is a fabrication designed to seduce him and use him. He is duped within the game of 'power and freedom'. He is, in the words of Chris Marker, 'time's fool of love'. His desire ultimately leads his gaze towards not the surface abyss of the mysterious and unknowable woman, but the terrifying abyss of the Other itself.

"The abyss Scottie is finally able to look into is the very abyss of the hole in the Other (the symbolic order), concealed by the fascinating presence of the fantasy object. We have this same experience every time we look into the eyes of another person and feel the depth of his gaze."
—Slavoj Zizek, from Looking Awry

Is this what finally drives Scottie mad? There are certaintly indications that it is. In the hallucinatory dream sequence the final image before Scottie wakes up is the silhouette of a hollow figure that falls from the tower. The figure falling from the tower has become a dark hole, hollow and unreflective.

The fantasy figure of Madeleine that occludes this truth from Scottie's gaze has disappeared, which leaves him with the problem of how to confront the terrifying vertigo of the abyssal hole in the world that the Other signifies. His answer is to try to put the fantasy object back in its place, to try and cover over the abyss before it's too late. Judy is his second chance. But fatally Judy too (the prosaic woman who merely resembles Madeleine) is merely another of Scottie's fantasies, another lie, which in his frantic and almost necrophiliac desire to resurrect Madeleine, he misses.

Vertigo: Haunted Locations - Part Four

2007-07-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

Scottie proceeds to follow Madeleine into the chapel, fearing that she is about to kill herself.

After Madeleine has fallen to her death there is a sequence consisting of the coroner's inquest into her death which was filmed in the Plaza building at the Mission San Juan Batista.

After Scottie's mental breakdown there is a sequence in San Francisco where he spots a woman who bears a striking resemblance to the dead Madeleine. He follows her back to her room at the Empire Hotel. This Hotel has now been renamed the York Hotel but is still clearly recognizable from the film.

Scottie befriends the woman, who calls herself Judy. In one beautiful sequence they take a walk together at the Palace of Fine Arts.

Vertigo: Haunted Locations - Part Three

2007-07-24T19:00:00.000-07:00

There are two sequences which take place at the old Spanish Mission at San Juan Batista which is located 40 miles south of San Francisco. Before each there is a striking sequence where first Scottie and Madeleine and then Scottie and Judy drive down to the Mission. There is a beautiful sequence where they drive through the Avenue of Tall Trees.

The iconic sequences at the San Juan Batista Mission south of San Francisco occur in a number of different buildings. The first sequence occurs in a livery stable, where Madeleine sits apparently in a trance on a buggy drawn by a plaster horse. The stable, together with plaster horse and buggy are perfectly preserved and almost completely unchanged since the shooting of the film.

From the script:

INT. LIVERY STABLE - (DAY) The dark interior of the Livery Stable. The figures of Scottie and Madeleine are seen a little way in. Madeleine is seated in a surrey, while Scottie stands by her.

INT. LIVERY STABLE - (DAY) Madeleine's eyes are closed. Scottie, leaning against the surrey, looks up at her intently. After moment he calls to her softly.

SCOTTIE: Madeleine...? She opens her eyes and looks down at him.

SCOTTIE: Where are you now? She smiles at him gently.

MADELEINE: (Softly) Here with you.

SCOTTIE: And it's a all real.

MADELEINE: Yes.

SCOTTIE: (Firmly) Not merely as it was a hundred years ago. As it was a year ago, or six months ago, whenever you were here to see it. (Pressing) Madeleine, think of when you were here!

She looks down at him with, a worried, regretful smile, wishing she could help him. Then she looks away into the distance, and speaks almost at irrelevantly.

MADELEINE: (Dreamily) There were not so many carriages, then. And there were horses in the stalls; a bay, two black, and a grey. It was her favorite place, but we were forbidden to play here, and Sister Teresa would scold us...

Scottie looks up at her in desperation, then looks about the stable for help. His look scans the carriages and wagons lined against the wall, goes past the old fire truck on which there is a placard proclaiming the world's championship of 1884, and finally stops at a small buggy -- a Bike Wagon --To which is hitched a full-sized model of a handsome grey horse.

SCOTTIE: Well, now, here! He races to the horse. On it hangs a sign: "Greyhound World's Greatest Trotter."

SCOTTIE: Here's your grey horse! Course he'd have a tough time getting in and out of a stall without being pushed, but still... You see? There's an answer for everything!

He looks across to Madeleine eagerly. She is staring ahead, lost in the past.

Madeleine then runs from the livery stable across the courtyard of the Mission towards the chapel and the Tower. The Tower does not exist and was added as a special effect for the film. In all other respects though the Mission at San Juan Batista remains startlingly unchanged from the film.

The chapel and the Tower from the original film:

Madeleine and Scottie embrace outside the chapel, before Madeleine persuades him to allow her to go into the chapel alone.

From the Script:

MADELEINE: You believe that I love you?

SCOTTIE: Yes.

MADELEINE: And if you lose me, you'll know that I loved you and wanted to go on loving you.

SCOTTIE: I won't lose you. Pause.

MADELEINE: Let me go into the church alone.

SCOTTIE: Why?

MADELEINE: Please. Because I love you.

He stares at her, sees the pleading look in her eyes, and lets go. She turns and walks away toward the church, slowly, her head bowed. He watches her go and starts to move after her. Then slowly, as she goes, her head begins to go up until finally, as she walks, she is staring high above her. And then, suddenly, she breaks into a broken run.

EXT. CLOISTERS - (DAY) Scottie jerks his head up to see what she was looking at.

EXT. CLOISTERS - (DAY) From Scottie's viewpoint: the high church tower.

EXT. CLOISTERS - (DAY) Scottie, immediately alarmed, brings his eyes down and looks toward the church entrance.

EXT. CLOISTERS - (DAY) From Scottie's viewpoint: Madeleine runs through the open front door of the church, and vanishes.

EXT. CLOISTERS - (DAY) Scottie starts to run toward the church.

SCOTTIE: Madeleine!!! He runs to the church door and runs in.

Vertigo: Haunted Locations - Part Two

2007-07-24T08:24:00.000-07:00

Scottie follows Madeleine to San Francisco Bay at the spectacular Fort Point, location of the Golden Gate Bridge. This is the location of one of the most iconic sequences in the entire film.

Scottie watches as Madeleine stares mournfully into the bay, dropping flower petals into the water. Suddenly she jumps into the bay, and Scottie jumps in to save her.

Scottie pulls the unconscious Madeleine from the bay and takes her back to his apartment at 900 Lombard Street in San Francisco. This apartment still exists and is still clearly recognizable from the original film, and provides a further extraordinary touchstone to Vertigo.

Later in the film Scottie continues to follow Madeleine around San Francisco and is surprised when he follows her green Jaguar right back to his apartment at Lombard Street. This is the scene from Scottie's point of view as he follows Madeleine down Lombard Street.

Vertigo: Haunted Locations - Part One

2007-07-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

I recently visited San Francisco in pursuit of my obsession with Hitchcock's Vertigo. I spent two weeks methodically visiting surviving locations from the film. What follows is the first part of a kind of photographic field report of that visit.

This is the Brocklebank Apartments at 1000 Mason and Sacramento, which is home to Madeleine Elster, and is where Scottie begins to follow her green Jaguar.

After following Madeleine through San Francisco she is seen parking her green Jaguar in a dark alley and disappearing through a door. This turns out to be the rear entrance to the Podesta Baldocchi flowershop. Scottie follows her into the alley, enters the back door and spies on her in the flowershop. This location was at Claude Lane, which is a small lane connecting Bush and Sutter Streets in San Francisco.

Despite being the location for some upmarket boutiques and restaurants, Claude Lane retains many of the strange elements visible from the original film, particularly early in the morning when it is quiet. Unfortunately the beautiful Podesta Baldocchi flowershop exists in name only, as the charmless internet flower warehouse, which was only discovered after a number of fruitless treks accross the city, testified.

Scottie then follows Madeleine to the Mission Dolores in San Francisco. This is the oldest building in San Francisco, and retains pretty much everything seen in the film.

Scottie follows Madeleine to the beautiful old cemetry at the rear of the Mission, and in an extraordinarily dreamlike sequence observes her placing flowers on the grave of Carlotta Valdes. The cemetry has not changed dramatically since Hitchcock filmed here, and offers a very powerful touchstone to the film.

Scottie then follows Madeleine to the California Palace of the Legion of Honour art gallery, where he watches her sitting in front of the portrait of Carlotta Valdes.

Unfortunately Madeleine wasn't there when I visited, and nor was the portrait of Carlotta.

The Vertigo of Time

2007-07-12T09:57:00.000-07:00

Chris Marker observes, in a remarkably lucid essay on Hitchcock’s greatest film, that the vertigo dealt with in the film is not really concerned with space, height and falling – rather, these function as metaphors for another type of vertigo which is extremely difficult to represent – the vertigo of time. Scottie, played by James Stewart, is infused with the ‘madness of time’. ‘You’re my second chance’ cries Scottie as he drags Judy, played by Kim Novak, up the stairs of the tower at the end of the film. This moment is not about conquering his vertigo, it is about reliving a moment lost in the past, about bringing it back to life only to lose it again. As Marker notes, Scottie imagines a second life in exchange for the greatest tragedy, a second death.

Following a dramatic rooftop chase where the detective Scottie loses his footing and is left hanging by his fingertips from guttering twenty or so floors up, a policeman, attempting to rescue him, falls to his death. Scottie is retired from the force, diagnosed with acute agoraphobia which leads him to suffer episodes of vertigo. The now retired Scottie is asked by an old college friend Gavin Elster, played by Tom Helmore, to go ‘on the job’ one more time, to trail his wife Madeline, also played by Kim Novak, who he claims is acting bizarrely. He claims she is being haunted, even possessed, by the tragic figure of Carlotta Valdes, a woman from the 19^th century, seduced by a rich and powerful man, who had a child resulting from the affair which was taken away from her when the man abandons her, she later committed suicide. Madeline apparently makes unexplained journeys during the day that she claims to have no memory of. Scottie, reluctant at first, is ‘seduced’ by the sight of Madeline at the wonderfully evocative Ernie’s restaurant and agrees to follow Madeline.

He spends a day following Madeline around San Franciso - to the Podesta Baldocchi flower shop, the old Spanish Mission Dolores which is the site of Carlotta’s grave, the Legion of Honour art gallery, home to a portrait of Carlotta, and the McKittrick hotel, the former home of Carlotta. Scottie continues to follow Madeline the next day – she drives out to the Golden Gate Bridge where she attempts suicide by throwing herself into the bay, and Scottie rescues her.

He takes her unconscious back to his apartment. Upon awakening Madeline appears to have no memory of her movements prior to going to the Golden Gate Bridge, or how she came to ‘fall’ into the bay. Scottie and her begin to become more closely involved with each other, and ‘fall’ in love. Madeline attempts to explain to Scottie her feelings of possession and haunting (the wonderful scene in the sequoia forest – the ancient monuments to ‘time’ – the oldest living things).

Madeline proceeds to explain to Scottie her deep fear of madness, destruction and death. She describes a dream to Scottie about an old Spanish mission with a tower, where the past is seemingly preserved. Scottie realises that she is describing an actual preserved Spanish mission to the south of San Francisco and drives her there – to show her that it’s ‘real’ and not a dream, to confront an object of her fear, in some attempt to dissipate it and ‘free’ her from being haunted by the past. When they arrive Madeline becomes extremely distressed and insists upon going into the chapel alone. Upon entering she climbs the stairs of the tower. Scottie attempts to follow her but is prevented from doing so by his ‘vertigo’. Madeline throws herself to her death from the tower.

The now traumatised and guilt-ridden Scottie slides into an acute form of stasis, depression and withdrawn, which is signalled by a bizarre dream sequence – and described quite comically by the psychiatrist as ‘acute melancholia with a guilt complex’. Upon seemingly recovering and out of hospital Scottie is seen wandering around familiar landmarks in search of Madeline. After a number of failed encounters when he appears to see Madeline from a distance, but is disappointed to discover that it is a different woman when closer, Scottie spies a woman in the street who bears an uncanny resemblance to Madeline. He pursues this woman to her hotel room where he demands to speak to her. We learn that this woman is called Judy, she is a brunette from Kansas, and is apparently devoid of the social grace and charm of Madeline. Scottie persuades her to have dinner with him. We then learn, in a narrated section where Judy writes a letter to Scottie, that Judy is in fact Scottie’s Madeline. She reveals the part she played in Gavin Elster’s plot to kill his wife. The seduction and manipulation of Scottie (she played the role of a Madeline haunted by the past in the form of Carlotta), and the leading of him to the tower where they knew he could not ascend, in order that Elster could throw his real wife from the tower and make it look like a suicide caused by her being haunted by Carlotta. However, Judy had been in love with Scottie, and appears to abandon her plan to flee from Scottie, and dares to try and stay and have a relationship with him. The traumatised and haunted Scottie, in a series of disturbing scenes, attempt to ‘make-over’ Judy so that she better resembles Madeline – shoes, clothes and hair. He finally achieves this in the famous scene in the hotel room where he manages to resurrect Madeline from the dead.

Judy, however, makes an apparent ‘slip’ and attempts to wear Carlotta’s necklace. Scottie realises the truth – realises that he’s been ‘had’. He drives Judy to the old Spanish mission – ‘There’s one more thing I need to do before I can be free of the past’. Once at the mission he reveals to Judy that he knows the truth and he forces her to climb the tower, to the ‘scene of the crime’ – to become ‘free of the past’. Once in the tower, Judy, startled by the appearance of a dark shadowy figure (which turns out to be a nun) falls to her death, and the film ends with a shot of Scottie staring down at her body from the top of the tower.

Vertigo brilliantly dramatises the interior mental anguish of the protagonist Scottie by demonstrating the progressive infusion of memory into the mechanism of his thought.

Scottie’s haunting – his possession by the figure (memory) of Madeline drives him to attempt to recover the past and instantiate it in a resurrected figure of Madeline through Judy – Judy-Becoming Scottie’s Madeline. Scottie spirals into the past (like the spirals in the opening credits) – trapped by an obsessive and traumatic image of the past which he attempts to repeatedly instantiate (to bring Madeline back from the dead, from the ‘dead-time’ of the absolute past of memory, into the present). The film manages to dramatise a subject’s possession by time – Scottie is ‘lost in time’ – and the drama of a traumatic division between the pure memory (Scottie’s obsession with Madeline) and his present/actual recollections (his attempts at repetition with Judy). The indiscernability between the two realms instantiate what Deleuze calls the crystal-image.

This is captured in Eric Rohmer’s writings on Vertigo: ‘In Vertigo we travel in space in the same way we travel in time, as our thoughts and the characters thoughts also travel. They are only probing, or more exactly, spiralling into the past. Everything forms a circle, but the loop never closes, the revolution carries us ever deeper into reminiscence. Shadows follow shadows, illusions follow illusions, not like the walls that slide away or mirrors that reflect to infinity, but by a kind of movement more worrisome still because it is without a gap or break and possesses both the softness of a circle and the knife edge of a straight line.’

Cinematic works of art such as Vertigo are able to create extraordinary images that weave a transverse continuity between different layers of the past and elaborate an entire network of non-localisable relations between them. In this way such works are able to express in the most profound manner non-chronological time – or direct images of time. Immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future, the inside and the outside, at a distance impossible to determine, independent of any epistemologically fixed point (indiscernibility). Such an image no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristic, but topology and time. Cinema has the capacity of infusing images with a real sense of the transcendental form of time, its ceaseless differentiation of present into the past and the preservation of the past in the constitution of the future.

The Virtual Photograph: Haunted Absence

2007-07-12T09:20:00.001-07:00

The photographs that seem to haunt me the most are the ones that remain undeveloped, sealed virtualities residing in cameras or dark anonymous film canisters like some particularly toxic or explosive chemical.

Insofar as photographs (as Bazin and Cavell recognised), even before they come to signify or resemble it, actually “embalm” reality, then the undeveloped photograph serves to withhold the preserved dead face of reality from our gaze. A gap opens up where I am unable to maintain, through my gaze, even the paradoxical presence to the absence of reality offered by the actualised photograph. Here reality’s absence assumes a dreadful weight even more haunting and acute than that provoked by the photograph. The undeveloped photograph remains sealed up like the ashes of a dead reality, haunting through its exacerbated absence. The doubled real world of the photograph, when it remains hidden and unmanifested, comes to haunt the actual world of the present with a different and more terrible form of absence. For that reason the virtual photographic image becomes a haunting object of impossible desire and impossible memory. This website has some beautifully haunting images developed from old cameras containing forgotten and undeveloped images.

Vertigo: An Obsession with Realism

2007-07-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

Photographs seem to haunt our imagination and our relationship to the world, offering as they do a persistent material presence to us of our absence from the world they display. The photograph confronts us with an automatic, mechanical and faithful doubling of a world now seemingly lost to us in time.

Their strange aura appears to derive from the degree to which the ephemeral moment of presence they persistently confront us with is inextricably linked to the overwhelming material density of the reality they serve to double and offer up to our memory.

Cinema, due to its essentially photographic nature, is also able to provide a complex double of an absent real world. Through the development of the necessary technology to screen moving photographic images the cinema was able to develop a simulacrum of the real world, capturing and ‘embalming’ the movement and eventually the associated sound of the existing material world.

Here lies the extraordinary value of Bazin and Cavell’s work on the strange and mysterious intertwined ontology of photography and cinema. Both identified the degree to which cinema extends and expands upon the ontology of the photograph, concentrating particularly upon the notion of mechanical automatism and the role it has in serving to so effectively double reality and mummify the duration of things in the world. Bazin highlights the fact that photography allows, for the first time in history, the mere ‘instrumentality of a non-living agent’ (i.e. a mechanical automaton) as the only medium between the original object and its reproduction. So the image is formed ‘automatically’, seemingly free from the intervention of the human hand and subjectivity, which, as Bazin indicates, ‘satisfies, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism.’

The fact that photographs provide a double of the real world does not at all guarantee our ongoing presence to the world so displayed. In fact it is just the opposite. The photograph displays a mummified presence that is absent – as Cavell writes ‘present as absent, or absent as present’. This is not to deny the reality of the real, rather it is to allow the photograph to disclose or approach an understanding of the ontology of reality. The photograph discloses reality itself (what is really in our presence) as being from which we are always absent.

The displacement of present reality, which is persistently displayed by the photograph, explains our sense of persistent estrangement from it. The ‘realism’ achieved by the photograph provides us with an acute sense of reality, which crucially is one from which we already sense a distance. The photograph doubles and consummates our implicit sense of ‘reality’. The mechanical automatism of cinema clearly exacerbates the sense of distance and estrangement implicit within photography thereby providing us with the requisite heightened sense of reality. However, it is an ontology of reality which is persistently haunted by the realisation of our absence from reality, the impossible distance which always already haunts our sense of reality.

I believe that such a hauntology provides an explanation for my ongoing obsession with a film about a singular desire for realised fantasy generated by the protagonist’s absence from the present of reality – Hitchock’s Vertigo. The obsession with realism and its integral connection to fantasy in cinema (exemplified so powerfully by Hitchcock’s Vertigo) was clearly identified by Bazin when he observed that cinema inherently produces images of the reality of the world, or hallucinations ‘that are also a fact’.

For Cavell the obsession with the type of realism explored within cinema is connected with our strong desire to ‘view the world itself’ and the associated wish to access the very condition of viewing or imaging as such. Cinema responds to these desires insofar as when we watch a film we appear to be viewing the world unseen and we appear to be in communion with the objective conditions of viewing as such. Such viewing fulfils our obsessive desire for realism since it displaces us from our normal subjective habitation within the world, and propels us towards a sublimated objectivity troublingly associated with voyeurism. Our normative mode of perception constitutes a somewhat strained connection to the world which is not so much looking out at it and perceiving ‘how it is’, but rather to ‘look out at it, from behind the self’. The interposition of subjectivity between one’s being and the world besets philosophy with a convoluted epistemological problematic, itself a symptom of our obsession for realism.

In order to come to view the world ‘how it is’, to form images of reality, it becomes increasingly necessary to attempt a sublimation of our private fantasies, to render them imperceptible. Yet, as Cavell notes, by viewing the world from behind the self, we repeatedly consign our private fantasies to being thwarted and displace ourselves from our natural habitation within the world. We are thus responsible, in our normative condition, for everything that is unnatural about our condition. However, the cinema offers us a redemptive opportunity for an automatic displacement from our unnatural subjective condition. Films seem to respond to our obsession for realism, insofar as they appear to be ‘more natural than reality’, by removing the responsibility for the displacement of subjectivity from us. Cinema thus provides a relief from the burdensome realm of private fantasy and its heavy responsibilities. Films serve to automatically displace us from our subjectivity and offer us an objective glimpse of the world ‘as it is’. However, crucial to such an understanding of the ontology of reality disclosed by cinema is the fact that the objective world which appears ‘as it is’ has always already been drawn by fantasy, that the world drawn by fantasy is not a world separate from the real world – fantasy and reality are aspects of the one existing world – and therein lies the revelatory redemptive power of cinema in relation to our obsession with realism. On film the world is automatically recreated, doubled and imaged.

As Cavell identifies, the cinema permits the self to become ‘awakened’ and to cease withdrawing its desires deeper and deeper into an imperceptible interior realm. Film awakens us from the governing mode of normative perception that has come to seem so natural to us, namely that mode of perception in which, in order to view the world unseen (and therefore objectively) we look at the world ‘from behind a self’ and render our desires and fantasies invisible (or rather, deny that their visible marks constitute part of the ontology of reality).

The cinema has the capacity to awaken us to the world’s reality and to the reality of our unnatural condition of displacement from the world.