12tableaux

i. A beggar woman's song resounds, in a language that is neither explicated nor translated. It is said that she follows the rivers. She laughs a laugh of ecstasy, she laughs a laugh of exhileration. It is said that she is mad. In the distant background a red sun descends during dusk, itself an afterimage of a light that is already long gone. The beggar woman resumes her song, she will do so once or twice more, later. (Although it is difficult to tell whether we can speak of a later.) It is said that they were together in Calcutta, she and the white woman. The red sun has faded, a phantasmic piano motif starts playing, and I drift into a dream that isn't mine.

ii. Marguerite Duras composes 'India Song' like a free counterpoint. The visual image and the sound image are not in total accordance with one another. Instead, they are granted an autonomy each of their own and run along two tracks simultaneously though separately. The visual runs over the sound as much as the sound runs over the visual. There are times when they touch, link into each other, but never to fully conjoin, only to scatter apart again and again. Their relation to one another is constituted by this very separation. It is by being separated, wholly separated, that each reaches into the other, perhaps beyond the other, without running the risk of being reduced to a newfound unity. As such, each drives the other to their limit; sound moves the visual into its unseen, the visual penetrates into the unsaid of sound.

iii. It is a spectral cinema — a cinema of spectral bodies and spectral voices. Sound haunts the visual as much as the visual haunts sound. Marguerite Duras makes a distinction between voix intemporelles and voix de la réception. As if to suggest that the latter are somewhere between diegetic and non-diegetic, unspoken utterances that come from a beyond within the visual — a ghostly redoubling of the visible into the invisible, which is its fugitive grounding. The desire of still bodies. The unthought of celluloid dreams. Unhinged, decentred voices which make a little bit of time enter into the frame. As opposed to the timeless voices that come from an outside of the visual, from a non-place which is pure exteriority. Curiously, Deleuze-translator Hugh Tomlinson chooses to translate these as "untimely" voices (invoking Nietzsche in the process.) Somewhere between the eternal (timeless) and a time still to come (untimely), these voix intemporelles tell the story of Anne-Marie Stretter and drive it to its limit — an unfolding into the infinite. As if to say that the story of Anne-Marie Stretter has happened, is happening, and will always happen. What we see is only an afterimage, an echo of lost time, the red husk of a sun that has already faded. And yet it is also taking place now, as if infinitely redoubled within a crystalline structure. A silent murmur resounding, always resounding through the chambers of our hearts.

iv. The sound image, its polyphony of timeless/untimely voices, installs a kind of structural amnesia into the visual image. It returns the visual image to a site of forgetting, the silent witness of all that comes to pass. It makes visible in the visual image that which lays underneath: layers upon layers of lost time — the acting out of an entire lifetime at only a moment's notice. But only because the visual image too, reveals something of the sound image at the margin of its own bearings. It renders visible the other side of time, so to speak. The stillness at the heart of forgetting. Something that holds in spite of all that comes to pass. When we look close enough we will see that the crystalline structure is fractured from within. In the visual image this fracture is effectuated by the ballroom mirror which redoubles the bodies moving through it, drifting in and out as if they had become the ghosts of their own lives. And from the fracture within, these bodies scatter into a myriad of states that are interchangeably actual and virtual. The story of Anne-Marie Stretter has happened, is happening, and will always happen — but we come to realise that her story is equally infinite as it is eternal. The visual image then, is a kind of resting place, a tomb for the eye. Anne-Marie Stretter has to disappear from it, again and again, so that she can also be held, eternally, inside of it. She is everywhere at the end of time. And if the sound image is an outside of pure exteriority in which she finds her death, the visual image is an inside without interiority in which she lives on forever.

On 'Corps Aboli' (1978) by Teo Hernández

A dance of two incommensurable bodies — one onto which, invariably, the gaze inscribes its perception and another which possesses, directs the gaze. What becomes possible in this dance however, is a meeting of the two without one to the other becoming same; the dancer and the camera remain forever distanced yet find themselves entangled in an unconsummated carress, in the same manner that the wind grazes my hand's grasp. As such every regime of the body is laid waste to; all signification is worthless for the body, at once, becomes nothing more and so much more than it already is. The dancer's body then, is no longer a thing to be gazed upon: "his body no longer perceptible, his soul a fire on display." [1] Instead, the gaze joins in onto its dance as the two together become nothing but pure motion — dance as a manner of being in the world. It is a marvelous little film, an a-signifying machine which shows that other gazes and perceptions always remain possible still.