The body and the screen(s)

A few of the images from Silvia Dadian's exploratory work from August 28 continued to brew in my memory. The most persistent was the shadow play of stacking blocks because of the way the  silhouette articulated in a puppet-like way, similar to the work here of a contemporary Indonesian puppeteer. But I also kept trying to make sense of what each of these images showed separately and together, and what they were pronouncing of the subject depicted, and of me the viewer.

In this project, three different projections portray a process involving the subject’s body. In the first, a woman is making herself up in a mirror. Because the projection is directly on the mirror, it made me aware of the projector relaying the image and diminished my awareness of the camera that first recorded the image. The makeup scene is done as if the camera/projector is the mirror itself, but the woman is looking at herself, not out at the camera. Her self-absorption reminds me of how actor performs in a narrative. The second image is the silhouetted form already discussed, a variant of the mirror image in the way it both, ambivalently- covers and performs. It is a more explicit about the sexuality of the figure; again a form of self-absorption but more directed to how she looks to an other (from whom she is also presumably trying to hide). The last image looks more like a narrative fragment than the others. A woman emerges from the water into the frame-- which is the most brilliant bit--she lies down for a minute on the deck and then gets up and leaves the frame. She is dressed- perhaps in the same skin-hugging outfit as the last shot which made me think of a scene from Jon-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (Contempt)- a very subjective memory of a woman coming out the water at the top of a shot. I was reminded also of a movie by Harun Farocki where a woman is having makeup put on, and this chain of associations led me to a published conversation between Kaja Silverman and Farocki about Godard’s My Life to Live. 

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Structured in chapters like a book, My Life to Live explores the desired autonomy of a young woman who leaves her husband and child, finds herself penniless, becomes a prostitute and is murdered. Besides Nana, the lead, there is a small coterie of characters that includes Godard the director. The camera also plays a role in this film in articulating agency. In their analysis of this film, Silverman and Farocki draw the reader’s attention to how the camera swings between an enunciative and diegetic function, between documentary and narrative. According to the authors this oscillation is part of the film’s aim to make a distinction between the actress Anna Karina and Nana, the character she portrays. This play with the camera also calls attention to the relationship between the surface or mask of the performer (performing a role within the film) as well as the actress’ performance, and the interior- what they call in this movie, the soul. The switch between enunciative, or documentary/objective camera and the narrative camera that anticipates the next move– helps register volumes of information about power. Godard, addressing his strategy with this film:-- "how can one render the inside? precisely by staying prudently outside."

I began to think of these distinctions between inside and outside, mask, skin and interior as I meditated on Silvia Dadian's fragments- there is, in her rendering a multiplication of surfaces that we either look through or become aware of, including the mirror, the screen, the screen we watch on, the skin, and the surface of the deck, all of which the mark the appearance of the subject, but do not acknowledge anything about her.  In the dialectic between a declaring, enunciative position and a narrative one, Dadian's are the former. Although they do not exclude the possibility of narrativity- it seems like they have cut around those bits. I am left wondering about the silence of the woman in Dadian's pieces, and at my position as viewer, which felt voyeuristic in the first two at least.  I think the intention was to have the viewer appear also and be implicated, but I'm not sure how that will work. I am left though with a new thought, on watching the water dry-- which, although it was tedious to watch, got me thinking again about the soul and about the fragile marks made by a life. Some writers such as Franco Berardi, in trying to indicate toward our human corporeality and intimacy that is shrinking as a result of screen cultures, are using the word soul, in order to reach for an interior, and a desire that has been scrubbed out in the name of realism and cynicism. The other association I was led to was that of "a bare life," the starkest description of how external power determines the existence of the subject (that is you and me)- being allowed just to live, with no other attributable qualities or agency. This is the life in a refugee camp.