Without Direction

Kelly Reichardt works in a uniquely American idiom, in a poetic, lyrical narrative style – hardly elliptical, but bedded with silences – and with the quietness of that which must remain unsaid, unspoken. Experimental cinematic poetics and narrative orientation are uniquely fused in her work. Her films occupy a certain kind of 21 ^st century impressionistic register, unadorned, stripped down, often described as austere, contemplative or minimalist. Reichardt’s cinema feasts in the uneventful event, in the questioning of what constitutes a dramatic action, what defines and gives meaning to beginnings and endings.

Yet it is in the intimate smallness of Reichardt’s films, and their prizing minor moments of subtle revelation, small gestures, that the tonal strength and tenacity of her directorial voice emerges and is felt. We could say that Reichardt articulates the terms of a minor cinema within American independent film practice (taken pace Patricia White regarding women’s cinema/70s cinema) The private, small scale of her collaboration and the habitus of her film’s production – models itself on friendships, occulted nighttime conversations, misdirected journeys, and brief love affairs. In some sense, Ode, much as many others in her oeuvre, represent the tracing of that experience of the film’s making – a relation of intimacy between cast and crew, ambiently, humbly given to the audience.

In this transitional work is evident the signature intimacy of scale of Reichardt’s films, and a set of motifs we’ve drawn close to, through the delicacy, spareness of her style – a mournful naturalism, a resolute description of a profilmic world, its evocations of a time that seems to wander, to get away from us, just as we wander through it, and characters attempting to find, however fallibly or unsuccessfully, their place within it. In Reichardt’s films, we are allowed to get lost, and getting lost is perhaps her cinema’s most axiomatic principle - a dispossession that is both existential and narratological.

Ode (1999, U.S.) was made on Super 8mm, and with a crew of 2: Reichardt, one other crewmember, 2 actors. In her filmography, it takes a place in a 12 year period in between her two features. Her first film River of Grass, reworks a rebel outlaw couple narrative towards a treatise on failure, on the haplessness of an attempt to escape the drudgery of the everyday, the difficulty of commitment to actually breaking the law, of inhabiting the place of the outsider jubilantly or effectively. Old Joy is a film that treads the delicate boundaries which separate old friends on a camping trip to hot springs. We see a strained relationship after something indefinable has happened. It is an ode, in a sense to an end of something.

Ode is based on Bobby Gentry’s country song, “Ode to Billy Joe” which in 1967 became a national hit, and the Herman Raucher novel and screenplay of same name. A Hollywood film based on it was made in 1976. The song, set in 1953, tells the story of a teenaged boy’s suicide told evasively through the plaintive lyrics of its narrator – Bobbie Lee – a girl whose relationship to Billy Joe is speculatively and mysteriously drawn. Billy Joe is “no good,” they are seen on the bridge, something is dropped off it. Details emerge through banalities of a dinnertime conversation. The persistent refrain “Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge,” echoes throughout the song, and it offers the framework for the opening scene in Ode. The 1976 Raucher screenplay and film introduced a queer subtext to the elliptical narrative, in which Billie Joe’s suicide is fleshed out in relation to a sexual encounter with a man.

Made in the late 1990s, in a moment after the emergence of the new Queer cinema and in the wake of the murder of Matthew Shepard, Ode takes up the narrative of gay sexual repression and subtly modernizes it, while still leaving it in a veil, of a hazy time outside of time – memory traces etched through the granularity of the film stock, its registration, of streaming dappling light, and half remembered places dimmed, tamped down with darknesses. Filtered entirely through the perspective of the 16 year old girl in the act of remembering Billy Joe, in the confused flush of first love and primary lust, Ode’s vantage point mediates the mystery of the boy’s end through the his relationship to Bobbie Lee, a Baptist preacher’s daughter. As a queer film, Reichardt’s elaboration of the mythos of the song and its circulating story is tendered through the frustrations of and limitations on pursuing one’s desire, of even knowing how to. Ode de-dramatizes, and avoids any overt sentimentalism associated with romantic tragedy – instead tendering the suggestions of Billy Joe’s emergent gay identity through impressionistic sketches of Bobbie Lee, her incapacity to properly see or understand him. They are misplaced objects for each other, yet cannot fully recognize it.

The event of suicide, like the refrain of the song, precedes and ends the film, suggesting a time that moves in a circle, one that cannot fully take account of Billy Joe’s struggle. Billy Joe cannot go back to whom he was after his orientation reveals itself - earlier he attempts to articulate his sexual longing - “it’s all just happening on its own.” And he can’t go back to how Bobbie Lee hoped to see him. Bobbie Lee, on the other hand, can only go back, in a circle of rememberance. Mediated by Bobbie Lee, we can only be presented with him from a distance, a figure that appears and disappears in her horizon. In the context of the late 1990s, as opposed to the 1950s or 70s, Reichardt’s film’s political subtlety focuses on the personal scale of loss – Billy Joe’s illegibility to himself as much as to Bobbie Lee. Their story is neither triumphal nor monumental, but a piecing together of the affective universe of longing and self-questioning, if not recognition, through the specific materials of a realist cinematic language.

In Reichardt’s films, the task of finding oneself becomes a struggle diffused into the relationship between bodies and landscapes. Hers is a lush, color saturated profilmic world, constituted by sculptural and ephemeral qualities of light, shadow, texture, matter. There is a sense of thrumming life, at times responsive, at time indifferent to the pulsations of another kind of pattern, of human interiority and of the social constraints that organize its character’s lives.

Location and place are incredibly central to Reichardt’s body of work. Here is an elemental world, full of opaque surfaces and mute landscapes, mottled, tactile textures of an enveloping, at times obscuring or hazy nature – tree branches, reflections in water, buzzing insects and floating pollen, leaves made semi-opaque – nature as both enclosure and as an optic. On the one hand channeling the interiority of characters, on the other a filter, something we strain to see through. Spaces and objects that at times seem to visibly, palpably engulf, much as we see Bobbie Lee in the beginning of this film shrouded and encased in a warren of hanging leaves.

Reichardt’s films often engage in and challenge the generic touchstones of the road movie, from River of Grass to Meek’s Cutoff: they are all stories in which destination is questioned. Things move forward, but they don’t always progress, make progress. Here mobility is organized, peripatetically and circularly, around a road and a bridge, evoking the world of the song, and the social and religious limitations on the young couple’s possibilities, their geographical and social limitation. In Ode, destination and orientation intermingle (destination– a goal, a place to reach - and orientation – a relation to direction, sexual desire, its unpredictable objects)– in a poignant, affective way. Moving forward, towards sexuality, towards the inchoate material palpations of the flesh which so define narratives of teenage desire and sexual awakening, is never so subtly rendered – as the heterosexual teenaged couple confront not only the inarticulate meanderings of their own desire, but also the intractability of their social places – Billy Joe a wilfull social outcast, with his earring and his refusal of the customs of devoutness, the practices of being proper and respectable, and Bobbie Lee, a good girl challenging the conditions of her traction in the strict confines of her religious home. Billy Joe is often seen running in the film, running through a town that offers few passages away or out – he is a figure that is moving against an unseen tide, and it is a form of movement that suggests a drive and insurgency to flee, to take motion in another way, towards another path – an exerted energy without a visible object or a legible goal. Bobbie Lee's first proper vision of him occurs through the hazy filter of a car’s rear window, in which she says, “he sure can run though.”

The pastoral landscape of the deep South is presented without idealism. The restrained space of a deeply religious Southern Baptist town limits the mobility of its young seekers and the perambulations of their desire. They meet surreptitiously on a bridge on a well trodden road – an in between place which is also an in-between-ness that embodies their relation to each other and to the remote, adult world. Geography and travel, the strivings of movement, are always emblematic of how a life can be lived, and how a life can be lost in Reichardt’s films. In Ode identity is engulfed in the unseen and unforeseen throes and rhythms of this movement, even if it appears without a direction.

This is the text of my introduction of a screening of Kelly Reichardt's Ode at the White Light Cinema, Chicago, August 2011.

Film Thing

So, trying to move this space out of dormancy....

I’ve been exceedingly absorbed by putting on Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder’s Light Spill in the UWM Art History Gallery in the past few weeks. Below are some of my introductory remarks on the installation, (even if posting this here somehow seems like a troubling of a tacit day shift/night shift divide.) Overseeing the exhibition in the gallery has given me an intense crash-course in the peculiarities of managing duration in the interests of both literally and figuratively “feeding the machine.” I’ve sometimes felt that acquiring 16mm film prints for this piece has been like wrassling pigs for the slaughter, and in the ethical pulls of film's preciousness, its organic-inorganic-ness, oddly lies the precise locus where the work’s delicacy and beauty emerges…

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As a kind of post-cinematic practice – and by cinema is meant an idea and ideal – Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, in Light Spill and in much of their other work, explore the basic components and materiality of film as medium – projector, screen, light, celluloid, and their recombinant capacities. Their work also draws on traditions of expanded cinema, in which film is folded into a tapestry of other media – performance, sound, light, audience interaction. The interactive components of Light Spill are born out each time this work is mounted in a different venue. Like film itself - which in each screening, subtly shifts meaning – the work takes on an iterative, performative, aleatory quality that is dependent on the variables of the location and space chosen, the films acquired & donated for the exhibition, and the specifics of the projection situation. Gibson and Recoder think of this work as an “ongoing open archive” in its collaborative capacities. Conceived in 2005, Light Spill continues to be installed in various venues internationally (it has shown in TENT in Rotterdam, Pittsburgh Filmmakers Gallery, at the Images Festival in Toronto, the Robischon Gallery in Denver, among many others.) So as a traveling work, of instructions as well as collated materials, some consistent (the projector) some contingent (the films and spaces) Light Spill accumulates a persistent life of its own, through its transit and reconstitution from site to site.

I want to make a proposition, which Light Spill, as a forerunner in the convergence of film practice and gallery practice elegantly bears out: that cinema’s beauty is always and has always been embedded in the spectacle of its own destruction. All films, by virtue of their material existence and their wending through the armature of the process of projection wear down, become dissolute, and decay. But there is another way that cinema’s binding to death is made clear, in the very ways that film as medium has always tried to capture and make animate the inanimate, in the “giving life to those shadows” - and in that process, preserving the unpreservable.

What we have here, staged in this installation, is a scene of luminous destruction, of obsolescence, a potlatch if you will – but a catastrophic dramaturgy that asks us to consider the conditions of film, its history, its disposal. It also asks us to consider the idealization of cinema, as institution and immaterial idea. The films we see unspooling before us have been discarded on multiple levels of value, before they have even reached us, as projected images, before they reach the floor as incontrovertible waste matter. The representational content of the films is traded for an unfixed, unfocused, painterly frame, as the intermittency mechanism that regulates the fixity of the image is removed. The lack of a take up reel on this modified projector produces an apparatus that does not seal itself back up, in the action of rewinding the film onto another reel. Thus, film spills out before us, in the light of another space and another aesthetic relation. Instead of the rewind of the take-up reel, the messy objectness of film is unwound, allowed to take on another shape - and unbound from the institutional shackles of its history and its immersive representational conventions.

 

The conceptual incisiveness and incision, one could say, of this work, emerges in part from its temporal and durational qualities. It’s impact draws on an awareness of the multivalent destruction of cinema, on the abstract and the pragmatic scale, as well as on the felt and experienced scale – in this gallery, in this specific place, these particular films see their last moments of projected, if blurred out, bliss, before expiring. And in expiring, spilling out, snaking and tangling before us, they become stubbornly sculptural objects, made for a different kind of lively and vibrant contemplation. The film object’s slow slithering extrusion from the back end of the projector contrasts with the mechanical time of the apparatus, and the sense of frenzied speed of the abstracted projected image. We are suddenly made aware of all that we may have missed in the temps perdu of films unfathomably lost, unrecoverable. On the one hand we have the lost time of films unwatched, unseen, unknown, and the shifted temporality of arriving too late. The disaster happened long ago, and we realize we slept through it. On the other hand, we have a gesture towards a time of infinite spilling out, and a historical machine that demands a requisite and singular procession of endless images, moving ever forward, as it processes and masticates them, unperturbed. Thus, belatedness: a certain motion backwards, paradoxically to another (perhaps sideways) understanding of the technical and material properties of film’s projection, and the film strip’s materiality. Gibson and Recoder’s installation assembles one model of film’s obsolescence, but also points us to the possible futurity that gleams within it. Film spills out as stubbornly gleaming waste matter, but matter made analogically organic, live and lively.

Light Spill addresses the museological fate of film in the expanded arena of the art gallery. The history of the darkened film theater collides with the brightened space of art exhibition. From black box to white cube, and from one scenario of projection, in which the conditions of film’s exhibition remains invisible, to another, in which we are left with the exposed body of a technological apparatus and its material base made both beautiful and strangely new: estranged by what Gibson and Recoder call the “light mechanics” of a medium. Light here is essential – an essential element of both film production and projection, but also an elemental substance that can illuminate the values of film as object in a new sphere of aesthetic and conceptual utility. Light spills through film and beyond it, spilling out: the diffusion, “the becoming cinema of art,” as Gibson and Recoder suggest. To shed light, in its multiple senses, we require a material that can collect and refract it, and that thing is film.

Fragile Membranes

“The carpet too is moving under you” - Bob Dylan

“The heart is a repository of vanished things…” -Mark Doty

I had a series of posts percolating, but life intervened, as it does, and summer passed like so many leaves blowing down the street in a Sirk film. Despite and because of the unforeseen, I had a series of effervescent encounters with objects, images, and artworks, which serendipitously converged with reading Jane Bennett’s wonderful book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Thus I’ve been thinking a lot about aesthetic forms that treat the contingency of matter and material, about the fragility of membranous objects, that only remind us of the skin of our seemingly more solidly protected bodies – a surface that illusorily shields us from a sense of our own porosity, from the harsh elements of a rupturing, polluting exterior conditions – both environmental and affective, political and relational. To risk describing the pull of the vital thing and what Bennett calls “impersonal affect” is as she suggests to risk a “willingness to appear naïve or foolish.” (xiii) So…onwards with a certain vulnerable imprudence.

In sum, I have become obsessed with bubbles.

That is to say, with delicate tissues, with ephemeral materials, which nevertheless persist, even after their death and evaporation, in a sphere of imagination and aspiration.

The first in this bouyant series of enchantments and revelations: Brazilian conceptualist Rivane Neuenschwander’s work in The New Museum, especially her moving image piece, made on high definition digital video, The Tenant (2010, inspired by Roman Polanski’s film of the same name.)

In it, we are presented with the movement of a soap bubble as it floats through an abandoned house under renovation. The translucence and refractory iridescence of the bubble, its perfect spherical shape, travels through spaces that are marked by a state of impermanence that look like ruins as they as much as they do developments – decay and progress have never seemed so dissimulative, so interchangeable. The mise-en-scene: a bubble floats ethereally through destructed space, past raggedly blotched partly painted walls, rooms laid bare and stripped, as if innards exposed, a potential home in a limbo state, a loosened, unfixed body of it own. This interior - a skeleton that muddles the line between building and tearing down - is filtered and lensed by the refraction and transparency of the bubble, constantly threatening the very real possibility and nascent predicament of the bubble bursting. What wall, what edge will collide with the path of this floating orb? The bubble may break at any point, yet it continues to move, a haunting and utterly mesmerizing presence, which in its rainbow edged luminescent opticality approaches a quality of fantasmatic science fiction. As I watched, its movement kept moving me. How could such a pure – circular, coherent, never punctured - yet fragile and permeable form, exist and persist? How could I have never thought about such a paradoxical entity, simultaneously organic, corporeal, otherworldly, transcendent in its sublime formal simplicity? The video seamlessly creates continuity across cuts (and very likely across the frangible life of many “stunt” bubbles, much like the hundreds of flies used to make Yoko Ono’s film Fly) through matches-on-action that affect the flow of a long take, even as the interiors and surroundings ceaselessly change, as the bubble, suspended, turns corners, and drifts through empty rooms. The hypnotic propulsion of the bubble is all – all that matters, all that absorbs, all that creates the lull and the draw of its weightless gravity-less motion. There seemed nothing more utopian and tender, nothing more momentary and moving, in many ways, at that moment, in that space of watching. The bubble never “died” – it continued to drift, to propel, to travel, through that seemingly hostile otherworld which was also a real world – a space of provisional yet unrealized habitation. A “bubble that never bursts:” a conceptual fantasy drawn from both our mortal longings, and from a palpable material urgency. I occupied a time outside of that reality of catastrophe, but still within a state of enthralled suspension, seen in the mirror of a frail membrane, through that unburst bubble.

So, to think of the bubble – a model for the in-betweenness that adjoins body and thing, of thing, brute substance, as body, moved me very far in a very short span of time – from the abstract to the concrete, and back again. It insisted on the tenuous hold we have on a kind of vitality, on the precariousness of a moment that may rupture and dissipate at any point, of a body defined by ephemerality and expansiveness, its glassy transparency a lens, camera, window, eye all at once. What could be simpler, more minimal, more meaningful? A bubble: created by breath and soap, and carried away by an invisible gust of air, made visible by the resilience of this uncanny, see-through skin. What was the creaturely ontology of this “thing” that so compelled me, a product of animal and vegetable? The vital life of this thing which is more than a thing, blowing, living and traveling in the wind.

An auratic, transformative, because suddenly mortal thing. What subtended its strange vitality led me to other objects of wonder. Other bubbles – Neuenschwander’s earlier piece An Inventory of Small Deaths (Blow) (2000) made on Super 8 and on show at the Walker Art Center in The Shot in the Dark exhibit, in which the bubble is a fleshier and more undulating and formless entity, less spherical and more organically malformed, full of curvy bumpy edges and movements floating through a more open verdant landscape.

Then to this amateur video later procured by my friend Lucas (indulging the perversity of my new obsession), in which huge untenably shaped tuber-like bubbles flow and evaporate in magical forms of almost Melies-infused disappearance, materializing the threat, the wish that underwrites the suspense of The Tenant.

Stinson Beach Bubbles (canon 550D) from markdaycomedy on Vimeo.

But also other tenuously animated materialities. One among them, Robert Breer’s Rug (1968) - also on view at the Walker - mobilizes a sheet of aluminum placed on the floor into an imperceptibly animistic and uncanny substance.

A motor under the silvery sheet allows the “rug” to sliver, to tremble, to shake, and to move in such subtle motions that one feels the ground literally moving under one’s firmly planted feet, and one’s perspectival and peripheral vision to be scrambled, enervated. We can’t help but move around the tremulous object, but the object demands and beseeches that we stand still, in order to better see its infinitesimal movements and contingencies. Breer’s vibrant thing - a moving image, an animation, a sculptural form that requires our stillness, so as to maximize the uncanny effect of its performed motility. It refuses the fragmenting impatience of white box museum spectatorship, demanding the attentiveness of cinema (Breer was a filmmaker after all), as it quivers and envelops us in the apparency of its approach, towards and away from us, insect like, in ant time. This is a relationality that gently nudges our durational incontinence, and asks us to allow the space and temporality around us to unfold at the pace of the thing. In the manufacture of the shallow breaths of a light wind, from the interaction between our bodies, a minimalist material, foil, and the sounds and gestures of the inanimate animate, so much “body” brought to life.

Robert Breer: Rug, 1968 from this is tomorrow on Vimeo.

This work reanimates, revivifies me, even when it encourages me to switch places with it, to become still, to become a deceptively mute thing. This is perhaps what Bennett means in her examination of the ethical entwinement between our human borders and meanings and the lives and loves of the vibrant, vibrating and luminous thing. This has not only a political dimension, but for me, the capacity for a poetic one. What kinds of associative kinships can be made, by no longer enforcing the boundary between subject and object, and between the subjectivated and that which we perceive to be without subjectivity? Perhaps it leads to a poetics of connectivity, in which our phenomenological entwinement with the world and with those overlooked things, in all their messiness, is what Bennett recognizes as a kind of transformative pollution and commingling, one that demands a different way of speaking, feeling and looking. A way that depends on the “shared materiality,” which binds the animate and inanimate, human and thing. It was Bataille who invoked the synthetic capaciousness of the poetic: "Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism - to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea." (Erotism, 25) Bataille's radical, anarchic organicism may be a far cry from Bennett's ontic materialist ethics, but the investment in the rawness of matter, outside of hierarchical economies of interiority, opens out onto a reconfigured vantage point from which to channel feeling and being.

Like being pierced by a bubble.

[I now realize that this is partly an archive of things that break, fall away, that burst into thin air, and disappear.]

Getting Lost

I began these notes about 4 years ago, while still in graduate school. They’ve become something else - a longer, perhaps ill-advised academic - and therefore ongoing - project. I present these fragments here as a coffret of admixtures, tinctures, infusions and extractions between the olfactophile and the cinephile.

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“Of all the senses, the act of smelling, which is attracted without objectifying, reveals most sensuously the urge to lose oneself in identification with the Other. That is why smell, as both the perception and the perceived - which are one in the act of olfaction - is more expressive than the other senses. When we see, we remain who we are, when we smell we are absorbed entirely." - Adorno & Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment

§ The nose - I am the owner of an aquiline, or in more vulgar terms, Jewish, one, bequeathed to me by my father. My recollections regarding scents - particularly the musky wafting smokiness of incense - will always be tied to my father’s utterly unashamed reactions to them: of stricken refusal and adamant eviction. Burdened with the self-designated responsibility of a bloodhound, he continues to censor my mother’s noisome eau de toilettes. Once on a visit to my parent’s house, I brought my mother a potted purple hyacinth plant. It got unceremoniously sent back home with me to wilt and die within a few days. I can’t say that I necessarily enjoyed the luridly indolic, powdery scent of hyacinth, as much as I did its ferocious spirit and intensity, but in the end the flower’s fragrant bouquet became associated with the death throes of this amethyst jewel’s abandonment. From then on, the smell retained an element of bitterness - it became yet another aroma of rejection, an indication of my inadequacy in the face of discerning parental judgment. A spirit of rebellion may have manifested itself in the gift, as I must have unconsciously sensed that my father’s fragile nasal constitution would revile it.

§ According to that champion of the squalid, Georges Bataille, the language of flowers is the script of death.

“Risen from the stench of the manure pile – even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity – the flower seems to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure. For flowers do not age honestly like leaves, which lose nothing of their beauty even after they have died…flowers…die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds. It is impossible to exaggerate the tragicomic oppositions indicated in the course of this death-drama, endlessly played out between earth and sky, and it is eveident that one can only paraphrase this laughable duel by introducing, not as a sentence, but more precisely as an ink stain, this nauseating banality: love smells like death. It seems in fact, that desire has nothing to do with ideal beauty, or, more precisely, that it only arises in order to stain and wither the beauty that for many sad and well-ordered personalities is only a limit, a categorical imperative. The most admirable flower for that reason would not be represented, following the verbiage of the old poets, as the faded expression of an angelic ideal, but on the contrary, as a filthy and glaring sacrilege.” Bataille, “The Language of Flowers,” Visions of Excess, 12-13.

§ Scents in my memory were always dangerous territory, a fault line for the unknown: smells often edged onto the precipice of shame. And often it was I who was doing the sanctimonious work of a Sherlock Holmes, smelling the silverware for telltale traces of pungent onion or smoked herring, the customary culinary offenders in my post-Soviet home. The smell-test became a de rigueur pre-meal ritual. And the odors that were felt obscene to me, such as the greasy, marine residue of pickled fish, often indicated my squeamish recalcitrance in the face of my cultural heritage. As each fork or knife unveiled its culpability through a malingering odor, I perceived an indictment of my perennial status as immigrant, outsider, and fool. At its worst the ritual could lead to a kind of phantosmia, the pressing in of olfactory delusions.

§ To be aware of smell: always to be at the cusp of something foul.

“The triumph of the sign, of the exchangeable, is a direct accomplice of the elimination of smells, which – when not deemed pleasant or masked by a superior musk – can only be equal to their terrible selves. The concept of perfume, be it man-made or natural, is bound by the conditions of odorlessness. If we speak of limits, it is because odorlessness can only be approached or approximated. Perfume, whether essence of lemon or of orange blossom, is nothing more than an inclination toward an impossible goal…The ideal hygienist dream quite clearly contains a compulsive need to eradicate human smell and the ‘olfactory animal’ that man had once been…Smells have no place in the constitutive triad of civilization: hygiene, order and beauty. In the empire of hygiene and order, odor will always be suspect. Even when exquisite, it will hint at hidden filth submerged in excessive perfume, its very sweetness redolent of intoxication and vice.” Dominique Laporte, The History of Shit, (83-84)

§ Amber is a scent that I adore for its inveterately animalic qualities, its indication of unseemly protrusions and secretions beneath a sweetish and rounded fleshy surface. Today, amber is a composite scent that has no direct correlation or substance of extraction from the plant or animal world; it’s now created from various resins –frankincense, sandalwood, patchouli, as well as vanilla, musk, rose – to approximate the scent of ambergris, an outlawed substance. The story of ambergris is itself a tale of colonialism, natural resource mining, and vomit. Ambergris, which would wash up in chunks on the shore, was believed to be the throw-up of sperm whales – aquatic hairballs, as it were - but consisting of the indigestible remains of other underwater creatures the whale had swallowed: beaks of squids, for example. Ambergris would develop a particular aroma once expelled, congealing in the ocean waves for days, months, years, then drying in the sun. The smallest diffusion of ambergris would create a heavenly scent, but in full force in the undiluted grey viscous chunk washed up ashore, it’s purported to smell like the most pungent shit.

§ The deodorizing idealism of freshness served as the antidote to the fetid, cloying and prickly. (Witness the fashion for “clean” scents and ozonic notes in mainstream perfume that eradicate any bodily implications of the soiled.) Images of my Vinnitsa childhood are peppered with the vibrant smells of ambient wild brush; the greening of walnut shells as they fell to the ground from the tree in our riverfront backyard; the smell of ripening raspberries and gooseberries on the bush; the smoky, snowy, arid reed-like white birch of the Russian national imaginary; the fragrance of crackling leaves on the pear trees I would climb for shade and privacy to evade collective scorn and judgment; the sparklingly crisp scent of lilies of the valley, their fragile white bells ensconced in enveloping green leaves; the sweet homemade confectionary aroma of Napoleon dessert, with its endless thin layers of baked wafers and milky, eggy clotted cream; and most importantly of all - the warm opaque tannic aroma of tea, with the acidity of lemon, as comforting to me as the obliging babushka who unfailingly served it, then as now.

§ As a teen I discovered the world of the bazaar throwback perfume oil vendor. I acquired small coveted, diamond-shaped vials of Frankincense and Myrrh – evoking the ancient bacchanalia of faceless libertines and dark draped, candle-lit chambers - as well as Amber – in its resinous manner, hovering like a warmed over wraith on the skin, a drunken, sweaty, tousle-haired guest who has overstayed their welcome. Based on notes alone, these cheap potions read to me no differently, no more distinctly, than the miniature bottle of Christian Dior’s Poison which I would sniff covertly on my mother’s black formica bureau every other day as a pre-teen, catching a whiff of its excessive, and now infamous, Oriental accords distilled into purplish-black glass. The resplendent bottle, the shape of a rotting heart, with veiny protrusions and gold print, suggested a redolent, bejeweled genie in a bottle, about to be released. Perfumes were a stolen pleasure, a secret fix.

§ How did I get from then to now, to fantasizing about impossible blends, as if perfumery was so easy for auto-didacts? Could mixing aromas be made akin to the art of cinematic montage, or the recombinant geometries of writing itself?

§ Seemingly, the obsession took hold in direct correlation to my failure to write. For Roland Barthes, contemplating the relationship between writing and speech, scent could be a trope deployed as a challenge to the abstracting permanence of the written:

“As soon as you have finished speaking, the vertigo of the image begins: you exalt or regret what you have said, the way you have said it, you imagine yourself (you consider yourself as an image); speech is subject to remanence, it smells. Writing has no smell: produced (having accomplished its process of production), it falls, not like a collapsing soufflé, but like a meteorite disappearing; it will travel far from my body and yet it is not a detached, narcissistically retained fragment, like speech; its disappearance is not disappointing; it passes, it traverses – no more.” Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals Teachers,” The Rustle of Language, (321-22)

§ We are often caught between two modes or two traditions of relationships to smell. The first is the nostalgia-inducing madeleine of Proust. The second, the absurd caricature of Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose,” in which a middling official wakes up without his nose one day, and ends up getting rebuffed by this very organ, which he sees promenading the city in a more-high ranking uniform. The disgrace, his own nose that refuses to rejoin its owner in his rightful place on his face!

§ If we could blindfold ourselves and be led only by our sense of smell through a teeming city, along a riverbed, or through the brush of a forest, what would we see through our nose? There is a charming blackness in the potential caricature of the nostrils as eyes, both a horror of baroque proportions, and a physical comedy, monstrous and carnivalesque, body genres each. Synaesthesia in its most brute manifestation as a switching of sense organs yields an almost comical vision of the body out of order. Yet something radical underlies their exchange, the physiognomy of perception malformed.

§ To be a tentative olfactive libertine: an oxymoron. One can’t measure out a practical form of abandonment with the index of a single breath. I can never actually possess what I desire, which facilitates an endless perusal of descriptions that would draw near the coveted object, outline the shape of the smell, but never make it whole. I read endless writings by perfume connoisseurs, their language recalling the intensive devotion and thrall of the cinephile – florid prose and the deeply subjective language of cathected attachment.

§ How does one verbalize the scented life? The power of smell is both resistant to description but also prone to exegetical excess, to the limitations of simile and the associative leaps of the comparatist. As the anthropologist Alfred Gell suggests, scent has no formal or semiological system of its own - its very power emits from its formless nature:

“It would seem that we are dealing neither with a system of chemical communication which could be handled within a purely ethological system – nor yet with a ‘sign system’ – since the smell aspect of the world is so intimately bound up with its purely physical and physiological constitution that it can in no sense be considered conventional. Somewhere in between the stimulus and the sign a place must be found for the restricted language of smells, traces which unlike words only partially detach themselves from the world of objects to which they refer.” Gell, “Perfume Magic Dream,” The Smell Culture Reader (401)

§ Smells bear a residual and insistent relationality to the world from which they emanate: they cannot be separated into distinct, abstracted representational forms, but always returns us to that world and its valuing contexts. If vision is the privileged sense, bearer of evidence, embodying an architecture of horizons, edged forms, and perspectival space, smell is perhaps the most evanescent, edgeless and unpredictably tenacious. It lingers beyond its appearance and spatio-temporal presence, recurring wraithlike, bringing with it a trail of unforeseen recollections. Scent is the sense of contingency.

§ Can olfactophilia ever approach or analogize cinephilia, or vice versa? Just as one goes to the cinema for an indulgence in fantasy, a vision of an alternate world, and an experience previously frozen, recorded, replayed again, in space and time - I seek out perfumes and otherworldly aromas as a different kind of corporeal travelogue. Rather than the illusive movement through the diegesis, aromas move through me, my body’s porosity exposed. Here, perfume, in its political economy, distinctions of taste, and visceral charge, intersects with the touristic tenors of the gourmand.

§ There is something utterly expansive about losing oneself in, being transported by a certain smell. The mind and one’s emotions expand and contract to attempt to occupy the imaginary space made by the scent itself, as if one is following a story or constructing a set of abstract ideas in cubist form. Olfaction desubjectivates me, in a state of unbecoming in which I disperse into a trail of matter, pure sensation, hazy dissolution, non-sovereign being (a developing motif here, I suppose.) The experience of scent is embedded in the process of decay, the substance being smelled processually linked, in the activity of smelling, with its dissipation, particle by particle. It maps an experience of becoming matter, of feeling oneself as organism rather than as subject.

§ The top note, middle note and base notes of a fragrance create a certain narrative or structure of development and unfolding. This organization of unraveling attests to the fact that fragrances, like films, are time based. They depend on the temporal component - of evaporation and chemical transformation - to be truly felt, discerned, understood. If the filmstrip has emulsion, exposure, photographic development, printing, and projection, the perfume has a rich history of blending, curing, application, and sillage. In both mediums, these are durational and laborious forms of unique and enthralling alchemy.

§ I sniff feverishly at my half empty 1ml vial of perfumer Andy Tauer’s hallowed Orris. After applying two drops to each wrist and huffing, I am transported to a wordless space – of arid landscapes, sweaty cuminy skin, the most sinuous of mysore sandalwood, agarwood, ambergris, with traces of rose and orris root laced with the vanillic textures of benzoin. Iris flower is an impossible tincture, a flower that has no odor, and therefore approximations of its scent must be extracted from its roots. It is an anti-floral floral. The earthy, leather-laden scent of Tauer’s Orris is perhaps the most carnal, libidinal perfume I have ever experienced. The droplets on my skin evaporate, leaving image traces of smoky campfires, worn-out saddles, drying tobacco, resinous ambers, and Tunisian woods. Orris, the flower as root, embodies the meeting line between flesh and landscape. This is what I imagine the tobacco twists in Dead Man, the desert sands in Lawrence of Arabia, the skin under jeweled fabric in Ashik Kerib smells like.

§ On a literal level, the movie theater itself is redolent with smells that only return us to our sense of disbelief and self-awareness as film cultists, pulling us out of the fictional diegesis and into our placement in the space of exhibition. Buttered popcorn, the scent of musty fabric seats, jelly bellys, melting chocolate, the plasticky starchiness of Twizzlers, syrupy cola, sometimes Chinese food or McDonald’s when the food is bravely snuck and stowed, the smell of anticipating, hushed, bodies sitting in close proximity, monitoring their own movements, or sometimes the smell of fecund bodies, usually attached to rustling bags with many papers inside or an improper cine-etiquette. Drive-ins of course must have had their own attendant smells: dusty grass, car exhaust, warming milkshakes, the indications of leftover suntan lotion and the secreted energies of summer sex. These smells can provide a mapping of our habitus and placement within particular conditions of spectatorship. But this is perhaps too sociological to be of any use...

§ Instead, one could ask – if films could be translated into olfactory landscapes, what might they smell like? Here is a tentative, somewhat facile set of perfume formulas for films, with a series of base, middle and top notes, with the genres that might house them - like etched glass bottles of various hues, thicknesses and opacities.

• Cigarettes, whiskey, aftershave, office paper, gunpowder = Film Noir

• Gardenias, honeysuckle, soap, pink powder, briny tears = Melodrama

• Leather, pine, ocean, rocks, burning rubber = Action Film

• Sweat, cream pies, banana peels = Screwball Comedy

• Blood, dirt, stainless steel, bodily excrescences = Horror

• Sperm, lube, latex, nail polish, silicone, motel sheets = Pornography

§ The reverse might be easier – perfumes registered as cinematic fragments…

§ Guerlain’s L’ Heure Bleue always smells to me like dried, tear stained flowers, of the dusky air before a thunderstorm, of the powdery dust of vintage maquillage, and of the cold metallic musty smell of empty passenger trains. Originally formulated in 1912 by Jacques Guerlain, its transliteration meaning “the blue hour,” the time in Paris when day turns slowly, frozenly and beseechingly into night. It was one of the first modern perfumes to use aldehydes. L’ Heure Bleue’s notes – rose, iris, carnation, vanilla, jasmine, musk - barely encapsulate its essence. It is a fragrance that hearkens back to a lost time, to a panorama of historical affect that reads in relation to the romantic horizons and stark contradictions of modernity itself. It is cold in many ways, and therein lies its modernism – a fragrance that evokes a sensation of spring melancholy as well as arrested longing. There is a particular time in early April when I insist on wearing it, before spring blooms and while the weather is still rainy, gray, wet, but pregnant, incipient atmosphere. This is Catherine Deneuve’s purported perfume…. It’s cinematic equivalent: Anna Karina’s acrid, stalactite tears, set against Falconetti’s sainted faciality, in the movie theater in Vivre Sa Vie.

§ Are there particular scents for you that evoke films, or films that evoke scents?

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(I have of course left out Smell-o-vision and The Scent of Mystery, John Water’s Polyester, and various other more direct confrontations between smell & cinema in history and theory – these will have a central place in another piece of writing, elsewhere.)

Hyperosmia

"During the course of this malady which attacks impoverished races, sudden calms succeed an attack. Strangely enough, Des Esseintes awoke one morning recovered; no longer was he tormented by the throbbing of his neck or by his racking cough. Instead, he had an ineffable sensation of contentment, a lightness of mind in which thought was sparklingly clear, turning from a turbid, opaque, green color to a liquid iridescence magical with tender rainbow tints.

This lasted several days. Then hallucinations of odor suddenly appeared.

His room was aromatic with the fragrance of frangipane; he tried to ascertain if a bottle were not uncorked--no! not a bottle was to be found in the room, and he passed into his study and thence to the kitchen. Still the odor persisted.

Des Esseintes rang for his servant and asked if he smelled anything. The domestic sniffed the air and declared he could not detect any perfume. There was no doubt about it: his nervous attacks had returned again, under the appearance of a new illusion of the senses.

Fatigued by the tenacity of this imaginary aroma, he resolved to steep himself in real perfumes, hoping that this homeopathic treatment would cure him or would at least drown the persistent odor."

J.K Huysmans, A Rebours (1884)

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New post in the works...

What Hurts

Mr. Muscle, gazing boredly /And he checking time did punch me /

And I sighed and bleeded like a windfall / Happy bleedy, happy bruisy

- “Cripple and the Starfish,” Antony & the Johnsons

I was taken by a question posed by a friend: what films do you like, and do you allow, to hurt you? And furthermore, this made me think, what are the pleasures of being hurt by cinema, what are the allowances of that hurt? Whether it resides in a masochistic form of dis/identification or a perverse aesthetic relationality, of subjecting oneself to the rigors of the image, what constitutes this plaintive impulse for immolation? This is less a variation on the piercing of the Barthesian punctum, and more a questioning of the terms of one’s tacit subjection to the painfully beautiful image and to the twistings and woundings of narrative. Perhaps these are the terms of a brazen openness to feeling, to feeling bad.

Melodrama, for me, is one province of such willful, wistful desire for ruination. Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) represents the apotheosis of emotional besmirchment. It also gains an affective value in its repetition, and in its indulgence in tropes of repetition - one need only think of Ophuls’ La Ronde (1950) and the circular logic of the carousel to be reminded of his predilection for the iterative, cyclical, recursive form. Watching Letter over and over again only fuels the film’s power to bruise me. And I like to be bruised by it. The rhetorical perfection of the opening line of the letter, “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead,” sets the temporal conditions of a cresting horizon of feeling, with and through the disembodied voice of the eponymous unknown woman (Joan Fontaine). This is a line that often haunts me in its repeatability, and which I tend to utter to myself over and over again after I watch this film. What sheer narrational audacity, to begin with this gesture of promised obliteration! It is a beginning as ending, which on the level of diegesis portends to be an ending as beginning.

In this opening line of the letter, the moment of reading, the duration of reading, and the time of impending death are brought together in a complex affective formation. Through flashback narration the unknown woman's voice, her words, relay the process of her becoming dead. But she is also reanimated by her words, as read by her unrequited love, only to be pronounced dead definitively by the film once the time of the letter catches up with the story told. The woman, whose name we later discover to be Lisa, is beholden to an amorous object, Stefan (Louis Jourdan) who is emotionally insensate, deadened in his own way. Stefan is a lothario who cannot recognize or remember she - nor any other lover - with whom he has been intimate. The non-synchronicity of melodramatic desire is instantiated by a belated transmutation, a transmission of affect. Desire, its expression, moves from one time to another, from one body to another, precisely “too late.” Much has been written of melodramatic temporality (notably Mary Ann Doane & Linda Williams), in which the structural principles of “too late-ness” organize both the mode’s glimmers of utopian aspiration and simultaneously its inevitable groundings in the romance of impossibility and the impossibility of romance. The happenstances of chance yield to the workings of an indissoluble, unflinching fate - destiny as destination - in the form of a fatality manifested in plot. In Ophuls’ film, the unknown woman dies doubly through the very operation of the narrational process, through the act of storytelling itself.

It is not just that narrative closure itself models a form of mortal ending, but that particular films work this structure through in the most “perfect” ways. Both aesthetic and narrative precision become something that cuts into the fleshy body of our feeling. The beauty of a film’s formal perfection pains us. We see this in the excruciating symmetries, the ironies of parallelism in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000). The spatial, situational proximity of Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow also wedges a temporal gap, a stalling and arrest of the image, so many frozen moments that defy romantic causality, but give us instead the searing sensation of “perfect” images, “too much” composed stillness and effulgent detail to bear.

It is perhaps this experience, the pleasurable burden of bearing a distressed temporality - and the trouble of and with futurity - in melodramatic forms that spurs the most havoc. The “too muchness” of melodrama is in its twinning of romantic aspirations with its halting, lurching “too late” temporal schemes. Melodrama presents us with the manifestation of the impossibilities of reciprocity, of mutuality. Instead of a shared space of synchronicity we are given only the fugitive moments of a chanced pleasure, often in form of the arrested relational fragment. We may not have enough time, or we may not occupy the right time in relation to the other, but we have the sensual plenitude of all those images, unmoored and set adrift from the teleology of togetherness.

Thus, I am less concerned or compelled by the reasons for Lisa’s silence and inexpression, than in the fact that her silence – her refusal to identify herself or profess her excessive affection to Stefan – creates the structure of the narrative’s romance of pained impossibility. Lisa’s fantasy exists in the purest crystalline form: it does not require the participation of the other to make it meaningful, but only demands the idea of him. Thus, Lisa’s confession that “I wanted to be the one woman you had known who asked you for nothing,” also heralds Stefan’s de-realization in the work of her fantasy. Tania Modleski further suggests that Lisa “refuses to hold him to an obligation…she takes up the challenge of loss and lives it.” (“Time & Desire in the Woman’s Film,” in Home is Where the Heart Is, Gledhill, ed. 335) Lisa knows and intuits what we only come to know in the details of her letter: Stefan can never be a ‘real’ lover, he can only be an image, an apparition, a vitalizing illusive phantom. In the final sequence, Lisa herself emerges as an extrusion of Stefan’s renewed and clarified subjectivity. She appears as a reconstituted recollection, a diaphanous vision, as the young girl who first spied him through the frame of the door in their shared apartment building. We see this point of view shot, a repetition of an early image of Lisa in the film, after Stefan has read the letter, and is about to go off to fight a duel with Lisa’s husband. This is an agon which we are certain will kill him. Stefan “sees” Lisa as a reconstructed memory, through her words, too late, in a here-now-then-gone superimposed image, flickering and fading.

In watching the film again, I was struck by, most pleasurably hurt by another form of superimposition and imaging of disappearance, that of the dissolve. The dissolve (a fade out superimposed over a fade in) is an artifact of classical Hollywood scene transitions and a shorthand for smoothing over the shocks of temporal ellipsis. In Letter the dissolve wields an ineffable charge of melancholy, of dissolute bruising, a mournful maceration of the image. The evanescent beauty of these melting, overlapping images made me pause, even as they worked to cohere the spaces of telling and reading, to facilitate narrative propulsion, and to bridge the discreet subjective temporalities, in order for Lisa’s desire to finally, tardily, be told.

What hits me in these transitional moments? Tentatively approaching their fullness is also confronting their partiality. Here are the places where the temporalities of Stefan and Lisa touch and intermingle at the level of the imagistic, where the visual becomes liquid, languorous, indistinct, but nevertheless yields to the tragedy of a passing, irrecoverable time. In the first dissolve, Stefan’s reading of Lisa’s letter facilitates the blurring of his sharp profiled visage, a recession, a pull into the past of her recounting, an absorption into a part of his life that he is incapable of fully seeing. The images seem to bleed into each other, their bleeding a form of opening between bodies of time and between untimely bodies.

But the dissolves that do the most bruising work on me are ones that come at key moments of melodramatic revelation. In another dissolve, Stefan’s departure on the train after their consummated encounter yields an image of Lisa’s bereft walk away from the camera, as her darkened figure fades into an inky oblivion. This shot overlaps with another of a nun walking down an austere darkened hallway towards the camera, signaling Lisa’s impending pregnancy. The “two weeks” of Stefan’s trip edges into the rest of Lisa’s life with her secreted child, a child that dies when placed on another (contaminated, we learn) departing train as Lisa goes to profess her love and give her life to Stefan.

However, the transition that truly does me in, that subjects me to the most rending pain-pleasure, is the final image of Lisa as she writes the closing remarks of her letter. Here the time of reading, of writing, of watching, of hearing and of Lisa’s death approach a climactic convergence – the inexpressible expressed, yet again “too late.” The camera tracks from the crucifix on the convent wall and the perfectly made white bed, seemingly preternaturally prepared for a dying body, then settling on Lisa writing at a desk. Camera movement effects a fluid continuity as Lisa writes (and her voice from beyond the grave recites) these last words.

She is figured, yet obstructed, leaning over the letter – a text which so animates and defines this film’s structure, in a scene which finally fuses the textual artifact and the subject who narrates it. We see Lisa behind a lamp, its iron base mirroring the crucifix on the wall. The light of the bulb obscures as much as it brightens, hurting our eyes. In the profilmic space, it works less to shed light on Lisa, but rather produces a blocking blindness, illuminating the tortured crescendo of conclusion, the limits of what we can see - and Lisa's face marks that limit. The ill fated narrative train reaches its final destination in this melodramatic universe, and the shot begins to fall away, to liquefy with her final words: “If only you could have shared those moments. If only you could have recognized what was always yours, you would have found what was never lost. If only…” Her voice trails off. Lisa puts her hand to her forehead, fully covering her face and her pen drops, rolling on the paper. The image grows blurry, as the shot transitions, blurring into the last page of the letter itself, and the inkblot left by her pen. The blot of the pen, the bleeding of ecriture, matches the liquid dissolution of her life rendered as a receding image, a transfiguration of a last breath visualized as a formless mark, a trailing ellipsis.

The camera’s gaze decisively scans and caresses the letter, closing in on the finality of a message from the convent: Lisa spoke Stefan’s name as she died. Presented from Stefan’s point of view, the letter itself provides the material for a now immaterial, expired body, her voice muted into the inky mark of a bleeding contingency. This conjunction of temporalities, of time catching up with itself in the space of writing, reading, and in the blinding nature of seeing (Stefan’s overdue recognition) depends on a visual logic of disappearance, the straining of separation. The dissolve becomes a device that can never fully smooth over the rift between, but nevertheless aspires to put in haptic contact or even fusion, asynchronous times and bodies. Time catches up to us, always somehow too late. Our inability to see, and to recognize, eventuates a bleeding, bruising image, one that fades out too soon and too much. “If only…”, an echoing refrain, embodies the wrenching contingency at the heart of melodramatic (and, implicitly cinematic) time, joining the utopian possibility of another horizon of amorous experience that never appears (the “if”) and the intrinsic solitude of the “lover’s discourse” (the “only”).

What films, what images, have you let hurt you, perhaps too much?

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

In this blog I hope to grapple with ways of seeing and feeling matter, and the matter of seeing and feeling: through the abstract and overfull economies of film pleasures, and of non-filmic pleasures that may reverberate as inherently (or experimentally) cinematic. Its objects may be promiscuous, and are inspired by two general, if not definitive or related, “things:” film and scent.

Thus, I begin with an image of Hedy Lamarr smoking in Ecstasy (Gustav Machaty, 1933), an ode to the dissipation of smoke as the filmic materialization of post-coital reverie. There is perhaps no better image to express the ways that cinema moves the viewer and moves within itself, the contingent wending of evanescent particles and profilmic particulars together in a chiasmic logic of desire: the desire for a world beyond the screen and one intrinsically animated by the world placed in front of the camera.

In the course of teaching a seminar called “The Carnal Screen” I've been struck with the recursive trope of smoking that appears in proximity to, or as metonym for, the unseen sex act. This is a place where material representability (as well as its limits) is bookmarked by immaterial experience, in which the puffs and cloudy, sinuous slivers of cigarette smoke make visible forms of pleasure and modes of feeling that evade the gravitational heft of the body, while simultaneously passing through its enfoldings. Smoke rises up and away from Lamarr’s horizontally reclining face, profiled in its stillness, framing it in unpredictable curlicues. Her arm creates a triangular frame that gesture upward, mirroring a previous shot in which her face, seen in close up and upside down, in her evinced moment of pleasure, is partially concealed by the diamond frame of her elbows. The smoke in the air is the frangible archive of Lamarr’s breathing, inhalation and exhalation itself an index of cinematic arousal (no one heaves her chest and breathes more dramatically than Lamarr!) Ingestion, consumption, possession, swallowing are all inflected by Lamarr’s intense performance-as-portraiture, her relative stillness and statuesque nature only highlighting rustling moments, slight reverberations. The smoke emanates, drifts upwards, the inverted residue of that which has been represented seconds prior in terms of falling and rending – the descent of the new lovers bodies onto the settee, the pearls tumbling to the floor, Lamarr’s porcelain hand grasping at the fur of the sheepskin rug below her, the draped fabric which falls to the ground.

Images like this speak of the relation between bodies and cinema, and that, which lies sometimes mutely, in between – at the cusp of form and formlessness. The smoke signal that permeates through the prison wall in Jean Genet's Un Chant D'Amour (1950), orally received on the other side through the ingestion of its threnodic fumes, partakes in this rich interplay between material and immaterial. The gesture of eroticism is abstracted through the limits and perverse extensions of the embodied self into matter, into the very objectness which the architecture of the prison itself enacts and signifies - yet in the punitive register of a disciplining subjection. What is transmitted in this erotic gesture, in the absence of physical contact, but the ephemerality, the impossibility of the gesture itself? Smoke here operates, gains flight as figurative expressivity. It instantiates a liminal symbolic order that aestheticizes eros, showing desire to be purely aesthetic, emitting from the creasing folds between bodies and things.

Lesley Stern, the poet of smoke’s ineffable cinematic “thingness,” invokes the nature of its contingency,

“Yet if every passion, as Benjamin remarks, borders on the chaotic, cigarette smoke surely evinces the waviness of the border…it is often cited as one of the simplest examples of chaos – the smoke rises in a spiral from the cigarette, then suddenly it breaks up, it’s trajectory becomes chaotic, random. This moment, when laminar flow dissolves into nonlaminar flow can’t be predicted, and neither can the pattern of dispersal be foretold.” (The Smoking Book, 109.)

Cinema best narrates this path of desire’s meandering contingency and dissolute directionality, like the smoke that breaks up the field of the image, creating curtains of translucency and shadowy phantoms which snake and tease, the pulsion of enchantment. We are dispersed into forms that evaporate, leaving only memorial residues - smell, taste, breath, feeling, sense that involutes language.

So, what kind of smoke gets in your eyes? There is much left to say, but I have run out of breath.