Ein Essay von Melissa Benno zu Gina Telarolis - „Physical
Instincts“
Wenige Dinge sind in der Lage eine derartige Beklemmung auszulösen
wie der eigene Körper. Er bereitet den Horror gefangen zu sein in
uns selbst, eingeschlossen in Fleisch und Blut.
Im Rahmen der Recherche entwickelte ich einen Faible für weniger
offensichtliche, eher kryptische Videoessays. Schließlich stieß ich
auf eine Arbeit mit dem Titel „Physical Instincts“ welche
sich laut der Unterüberschrift (The Phantom Limbs of Dead
Ringers) an David Cronenbergs Film aus dem Jahre 1988 orientiert.
Dead Ringers liefert durch das Hauptthema Körperlichkeit
bzw. die Verbindung von Körper und Geist das Sujet des Essays,
welches einem hypnotischen Strudel gleichkommt. Eine anfängliche
Verwirrung bezüglich der Absichten der Autorin Gina Telaroli klärte
sich durch einen von ihr beigefügten Text, auf welchen ich mich
teilweise beziehen werde. Eine vollständige Version hiervon findet
sich im Anhang.
Der fast 10-minütige Film nimmt uns mit auf eine Reise durch
verschiedene Epochen der Filmgeschichte. Wir sehen eine Flut aus
Bildern, alle im weitesten Sinne dem Horrorgenre zugehörig, welche
kunstvoll aneinander montiert sind. Sie sind teilweise mit dem
Original-Ton unterlegt, an einigen Stellen verbindet die Autorin die
Bilder aber auch mit selbst gewählten Stücken. Eine klassische
Erzählstruktur lässt sich nicht finden, jedoch wird schnell klar,
dass der Leib hier im Vordergrund steht. Laut Autorin sollen die
unterschiedlichen Filmausschnitte Gliedmaße symbolisieren, welche
zusammengefügt das Genre ergeben: „genre could be a body
transplant of sorts“, wobei sie sich alle auf individuelle Art
und Weise aufeinander beziehen und aus den jeweils anderen Gliedern
entwickeln.
So ist es sinnlos nach einer Narration zu suchen, stattdessen steht
die von der Autorin als „bodylanguage“ bezeichnete
Bildwirkung im Vordergrund. Körper und Geist sollen getrennt werden,
indem die Bilder bzw. Körperteile aus jedem Zusammenhang gerissen
nur noch für sich selbst stehen: „To abolish psychology, the
subordination of body to the dictates of the mind, of morality, of
narrative, just means showing the image, the body, as speaking for
nothing but itself.“.
Das Bild an sich, von seinem eigentlichem Ursprung, seinem Geist
gelöst, nimmt nun eine völlig neue Funktion ein. Ohne zeitliche
oder räumliche Beschränkung treten der Affekt und das Instinktive
in den Vordergrund, der Geist verliert die Kontrolle über den
Körper. Dieser schwebt durch ein dunkles Nichts, bereit mit anderen
Körpern zu verschwimmen. Auffällig ist wie das Zerfließen im Video
mittels Techniken der Montage, der Überblendung von Szenen oder dem
Arrangieren der Musik gezeigt wird. Beeindruckend ist auch die
Auswahl der Filmszenen. Trotz der gewollten Verwirrung, lässt sich
immer wieder ein Bezug zu Körperlichkeit und dem Ausgangspunkt Dead
Ringers herstellen. Minute Acht des Essays lässt Spielraum die
gezeigten Bilder als Wiederauferstehung zu interpretieren. Ein Körper
löst sich auf und verliert so seine ursprüngliche Form, er wird
jedoch dadurch, dass er immer weitere Echos – in diesem Fall die
Sequenz aus Dead Ringers – seiner selbst produzieren wird,
unsterblich. Das Kino wird hier als etwas organisches skizziert, ein
ewiger Wiedergänger.
Den Ansatz, den Fokus auf die Bildwirkung zu legen, finde ich
faszinierend. Dem Zuschauer wird so die Möglichkeit gegeben noch
tiefer in den Körper des Bildes einzudringen. Auf diese Weise wird
eher ein Gefühl vermittelt und keine Logik. Die Bilder müssen nicht
in eine sinnvolle Ordnung gebracht werden, sie funktionieren in dem
Kontext autonom. Losgelöst vom normalen Sehverhalten begeben wir uns
so in unergründliche Tiefen, fernab von Sinn und Verstand. Was wir
dort vorfinden kann uns begeistern, zermürben oder verängstigen. Der Teufel steckt im Detail. /16.04.2013
Ergänzend der, das Videoessay begleitende Text von Gina Telaroli
History is made at night and, at least in my case, watched bleary-eyed at 5:30 a.m. over coffee. In November, I couldn’t sleep. I would spend evenings after work at Occupy Wall Street, my body propagated across livestream now and then as a symbol of brazen youth inside a thousand anonymous bedrooms of similarly bleary-eyed insomniacs; by midnight, tucked in, warming myself up slowly, I would watch Carpenter films and Dead Ringers on repeat. The loneliness of having a body—but my mind, wherever it was, was on genre, and thinking that genre could be a body transplant of sorts, a series of reconstructed appendages to approximate an ultimate, mass-manufactured body, story, romance. As a remake and clone of a hundred horror films, Dead Ringers could be remade from them, could be resurrected from the spare limbs of old buried objects, so that the ghosts of ’80s body horror could be given life, while Dead Ringers could become a phantom duplicate of itself, dismembered across the detritus of a moth-eaten Hollywood. Of course what’s interesting is not that the limbs are the same, but how different each is in playing the same function, same role.
It goes without saying about body language: every gesture—every supplication of a cupped palm, every spin of an index finger, every hokey-pokey—is the tracing of a phantom thought through the air. Of course, as Cronenberg and monster movies show, it’s usually the body that thinks before the mind. So with a found-footage, montage-movie, I found myself with the same issues of any shit-grade horror filmmaker collapsing traditional hierarchy of thought/action, mind/body, inside/outside, in which the latter is nothing but a symbol of the former. To abolish psychology, the subordination of body to the dictates of the mind, of morality, of narrative, just means showing the image, the body, as speaking for nothing but itself.
"The expression of an isolated face is intelligible all by itself, we don’t have anything to add to it by way of thought, nor of time nor space....Confronted with an isolated face, we don’t perceive space. Our sense of space is abolished," wrote Béla Balázs about the close-up, that affect that not only internalizes and embodies a response but in so doing internalizes and embodies the object being responded to. As Deleuze would point out, the close-up abolishes the geometric coordinates of time and space only as their mute witness. Still we can wonder: What if other body parts besides the face, or what if any image altogether, could serve this function as affect? Entire scenes would be rendered superficial, embodied and internalized—inside-made-outside—in the superficiality of limbs and visions expressing themselves mutely onscreen. In this cinema of affects, there would be no inside/outside, no delineation of shot/countershot, action/thought, when every shot is a countershot balanced against the others, each silently metamorphosing into the next. The body of the movie could rethink itself into new forms across a 20th-century history of B-movies, the nightmare responses to the violent, daylight realities of women held at stainless steel ovens to smell cobbler and dream of their men at war.
I imagined making a movie, the opposite of my previous ones, that could take place in no time or space but the ether of a movie-lover's broken dreams. "The structure Inside-Outside or Day-Night has no meaning in a pure space given over to itself and disoriented," wrote Jacques Derrida. To sew together a few movies only by hacking them to bits moment-to-moment and scene-to-scene.
No inside, no outside. "This is the affect-image," said Deleuze. "It has as its limit the simple sense of fear and the effacement of faces into nothingness. But as its substance it has this sense composed of desire and of surprise, which give it life, and the turning of faces out in the open, in the flesh." In the dark, I would shiver because I was cold, because I was anxious, and sometimes unsure which was which, body or mind. Of course there was nothing to look at.
Though hybrid parts are easily interchanged, that anonymity—when our words, our voices, our bodies are no longer our own, no longer belong to us at all—comes too from a total individuality that they express, these phantom limbs, nothing but themselves. So in this affect-film, the things onscreen would have no inside or outside, no meaning except in themselves: images, rhythms, gestures. As pure cinema, it would be a Frankenstein monster, ghost-written no more by me than however many unnamed and incognito artists and voices from the shadows of a history that at this point can seem half-imagined, half-projected onto a blurry present. Doesn’t really matter whether I puppeteered them or they me. It is what it is.
Ergänzend der, das Videoessay begleitende Text von Gina Telaroli
History is made at night and, at least in my case, watched bleary-eyed at 5:30 a.m. over coffee. In November, I couldn’t sleep. I would spend evenings after work at Occupy Wall Street, my body propagated across livestream now and then as a symbol of brazen youth inside a thousand anonymous bedrooms of similarly bleary-eyed insomniacs; by midnight, tucked in, warming myself up slowly, I would watch Carpenter films and Dead Ringers on repeat. The loneliness of having a body—but my mind, wherever it was, was on genre, and thinking that genre could be a body transplant of sorts, a series of reconstructed appendages to approximate an ultimate, mass-manufactured body, story, romance. As a remake and clone of a hundred horror films, Dead Ringers could be remade from them, could be resurrected from the spare limbs of old buried objects, so that the ghosts of ’80s body horror could be given life, while Dead Ringers could become a phantom duplicate of itself, dismembered across the detritus of a moth-eaten Hollywood. Of course what’s interesting is not that the limbs are the same, but how different each is in playing the same function, same role.
It goes without saying about body language: every gesture—every supplication of a cupped palm, every spin of an index finger, every hokey-pokey—is the tracing of a phantom thought through the air. Of course, as Cronenberg and monster movies show, it’s usually the body that thinks before the mind. So with a found-footage, montage-movie, I found myself with the same issues of any shit-grade horror filmmaker collapsing traditional hierarchy of thought/action, mind/body, inside/outside, in which the latter is nothing but a symbol of the former. To abolish psychology, the subordination of body to the dictates of the mind, of morality, of narrative, just means showing the image, the body, as speaking for nothing but itself.
"The expression of an isolated face is intelligible all by itself, we don’t have anything to add to it by way of thought, nor of time nor space....Confronted with an isolated face, we don’t perceive space. Our sense of space is abolished," wrote Béla Balázs about the close-up, that affect that not only internalizes and embodies a response but in so doing internalizes and embodies the object being responded to. As Deleuze would point out, the close-up abolishes the geometric coordinates of time and space only as their mute witness. Still we can wonder: What if other body parts besides the face, or what if any image altogether, could serve this function as affect? Entire scenes would be rendered superficial, embodied and internalized—inside-made-outside—in the superficiality of limbs and visions expressing themselves mutely onscreen. In this cinema of affects, there would be no inside/outside, no delineation of shot/countershot, action/thought, when every shot is a countershot balanced against the others, each silently metamorphosing into the next. The body of the movie could rethink itself into new forms across a 20th-century history of B-movies, the nightmare responses to the violent, daylight realities of women held at stainless steel ovens to smell cobbler and dream of their men at war.
I imagined making a movie, the opposite of my previous ones, that could take place in no time or space but the ether of a movie-lover's broken dreams. "The structure Inside-Outside or Day-Night has no meaning in a pure space given over to itself and disoriented," wrote Jacques Derrida. To sew together a few movies only by hacking them to bits moment-to-moment and scene-to-scene.
No inside, no outside. "This is the affect-image," said Deleuze. "It has as its limit the simple sense of fear and the effacement of faces into nothingness. But as its substance it has this sense composed of desire and of surprise, which give it life, and the turning of faces out in the open, in the flesh." In the dark, I would shiver because I was cold, because I was anxious, and sometimes unsure which was which, body or mind. Of course there was nothing to look at.
Though hybrid parts are easily interchanged, that anonymity—when our words, our voices, our bodies are no longer our own, no longer belong to us at all—comes too from a total individuality that they express, these phantom limbs, nothing but themselves. So in this affect-film, the things onscreen would have no inside or outside, no meaning except in themselves: images, rhythms, gestures. As pure cinema, it would be a Frankenstein monster, ghost-written no more by me than however many unnamed and incognito artists and voices from the shadows of a history that at this point can seem half-imagined, half-projected onto a blurry present. Doesn’t really matter whether I puppeteered them or they me. It is what it is.
