D’entre les mort or The living and the dead. Disco and a short discussion of the film Tralala, French 2021 directed by Jean-Marie Larrieu & Arnaud Larrieu.

“God had to create disco music so I could be born and be successful” – Donna Summer.

“From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.”― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

D’entre les mort or The living and the dead. Disco and a short discussion of the film Tralala, French 2021 directed by  Jean-Marie Larrieu & Arnaud Larrieu.

Stepping away from suffocation: a short discussion of the French film Tralala 2021. Disco! Disco in Lourdes, France. 

First the music was intriguing as well as different: not quite a musical and more like a Hymn or meditation through music through life it breathes another dimension into the ordinary, a homeless man’s day and those he meets. 

Tralala is a musical that is like clapping a beat, or adding boots and cats to rhyme and he takes this as his name. He, homeless. He lost. He like a dice roll drifts and finds something in the small and unseen in our lives we might usually overlook. Like vertigo, or a feeling of dizziness and disorientation. A song in the film D’entre les mort or often the English translation The Living and the Dead, a 1954 novel re-named Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock’s movie adapted from the French novel) directs me to this. Lourdes, the setting in France, is a place that orients pilgrims and disorients the disbelievers: can miracles happen? Have they happened? Why is the belief so strong and the community stands stable and solid in these beliefs. Tralala turns up in the town and disorients people. His appearance, like vertigo and like the song’s English title a life returned from the dead as well as breathing new life into the dead or forgotten relationships in the town. Who is Tralala?

Another dimension and I have the feeling of uncertainty with breathing and letting go. As an audience member I wasn’t prepared to take another’s perspective that like a bomb Tralala is the devils advocate. I didn’t want to determine my meaning, my attempt to connect with the film through with their stable stance. To suffocate; to accept their choices and their approach as the only way to feel this film wasn’t going to stop me breathing or giving it an organic life that evolved or appeared seen through different scenes something different and new.

In a way, borrowing from Dice Man, I questioned their habitual repetition to compete and interpret the whole before my own exploration or discussion. Determined to determine the spectator instead of accepting their perspective was unsure how to receive the film. I walked away from their perspective just like Tralala.. It felt right to let the film have an organic, fecund and less organized moment in my life. To breathe and not judge was what I was taking from Tralala. To feel less suffocated by the other’s perspective. Less dualist and less determined to simply place it in between a miracle and the devil I let go and breathed. 

Uncertainty added dimension and took from the one who tried to destroy the film experience for me. Was this also part of Lourdes miracle or pilgrimage? I breathed and then submitted to the music. Woven through Tralala’s narrative was his perspective: song and music simply walked in him and exchanged with others as part of his day, his ontology. He connected through music and lived as his music. Homeless and facing problems as they unfolded. Disco erupted into this unfolding. Lourdes missed their disco and the family that ran it missed their son, Pat, 20 years gone and now Tralala walks in and they need to fill that gap, their loss with the appearance of who they believed was their lost son and brother, lover and father. Who was Tralala? He had no story in this film. He was presence. His history unknown.


Disco! SO many moments in this film was like vertigo without the anxiety – if possible. The extraordinary in the ordinary – the music we play as we walk around, listen to when we shop and share together as we love, laugh or leave plays a role more significant for the sensitive or interested than those deaf to the rhythms around us. The next generation, the sons who wanted to leave for Australia were still caught in their father’s loss or mourning his brother and his musical connection.

 The loss and the new, rap or hip hop for another generation, was still mourned. The dance music and shared moves as well as light and pleasure was mourned. Where had disco gone for this generation and should older people feel shamed of their age and needs to express themselves through their generation, disco and dance? Unashamedly, I enjoyed the final scenes: dance and then songs sang by the “brother” Seb “D’entre les mort” is sang by the actor Bertand Belin. With Le mot juste, the hypnotic rhythms – percussion created a space to forget and to enjoy performing and the performance. The narrative again lost or wandered and music plays a role in the pilgrimage out of grief and into life.

I found in the film an encouragement, or going against the tide, for older people to dance for therapy, memory and improve quality of life. The intergenerational trauma that disrupted and disoriented the extended family from Pat’s disappearance to the sudden appearance of Tralala was like the lights on the disco ball in town, a removing of dust and spinning with the earth again. Without one meaning many worlds could world without holding onto an other through grief, dishonesty and regret. Tralala is not a musical and is not not one. The meaning for me is to sit again and listen to Bertrand Belin’s voice transport me somewhere else, unknown and unfamiliar with familiarity. Uncertainty unfolds for me as flexibility and opening to the voices of others: their daily hymns or values and meanings intertwining with my own.

(5) D’entre les morts – YouTube

Le mot juste (youtube.com)

 Not the waltz, this is Disco!

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Fatherhood, football and conversations: A short discussion of the French 2019 film Of Love and Lies.

“One bee cannot build a hive; one ant cannot build a colony.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

When a lie is life changing and improves relations.

“We’re so stupid. What do we tell our sponsor?…

Life is always cruel. All we can do is pass the ball and let the sun shine…hoping it shines on everyone…Eric Cantona… He [the son] wanted it to shine on his father.

 I don’t ever want to see his father again! The disaster is his fault.”

Blaming, shaming and parenting in the French film Of  Love and Lies, 2019, Director: Julien Rappeneau.

Framing vision and accepting difference: watching a film with Empedocles philosophy in mind: Love and Strife and the way the whole world is constructed through push and pull forces is one way I approached watching, thinking and framing this film for a conversation. The family unit and the separated working class parents struggling to provide health, happiness and love in the life of their young son. Not perfect it is the strife – the alcohol and the interplay of judging forces from others that separates them. Love, even through lying and messing up things, becomes the unifying force. For Empedocles, love and strife are both important and crucial for creativity and it is one of the final conversations between the father and the son that reveals the importance of encouragement and responsibility mixed with parental control and understanding – no yelling and accusations nor blaming with harsh consequences like a slap or grounding – that creates development through the lifespan for both the young son and the parent.

A father, who is an alcoholic and divorced with a son that simply wants him to change and admire him and feel he is admired by his son. Quoting Eroc Cantona is surprising and appeals to the football (soccer) fan. Coping and managing problems at home and in the workplace with some humour and playfulness clearly suited one football coach over the other. Cantona was quoted by a character who wanted to move on and not dwell on the shame or embarrassment the young son had caused by lying about his chosen place in the Arsenal football youth league club. 

Responsibility.

This film isn’t a fairytale simply leading logically through a narrative to an unobtainable success or ideal relation. The father and son relationship is mediated through a social worker and her obligations within the system to ensure the father doesn’t harm the child through his alcoholism. Divorced, the mother now has a new husband and the young boy lives with her. The father is blamed by children and adults for his alcoholism. Viewed as his fault he cannot manage issues without the toxic support of excessive alcohol. The son decides to lie to feel admired and change the image of his father. Is he solely responsible ( I think he’s pre-teen and between 9-12 years old) for the lie?

“Not playing will leave a wound forever” (Father)

The son’s lies are uncovered and he withdraws without letting anyone know. His team need him and his father searches. The conversation involves a nickname, the son’s: Antboy and the father’s interest in documentaries, in this instance “Argentinian ants” and the knowledge that during a flood they group together to form a raft for survival. They are “united”. Beyond the feelings of shame: alcoholism, lying about Arsenal selection and feeling a ‘collapse” into solipsism and shame, the son receives a “Dad speech”. Facing his shame means healing the wound and joining his football team as a group, united to continue playing and developing as a young man with the knowledge of responsibility and support from his family.

Argentinian ants can navigate together for months as a raft. They don’t separate and the father’s conversation doesn’t chastise to isolate and blame the child, his son.

Victim blaming and shaming isolates and denies growth personally and within a group. At tis point, some parents might feel shamed and yell or ground the child for their behaviour. The negative feelings from the attention and lies too great. The father faltered and went and found alcohol to cope with the knowledge that his son lied. The village expected this. The father with the son grew from the event together to accept they are less than perfect and strong together to instigate small, manageable changes: the father into a job and out of alcohol dependence and the son, eventually to England playing with Arsenal.

Psychology research suggests that fathers play a vital role in emotional development and play is a response to a child’s needs – emotionally and socially. Parents model ways to solve problems and face difficult situations and this father-son relationship reveals the importance of working together to offer opportunities different – between genders and through diverse perspectives. Separation is painful and a father’s feelings are not always identified or acknowledged in the experience because of the importance of the maternal bond – especially for newborns and young children. In Australian culture men don’t often talk about their issues openly with others or their children. The importance of football in this film is the importance of developing a physical, emotional and social connection with the father (can be the same for girls through play). The lie became a way for the son to talk about his concerns, his love for his father, and the alcohol problem dividing them. Football was their unification as well as a way to bring to light the social problems society conceals through co-parenting, divorce, and child raising in separate homes. Football – the promise for a new life and skill acknowledgement playing for Arsenal – is a working class dream for social status and social improvement. What the French did differently, for me as a spectator, was question the father’s role in society in contemporary media portrayals. I have seen divorced father groups and heard them complain that they don’t get a “fair go” in child raising within the law. According to some research depression and alcohol in parents leads to a higher risk of mental health problems – emotional and behavioural – in their children. 

Shaming and blaming removes the responsibility from the group and isolates the individual. The father’s discussion of the ant reveals that the core of their love, the origins of both their love and the lie belonged within the group – their society-as well as them.: the decision to have a child and now the decision to develop and mature to support the child was the father’s motivation and determination.

© Cate Andrews, 2023.

La Belle Epoque. 2019. French film. Directed by Nicolas Bedos

La Belle Epoque. 2019. French film. Directed by Nicolas Bedos

Research has shown that feeling and touching real dogs increases activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, potentially important for regulating and processing social and emotional interactions. Thus making animal assisted clinical therapy relevant especially for depression and coping with stress. Patting a dog elicits emotional arousal just as feelings of familiarity as a response to someone close or known (Research by Rahel Marti at the University of Basel in Switzerland).

I felt the need for this interaction after reconsidering “identification” or “putting oneself in a character’s shoes” (see Berys Gaut discussion. Philosophy of Cinematic Art). Watching Daniel Auteuil in the French film La Belle Epoque, I identified with his character and empathised, walked some of the way in his shoes, most when, in one of the opening scenes his estranged wife belittled him in front of dinner guests with their son. Auteuil’s character questioned the motives of the son’s business as well as the denigration of human interaction in relation to technology, the interface of the current age.

The wife’s behaviour got under my skin and affected me emotionally. I couldn’t stand her; her attitude repulsed me and I couldn’t identify with any reason why anyone would want to stay around her or enjoy her demoralising of her husband’s values and artistic sentiment. resituating the common view of a “visceral dimension” attributed to passion (read lust, or sexual fantasy) or affects from romance; I experienced a visceral detachment and frustration: I didn’t enjoy her company and I didn’t want the Auteuil’s character for myself, as an imagined lover or as someone I have saved. I instead found myself identifying with the one who has experienced the abject ridicule from an arrogant competitor or someone who perceives themself as superior and entitled to assume a dominant and centred position in a discussion. His masculinity wasn’t reduced as his wife had hoped. Her feminine approach to disregarding his feelings and values disgusted me. She didn’t present me with a mirror to my own identity, but something hidden that I least admired in others: female-to-female violence unquestioned and without a reflective practice that’s ethical. That is, without active reflection in process the female character became a caricature of society, of the unthought actions that neglects natural feelings for emotional connection. She desires only to see herself reflected in her dinner table guests reactions to her intimate knowledge: that Auteuil will react predicably and this she detests. Her passion for him has died and we feel her coldness and her shame of her old husband (the now no longer youthful seducer) as the cause of her anger, shame and resentment. Her blame humiliates him unquestioned. She cannot see him as a human, she simply sees him through her mirror, her subjective I that has broken from their once “we” in marriage and intimacy.

Far from discussions of a voyeuristic narrative cinema, the story unfolds as Auteuil determines to experience his meeting with his wife again, in their time, their Belle Epoque, their youth. He sought a time before technology, before his son’s needs as an adult tech entrepreneur (recreating time periods for the wealthy to experience as an event, a party, a chance to live in history – and for a few, to relive the last moments of dead loved ones in their lives). His utopia was his time of sexual intimacy. His need and longing for sexual intimacy and memory of his wife presents as the similar need for familiarity and closeness that therapy pets offer the depressed, stressed and socially isolated individuals they support. I am not suggesting an animal becomes a lover, simply that so many parts of our brain need social and emotional interaction that I question why so many people choose to hurt others in front of groups and behind the scenes for feelings of dominance and the pleasure that gives them.

A lot of cinema discourse focuses on identification and the mirror stage – from Lacan – and mirror-screen (see Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz Film Theory). Jean-Louis Baudry’s discussion of the paradoxical nature of the mirror-screen and the reflection of reality/not reality: the cinema provides impressions of reality which the spectator forms an “imaginary self” within the film’s world, a filmic ego for the spectator to develop a sense of identity. This relation is what offers the spectator a position within the film as well as strengthens their world view: identification is necessary, according to Christian Metz, for comprehension and without it the film becomes incomprehensible.

Laura Mulvey also suggests that the mirror stage, in childhood development when the child recognises its reflection and develops an identification with its own image, pivotal for subject-formation and identification, of an “I” is similar to the screen because the film instigates within the spectator a moment (time of the film) for the spectator to recognise their likeness on the screen. Belle Epoque (2019), through Auteuil’s character returned to me my own likeness and also my desire to distance myself from those feelings his wife’s character provoked. I didn’t identify with his look: the desire he felt to reconnect intimately with his wife was not felt by me. HIs values were what I identified with and therefore I remained at a critical distance from. Mulvey suggests that a female spectator needs to retain her identity as “looked at” and therefore identifies with the woman desired and being chased as her self and her desire in life. I do not, according to Mulvey, have a spectator’s position because she positions the cinematic ego as masculine and in discord, I identify with the character and not his look because both of us stand outside of tradition. Auteuil’s masculinity is reproached and his forgotten sexual vigour by his wife and her discard for his advances reduces him: he becomes an object for her and without subjectivity (respect and youthful integrity) his masculinity is questioned, just as my spectator’s identification is too.

Mulvey suggests that scopophilia, the pleasure in looking, is associated with a controlling and curious gaze and women, traditionally are not the maker of meaning. Is Belle Epoque (2019) suggesting that the contemporary female character and spectator has lost it’s tradition and with it the masculine scopophilia associated with meaning-making and construction of the narrative? Like my turning from the film and seeking the warmth and touch in familiarity that I believe is universal and without the desire to harm an animal nor human, has Bedos directed a film that suggests the shift in perspective through technology and changing female roles has left a generation of men feeling lost or excluded from their feelings of masculinity and needs for intimacy beyond power struggles?

Neurologically, some research suggests that children don’t develop empathy with excessive screen time and the screen culture available to them – APPS, games, point and click slides across the screen. Identification with only screen characters – as much as I enjoy a conversation – is a partial view of identity and not enough to neurologically replace social and emotional contact. Auteuil’s character revealed this need and neglect. I felt empathy for the neglect and social humiliation his wife desired for him. It reminded me of so many people – male and female – who have felt this neglect and needed the warmth of human support. These people beyond a screen who have felt the resentment and repulsion of others who cannot see beyond their own screen-mirror image they have desired to portray in their public and private lives.

A great place to start exploring the cinematic ego and mirror-screen discussion is Spectator Identification with Narrative Film by Millie Schneider http://lovingthecinema.blogspot.com/p/identification.html

Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Ed. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White and Meta Mazaj. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 34-44.

Metz, Christina. “From The Imaginary Signifier: Loving the Cinema; Identification, Mirror; Disavowal, Fetishism.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Ed. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White and Meta Mazaj. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 17-33.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Ed. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White and Meta Mazaj. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 713-723.

©Cate Andrews, 2022.

Watching the film L’homme de la cave / Rereading Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

L’homme de la cave. 2021. French film directed by Philippe Le Guay (English title The Man in the Basement).

Of course, I noticed the French title and the word “cave” that I know can translate as cellar and basement, however I read “cave” and I see this film through another perspective. Not simply questioning Holocaust survivor’s testimonies and truths witnessing, the film became an experiment for me probing my own certainties about epistemology, or the study of knowledge construction and the privileged access to this through writing over oral histories, as well as dominant social powers over minorities and still persecuted peoples. In this country, the First Nations people are waiting for a referendum and I ask, why wait? They have received on paper reconciliation policies and acknowledgements of Country. Why, then, do they need to wait for a ballot to decide constitutional changes? Why spend the money, isn’t it an acknowledgement of Country as well as reconciliation? Why are we waiting to decide whether the First Nations people can exist free from discrimination (https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/constitutional-reform-fact-sheet-recognising-aboriginal-torres-strait-islander-people)?

History writing is a privilege. Another piece of Holocaust history that hasn’t gained much attention nor memorialisation is the number of Europe’s Roma and Sinti murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during WWII. It has been estimated that approximately 500 000 Roma and Sinti people were murdered or abused in medical experiments, because they were a threat to Aryan bloodlines, just as were the Jews. Our history books deny this knowledge and oral histories aren’t valued for their certainty and capacity to record the truth like pen and paper. Prisoner-to-truth, prisoner chained to memory and unable to move on and socially connect because of the past and historical wrongs and human rights abuses that have chained groups of people to trauma and resentment.

Philippe Le Guay’s film remined of Plato’s allegory of the cave, a way to question our certainty surrounding knowledge construction, epistemology, and, for me, ask questions like: Who is the slave? Who is more chained to the lightbox and certainty of one interpretation and label?
Plato’s Republic, in book VII, Socrates presents Glaucon (Plato’s older brother) with an unusual image (extract taken from The Ethics Centre https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-platos-cave/?gclid=CjwKCAjwrZOXBhACEiwA0EoRD_StKloS8CZmsRRA8hBVg11kvzUduk0cH_kSumjL1t7Eh7QN1yksxoCtpIQAvD_BwE):

Imagine a number of people living in an underground cave, which has an entrance that opens  towards the daylight. The people have been in this dwelling since childhood, shackled by the    legs and neck, such that they cannot move nor turn their heads to look around. There is a fire  behind them, and between these prisoners and the fire, there is a low wall.

Socrates goes on to ask questions about the play of shadows and noises if the prisoners could never turn their heads to see what is behind them. For the prisoners to experience freedom, to feel liberated, would be painful not simply for their eyes to adjust to the outside sun but also understanding the world outside their shackles, their cave. They would need to be forced out from what they had taken for granted as “all that existed” and if the freed prisoner returned to the others, would they be pitied and charged with losing their knowledge rather than gaining new knowledge and, would they be believed? “Could they ever return to be like the others?”

Socrates concludes that the prisoners would surely try to kill one who tried to release them,   forcing them into the painful, glaring sun, talking of such things that had never been seen or  experienced by those in the cave.

Le Guay’s film presented me with multiple meanings and approaches to the story. Questioning the Holocaust is uncomfortable and dangerous. The aggressive certainty that one group of people, the Jews, lost the most and now have to dominate discrimination perspectives as well as memorialisation, is the taken for granted assumption these days. The man in the basement, or cave, becomes like Diogenes the Cynic, the man who urinates in public as the “Socrates gone mad”, the questioning of truth and validity in witnessing is viewed as dangerous and provokes the Jewish/French family to the point of physical violence because their Jewish history was under attack or being questioned by a very small group of anti-Holocaust internet activists who question the dates (movement on trains, etc) and witness statements of Holocaust survivors.

Our memory is subject to aging and has been researched by many neuroscientists as untrustworthy. Hermann Ebbinghaus, a Berlin researcher around 1879 studied “forgetting”. Memories, shift change transform and wither over time and have an impermanence that even though connected with our body – the most vivid – aren’t always a film representation of a situation. “Forgetfulness reminds us that we are not in full control…Even when our brains work perfectly, most of us forget more than we’d like to” (Østby & Østby, 2018, p192). The Jewish family, the focus and the once owners of the basement now sold to a Holocaust denier, lost control. Their comfortable, peaceful family lives became entwined in agitation and resentment. Their heritage and their family history was insulted by the presence of a denier, activist and questioner.

The man who lives in a basement, a cheap place to reside because he isn’t wealthy speaks to the Jewish couple’s daughter. He suggests she question all she reads in her history classes and textbooks. He suggests she begin to question other taken for granted histories from countries such as America to see the world differently. Socrates speaks of the pain feeling shackled and not being able to turn one’s head, to see in another way their dwelling. To shift perspectives is uncomfortable. Diogenes the Cynic lived plainly, simply and without luxury often represented without clothes and living in an old barrel. Not much is known other than his questioning of Plato’s definition of a human. Le Guay’s film brings to light an uncomfortable knowledge that others in France were impacted by the Naxi regime and this approach to questioning provoked violence. Socrates gone mad, or the man in the basement’s presence, pushed to the limit rational control. Other people were listening and their approach to Jewish people was aggressive from the information they received and then interpreted.

I don’t believe Le Guay’s film was asking me to deny the Holocaust and the Jewish persecution from the Nazis and their sympathisers. I already had some knowledge that other people’s lives were destroyed by the Nazis and not remembered in recent history as valued as significant community members, such as the Roma and Sinti people as well as homosexuals and the hidden atrocities of war – the uncounted numbers of women taken as sex slaves, prostitutes and raped either having their babies taken by Nuns and left to die, given up for adoption or allowed to bring them up in their community as their own. What Le Guay highlighted was the acceptable anger of the Jewish family as well as the social questioning whether their out-of-control anger was necessary. At one stage this family’s apartment deed title was questioned by the body corporate, Is this how the Palestinians feel? Should they be questioning the evictions and acquisition of land, just as a body corporate does in a Parisian apartment noticing from the man in the basement, the Jewish family’s apartment used to be owned by a French family until evicted in 1942.

The man in the basement casts shadows of doubt as well as pushes you out into freedom and remaining in the cave all at once. The truth wasn’t uncovered and it wasn’t entirely right to attack people and their family simply living as French in Paris. Like Socrates and the mad Diogenes, he questions certainty and humanity as well as human relations. Unlike the First Nations of Australia or Roma people, and some might add Palestinian people caught in the aggressive fire from Israel for domination and land acquisition, Anti-Semitism is a crime and is treated quite severely through anti-discrimination laws. Le Guay offers a moment for us to turn our heads and see what might be casting shadows or making a noise; unsettling our comfort and I don’t believe asking us to join in more violence. He does put us in uncertainty: How do we solve these problems fairly and with justice when so many years have past, in places like Paris, with assumed ownership of land or property?

In Australia, it’s not simply about an apartment and is more about human rights abuses and the denial of human existence and differences from the taken for granted dominant assumption that grew from colonialism.

Østby, H., & Østby, Y. (2018). Diving for Seahorses: The Science and Secrets of Memory. NewSouth: UNSW Press.

Ethics Explainer: Plato’s Cave

https://theconversation.com/nazis-murdered-a-quarter-of-europes-roma-but-history-still-overlooks-this-genocide-128706
©Cate Andrews, 2022.

Deleuze’s affect in my own exploration of “cinemasochism” or the experience of potential from submission-to-the-image, to create thought in a short discussion of the French 2018 film Girl’s of the Sun (Director: Eva Husson).

Deleuze’s affect in my own exploration of “cinemasochism” or the experience of potential from submission-to-the-image, to create thought in a short discussion of the French 2018 film Girl’s of the Sun (Director: Eva Husson).

I believe I have entered into a contract between myself, the spectator and the film-as-body and question. Not to seek pleasure, in this film, but to seek an exteriority through affective assault or unplanned thought that my experience would include feeling disturbed, unsettled, and emotionally connected in-the-moment with women (unknown) from Kurdistan. This discussion is of one scene: men are pulled from their family and small community gathering and shot in front of their wives, sisters, daughters, mothers. They are fathers, husbands, brothers and sons and this scene disturbed me beyond my own recognition.
Unexpected and taken unaware I feel the pain of these women screaming; their loss tears their flesh and their sudden transformation from family gathering to war-torn, grabbing and inhuman touch left me silent and in pain. My head hurt, I wanted to look away and I wanted to both feel with them and stop the feeling for them. I am the female spectator, I am responsible. This is my contract and I have entered into it, unknowingly as well as with the experience, a new knowledge to know and connect further.

Colman (2011) suggests that Deleuze’s “affection-image” was influenced by Spinoza’s theory of “potential” (p83). She explains this as “the potential for some thing or body has in its movement and mix with other bodies or things” (Colman, 2011, p83). I feel both disengaged from my world, my everyday – the shots caught in screams in my own space, silent and admittedly I felt terrorised and frozen for a moment – Can I keep watching this film? The event of the cinema, which Deleuze suggests can disengage, becomes an event that has been documented because of the war and crimes against the Kurdish people (women and children captured and humiliated to remove their Kurdish integrity through sex slavery) and my disengagement therefore needs to become political as well as connected to others not known to me, beyond my home borders.

Am I forced to identify with these women, am I alone? I did identify with their pain and their trauma: the loss of their children and the fight they continued through grief and nation defending was of course beyond this scene and also embodied within this scene. To be killed by a woman, they stated, was for the Muslim terrorist an act of terrorism: they can’t enter paradise. The women questioned why they were being terrorised by Muslims because they believed in Islam. Affect and affected by this scene, I am moved to knowledge, to more perceptual knowledge and, through alienation or a step into disengagement from my world, I am to question what it is to be human and to connect with others through acts of joy as well as extreme terror and pain. I was moved and this was terrifying: alone, how many others shared this sentiment, were moved to action and how many looked away?

Colman does offer me some insight that the affect in cinema has the potential to become a “dynamic force” that inturn becomes embodied: the terror of the screen has the capacity to alter and create (2011, p88). The action-sound-images affect: the image assaulted my senses and cruelly disintegrated my comfortable integrity. The sound lingered longer. In my phonemic memory I retained the sound-images of screaming and gunfire longer than the scene. My sensibility, my emotional awareness was masochism: passive. I couldn’t escape the sound and it’s location was more than aural or beyond simple hearing. The sound went through my head and into my stomach. Stressed and caught in this sound-moment I was fully aware of my surrounds. My body experienced a moment of fight-or-flight and my own environmental awareness through sound increased. I heard people outside and the movement of my own clothes quite intensely for a moment. My whole body became on-watch through heightened arousal from distress.

The power of the scene/seen, the image was experienced as familiar and unfamiliar. It was a film. A film that wove into the story maternal bonds and women in a war zone. The weaving of languages, perspectives and cultures are familiar to me. The acceptance that I am outside the film screen and not lost in it is also familiar. The step beyond my borders for a moment in time, the unfamiliar, the felt and the sound resonated for a long time after. Disturbed and interested, I experienced suffering and my contract with the film fulfilled: to continue to seek my own potential beyond the film and my passive spectatorship.

A discussion of Cinemasochism can be found Patricia MacCormack, Cinemasochism: Submissive Spectatorship as Unthought. in D. N. Rodowick (ed). (2010) Afterimages of Gilles Delueze’s Film Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press. 157-177.

Colman, F. (2011). Deleuze and Cinema. The Film Concepts. Oxford & New York: Berg.

©Cate Andrews, 2022.

Feeling strange: an outsider’s view and quick conversation about the French film Jumbo, 2020.

Jumbo, 2020 French film, Directed by: Zoé Wittock

A film that questions everything: femininity and the open expression of female sexuality; masculinity; parenting; sexuality and gender relations; social and emotional connections and, bullying.
Initially, beyond objectum sexuality I saw this as a film about bullying and neurodiversity. Was the female character on the spectrum and simply brushed aside by her single, sexually active, mother as “strange” with “problems”?

Bullying by the mother simply because she wanted a child and the image of a child that was her “normal” was mirrored by the young teenage men in the small community. The young – I assume late teenage (?) woman was taunted and teased by a group of boys for being different. She assumed a a closed and uncertain posture when walking past. Her arms held tight to her body she looked uncomfortable in both their glares and through their comments as well as her inability to connect immediately with another comment just as derogatory that other girls her age might offer in battle or in defense of their space and place in the working class world she occupied.

I have heard of a woman, an American competitive archer Erika Eiffel (née Erika LaBrie), who advocates objectum sexuality and, in 2007 married the Eiffel Tower in a commitment ceremony. Others have connected intimately with inanimate objects just as the few who find their soul-mate or intimate match for sex and commitment. I was not shocked by the story, I simply noticed all the social and emotional conflicts arising because Jeanne, the young woman, admits to her attachment of an amusement park ride she names “Jumbo” and how this conflict within her was not noticed by her mother; her struggle to reveal this erotic attachment and deep connection she felt with the ride was invalidated. Her mother simply and irrationally denied her difficult experience and confronted her with her own values instead of attempting to understand and accept her differences.

Because I have heard of different sexual and intimate attachments with objects called different names, this made the viewing of the film different for me: without the clouding of thought through abject response (a peer suggested might occur with this film) I was able to notice the social interactions that subtly played a role in developing a narrative about exclusion, femininity, and social norms expected and constructed through direct and indirect interactions (direct: constructed through verbal interactions and socialisation processes and indirect: gazes, glimpses, noticing, shaming, non verbal interactions that women take on in the socialisation process).

This questioning, I noticed, was also one that occurred between Jeanne and a young male who found her attractive. His sexuality and masculinity was questioned and denied: Jeanne’s defiance and invalidation of his needs at the same time questioned acceptable boundaries and normal expression of female sexual identity. Jeanne’s attachment to Jumbo was perverse and disgusting. Abject responses of violence, ridicule and humiliation followed her “outing”.

Based loosely on a true story – whose? – it was left to the mother’s new boyfriend to confront the aggression Jeanne was experiencing and question the mother and the young man’s approach to Jeanne’s struggle, inability to remove the attachment or feelings as well as their inability to understand emotional attachment and the different psychological development of Jeanne (and others like Jeanne). The boyfriend’s anger at the mother gave Jeanne an opportunity to feel heard and respected: Was this her fault? Should she feel shamed and blamed for developing this strange or unfamiliar attachment that questioned human-object relations? She was blamed and shamed. She was constructed through others eyes and thoughts in a narrow framework and this revealed the bullying – indirect as well as direct agression simply because she wasn’t perceived as “normal” and the aggression she experienced was considered normal and within gender relations, socially acceptable.

I am not an expert in the topic of objectum sexuality, however this film revealed the sensitive nature of Jeanne and a potential way to look at her attachment as less aggressive and violent than the human connections she was missing or constructed in a small community (no choices, no money to leave). The erotic attachment she developed also seemed to appear through conversations she felt she was having with Jumbo. The lights flashed and she felt heard and cared for. Jumbo didn’t want her to leave – there was a suggestion of anger. And, also from my outsider’s gaze, the suggestion that she was lonely and socially awkward.

©Cate Andrews, 2022.

Pupille: In Safe Hands, 2018 French film directed by Jeanne Herry.

Pupille: In Safe Hands, 2018 French film directed by Jeanne Herry.

Rarely have I come across this feeling of sensitivity towards a male character in a film that pulls of my maternal strings in admiration and also respect – of course I have experienced this emotional pull in other situations and films, however the care and tenderness shown towards the newborn baby put up for adoption at birth was a glimpse of hope beyond my everyday understanding of the neglect and abuse in the child welfare system in Australia to date. The image I have chosen – the film poster – reveals my intrigue and sensitive experience watching this film.

Reminiscent of a Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt Mother and child portrait – often described as the painting of feminine spaces and experience as well as a claustrophobic foreshortening of space to reveal the intimacy in motherhood. Cassatt and Morisot revealed the restrictions at the time for women from their class to move about as a female artist and paint others is reversed. I now see the foreshortening of space as a very close portrait of a man, his masculinity presents a question: fatherhood and non-biological attachments and care often discussed as female. Whereas a lot of women suggest they need a break from the closeness and nurturing bond (whether through breastfeeding, bathing, staying at home), this man seemed to come alive and want to notice all about the baby. What do men feel when considering children – to adopt, IVF, or naturally is a new area of interest. And often discussed in counselling sessions for IVF because of the unforeseen stress (feeling exhausted and often harassed) and their role to play as a giver of life, a baby, is often spoken of as depressing and dehumanising and not what they expected when considering sexual intimacy with their partner. We did get a glimpse of this aggression through one couple’s long wait for a child to adopt.

The foreshortening of space, a man revealing his nurturing side was seen by a colleague as painfully attractive. She felt violated by his natural discussions of his care for his wife and family as well as the newborn foster child. Her perspective was clouded in jealousy whereas he, not bragging didn’t foresee his honesty as harm nor an event out of the ordinary.

Adoption is a difficult issue and I have heard harsh judgements from people who have entered into adoption accusing the mother of many things and not having the knowledge or understanding to support that decision or to remove the accusatory stance that separates a person who wants a child from someone who for many difficult and different reasons cannot raise a child. I have found the woman is to blame, shame, and accuse as guilty in this position.

Witnessing the contemporary approach to confidentiality and speaking to a new born – the social workers simply presented their role to the baby as natural and as human and respectful as we all might expect as adults in a professional situation. The baby boy was treated with care and respect. His Foster father bonded and developed an attachment for him to benefit his cognitive, emotional and physical development. The hope I felt was not simply for the young boy but also for the mother who gave him up – her story unknown and her needs uncertain, however she remained respected within privacy laws and social work ethics. Did she wrong the child in any way? Was there harm during the pregnancy because she wasn’t aware until too late? These accusations arose and I felt tense: blaming and shaming might have occurred if the struggling new born didn’t show signs of development. The social workers had to be sensitive to all involved and their rights and this was only relieved through the baby’s revealing of vital signs: louder crying and eye contact. The social workers’ roles were to manage adoptive parent choices, applications, forms for privacy and respecting the mother, and the child’s human rights necessary from birth. To do no harm meant to give the most care to the newborn baby possible as well as to others involved.

The foster father’s tenderness became the film as well as the struggle: to become attached and then, like in a job, simply release the baby after 2 months and let go of the intimate bond is similar to a biological parent’s choices in their child’s life. The adoptive mother didn’t reveal any signs of emotional attachment. This wasn’t a film about her. This was a film about beginning a journey for a single adoptive mother and a baby boy with some developmental issues. A beginning that witnessed a man’s bond and determination to care for his wife and her stressful job, their daughter, their household as well as his desire to give back to the community through foster care roles. He felt burnt out at the beginning of the film and we are left unaware whether he could manage another child immediately after the baby. We do see his sadness letting go of the little boy he held, bathed, fed, and supported in his first few months. Different to the struggle he experienced with older children in his care.

I was reminded watching this film of a quote from Empedocles that,
“God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. ”

The feeling of hope I needed to feel (choosing a film to relax is one way to do it) was almost a conflict between release, and simple pleasure viewing a tender moment and the connection with feeling uncomfortable. This feeling of conflict created for me a cognitive felt-struggle in the space of “impossibility”. A space of discomfort clouded with some guilt because, the impossible for me, was an experience of letting go of stereotypes for the space of a film. In the divine, in hope and care, I do feel there are borders and boundaries setting out my reaction and experience as well as others access to their rights to experience.

I needed to let go simply because of the Foster care (in the media) experience in my country is not often a story that provides hope. More often than not the stories of human rights abuses in my own country far outweigh tender, sensitive moments become relevant as well as a question. The boundaries put up through paperwork, privilege, institutional power and the struggles people face through adoption and foster care also reveal through the cracks the more sordid side to family violence: children caught blamed, shamed and used as scapegoats within systems and policies dehumanised within systems that fail to recognise or keep up with the latest in psychological discourses approaching children with intelligence: social and emotional respect and care for their diversity.

©Cate Andrews, 2022.

A short discussion of the French film Between Two Worlds, 2021, Director Emmanuel Carrère.

A short conversation of French film Between Two Worlds, 2021, Director Emmanuel Carrère.

Like in the mirrors in Michel Foucault’s discussion of Diego Velázquez‘ painting Las Meninas (1656), I am located in front of the portrait the journalist chooses to write. A judge as the spectator and, what is made of the spectacle? I don’t find there is a place that became or is between two worlds, I found myself considering the unethical approach the writer took as well as the false friendship she feigned to offer: I became empathetic to the young female cleaner’s single mother struggle to pay her bills as well as her hurt that her life was studied and appropriated for a book and her trust and developing of care for a woman she believed a struggling divorcee.

Take a step back. I notice and I was deceived. I was taken into the film thinking physically the writer wouldn’t survive the life as well as would become a genuine friend with genuine interests in the people. Instead, the writer – undercover and unethical – observed and remained an observer: privileged, wealthier, and with the opportunity to leave the struggling lower socioeconomic lifestyle of the cleaners in Northern France.

The book she wrote was a slice, a reflection of the world the struggling cleaners live, socialise and never feel respect for their time and efforts. I am reflected in that portrait: my position and whether I choose to respect a cleaner and say “Hello” and know there exists a life beyond my own, one where they might read, dance, laugh, love, struggle just as I do is a choice that this film suggests I can make and not leave it to the cleaner to explain themselves like a naughty child.

The portrait of the cleaner is one caught in a system of gazes where the cleaner is the painting and doesn’t get – through social institutions – to look back, to speak out and to demand humanity and respect. The life the writer lived with the women socialising became a place between work and hidden feelings (writing, taking notes) to experience the more human side of lower socioeconomic struggle: friendship and for some intimate encounters. Never thinking to take a break and enjoy the seaside with her children, the portrait of the cleaner included her own exploration of a simple pleasure simply because the writer’s own privilege expected or knew to take a detour and dip her feet in the sea. The cleaner experienced something more and then, through the uncovering of the writer’s identity, a breaking or experiencing something that has always been for her: wealth, privilege and feeling used by the system. The writer fell back into the “other world”: the world of access, wealth, and social relations beyond the cleaner’s esteem, education, and finances.

Reading this morning of another TicToc reality misadventure and issues surrounding consent, this film also reveals the ethical problem: 53 million viewers attacked an older woman for refusing a charitable bunch of flowers. A hidden camera then humiliated her with the intellect of the viewers on TicToc. One woman’s intelligence, she felt “dehumanised and patronised” was no match for the over 53 million views and potential misunderstandings (seen as criticisms) of her. What the masses perceive as a “random act of kindness” and then criticise for the criticism of it, is the issue: her feelings, she felt “clickbait” were not taken into consideration (Rafqa Touma, 14/07/2022, The Guardian: discussion of Melbourne woman Maree, filmed without consent). That is what is reflected in the struggle and conflict of the cleaner and her portrait: she is one of the 53 million lower socioeconomic undereducated as well as the one in 53 million to unethically feel observed and distanced through manipulation and deception. The writer’s book in the film was meant to prompt empathy and understanding in others who know nothing of a cleaner’s life or the struggles they face each day. Instead, I was also left wondering what social change comes from unethically feigning a friendship through fabricating a story of divorce and sudden hardship simply to write the book. The writer failed to consider the harm through emotional attachment and manipulation.
The female cleaner believed in the development of a friendship. The writer, once finished returned to her life, to her world and to leave where others could not: the long days and few hours spent with their children and loved ones. The writer stood alone at the end and the cleaner’s offer for her to join them one last time revealed her lack of solidarity and ability to see herself and the wrongs she had committed deceiving her cleaning “friend” simply to write her book.

Issues surrounding consent, friendship and dehumanisation are reflected in this film. The exchanges between women, their intimate social moments and conversations – I thought – would change the writer’s approach to hiding her notes and her objectives. She didn’t obtain consent, just as hidden cameras assume there is a public right to film and upload and potentially harm through social ridicule and humiliation. Just as revenge pornography and the sharing of idiotic selfies/soft porn to potential mates and then the decision to irrationally reproduce through rejection and humiliation tactics this film also revealed the intellectual dominance and access to lives that some assume their right. If there are no approaches to educate and change the current lack of social and emotional intelligence in any of these situations then the cleaner’s right to deny and refuse the writer a friendship becomes her only choice to experience some integrity and dignity of her own instead of accepting the writer’s place in society. In the end the writer wasn’t a friend and didn’t have an ethics to offer the cleaner.

The film, for me, was about consent, and for me, the lack of freedom most people experience when making choices in their financial situation. The mirrors reflecting society, the artist’s right to penetrate and re-present as a portrait doing harm just as they thought they were questioning and attempting to undo some harm in the socially constructed perspective that is the Northern France cleaner and their hidden faces. For me, the title of this film betrays us for I commenced viewing thinking the emotional connection – what is not seen between unknown people and their interactions – would construct the between two worlds: privilege and wealth versus poor and lower paid workers. I felt this collapsed through the dehumanising feeling the cleaner clearly felt (betrayal and broken trust feeling worthless as a human and this need for trust and importance devalued for a book and a secret life) and the feeling of “us and them” that typically separates people remained and was retained through the writer’s position and decision at the end.

©Cate Andrews, 2022.

The spectator and the storyteller in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films (opening of the Wunderkammer in spectatorship – a curious Sunday afternoon conversation out of the rain).

Synaesthesia: I think-feel the mood I see in colour; I hear the Wunderkammer unfold: a narrative for my my eyes/I to question my existence; my position in front of the film, the spectator and my embodied surrounds, my life. Watching the opening to the French film Edmond or Cyrano, My Love (2018), I hear a familiar approach: a narrative that extends out of the expectations of the film’s centre, or focus and includes fragments of historical fact. I return to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie (2001) to revisit my own wonder and curiosity: my questioned and questioning self in relation to others in time.

Jeunet uses the wonder of an omnipresent narrator in Amelie and in A Very Long Engagement (2004) to question the authority of origins, or of the text. The trauma in warfare questioned in A Very Long Engagement through offering a life for each French soldier (5 of them) sent to execution for self-inflicted wounds, or their own attempt to address the reality of war in relation to their personal, inner life and strengths. One man, the narrator reveals, a lover and disturbed by rats in war accidently shoots himself when he wakes to the crawling, horrifying feeling of rats infesting his sleeping body. For Amelie, the chance of the sperm and the egg uniting to create her is 1 out of 200 – that is after 5000 sperm released and 2000 sperm hit the fallopian tubes, 200 make it to the egg and only 1 fertilises. The story unfolds through narration including seemingly irrelevant facts in others lives, or for a spectator like myself, details and curiosities that open doors for thinking and feeling my everyday like a Wunderkammer. The cinematic gaze of Jeunet and his synesthetic offering: the colours I feel as rhythms and connections go beyond the rain and grey outside. The snatches of information deliver something more than sound to my eyes: I see the world with these details, with an-other’s approach to life and pleasure.

Synesthesia has been discussed in relation to cinema through excess, sensory excess. Whereas I don’t deny this as an experience of the spectacle, I also find that in the stories – like Hemmingway’s 6 word tales – I am pulled away from my everyday and at the same time delivered closer to enjoying other details often overlooked or missed in a sweeping general or conventional gaze. Like a nutshell opened and a surprise revealed, how can I open my world this way?

Synesthesia has been generally defined as “the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body” (noun, psychology). What if, the miniature, the detail never fully explored offered a sense impression like wonder and uncertainty felt in the body to engage or encourage stimulation, thought and behaviour for pleasure? A way of looking at the film, the metaphor of synesthesia offers a connection and perspective out of the ordinary, out of isolating colour, narrative, birth and egocentric vantage point to feel the cosmos and the connection with others and their stories unknown to me.

This interpretation and interruption of the meaning of synesthesia sent me wondering into Roland Barthes writings about plaisir/jouissance (1973, Le Plaisir du texte). Barthes suggests that plaisir comes from reading the text and jouissance arises from an interruption or opening where something unexpected occurs. And I have taken this to feel unsettled through enjoyment (not cruelty) in the opening scenes “narrative” in the films Amelie and A Very Long Engagement simply through the presence of a storyteller; unorthodox – plaisir- and experiencing a sensual breakdown (simultaneously through opening my own perspective and shifting my ego-centred subjectivity) in the focus expected or positioned through cinematic conventions. Through satirical or comedic juxtaposition, the storytelling in A Very Long Engagement questions the seriousness and validity of war and tribunals, and importantly the offering of one truth or way of seeing. I feel no longer whole and determined to present a self as authority through the open curiosity, wonder and uncertainty rewriting my interests and revisiting old films to rediscover something else about myself, my experience of rain on a Sunday afternoon as well as the author, Jeunet and his world: a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities and possibilities for me and beyond me for others.

A part to the whole, my wondering back and forth through my memories of these films has also opened my curiosity to the role of storytelling and listening to others stories, to their truths and experiences beyond my own. Why did Jeunet construct the film Amelie in this way? And then in 2018, Alexis Michalik also attempted to include some historical facts, interweaving with the imagined or fictional construct of biography – a life we didn’t live – into his introduction to a story, a construction of a writer/poet’s life, and an attempt to re-tell Edmond Rostand’s construction of Cyrano de Bergerac on stage in 1897.

These lives within lives in my own; transcending time and truth for cinematic imaginary – the interweaving of cinematic devices and storytelling devices to construct narratives that deconstruct origins. Noticing Jeunet’s stories, is also noticing a way to question war and, to bring to life beyond the military and the coldness of war. Young Amelie longed to feel the warmth of a hug from her parents, however because of her father’s military-approach to her health and his lived experience, she went without. In a Very Long Engagement, war divides and disrupts lives and love. With curiosity and openness to sensual exploration and pleasure enjoyment can also disrupt the mundane and ordinariness of our own lives, to question lived, felt experiences and cosmic connections with others.

With the rainy Sunday exploration into noticing – why storytelling of random moments in history, or slices in a life I am not there to prove or feel – I experience my own delight and curiosity (plaisir) in others stories and weaving my own.

©Cate Andrews, 2022.

Flickers of light

“The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye” – Jacques Derrida.

“I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us”― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception.

Flickers of light and in the blink of an eye: the uncertain, liminal space between moments seen, felt, heard and history deconstructed to come alive, to feel understood.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in the Primacy of Perception, that failure in communication separates our consciousness, our ability to know and to perceive exactly the same. And in this failure, this feeling we need to acknowledge is our step towards creating an ethics that units us, communes and supports communication to share a world, a community, a life. Of course, not all see the world as an opportunity to develop life skills from failure nor to allow failure to become a liminal in-between us, a place to discover or journey to explore depth in being together.

I felt uncertainty viewing, positioned in a space (a darkened room -a spectator and viewer of history and checking the traces present in my own, of other’s fragmentary glimpses and attempts to hold or fasten in judgements not my own) between my life and the film’s life; in the choice to shoot this film, The House of Pleasures, 2011 (L’Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close, French film, Director: Bertrand Bonello) using an approach I can only describe from my experience similar to Eadweard Muybridge’s early explorations in motion, moving pictures (around 1872). Slow shutters, the bodies move through space against time, against my need for fluidity and my perceived motion. Like continuous blinking eyes, forced into shuttering, as I approach this difficult subject matter, I am also distanced: the camera distances me as well as attempts to move beyond historical photographs and art constructions of the time to question my perception of French prostitutes kept for the discretion of the bourgeoisie (late 19th and early 20th Century). I am asked to confront my contemporary knowledge about syphilis, freedom, and the construction of identity in a time where the working classes had no access to history writing, art creation other than the models and politics. The camera’s eye shutters and I feel dream-like.

Merleau-Ponty positions our body as a thing among other things; caught in the fabric of the world my body and others move fragmented noticed and invisible, unseen. My body feels the world and my body is not felt by the world as I feel it. Just as another’s perception of red is not my own so too my body is in-between connection and failure, communication and light as well as dark. In the mid-1870s Muybridge demonstrated his invention, a zoopraxiscope, a lantern, a light that projected photographs – like a drawn flip book for children to explore in fast motion creating the illusion of movement – in rapid succession onto a screen to produce the illusion of movement.

This film’s illusion, that a truth and life can be known through someone’s occupation, gender, sexuality and academic research – the research into the idiocy of prostitutes and the size of their brains, as well as syphilis’s role or drama-in-time being of the time – is like time in the film – ungraspable, unseen and also flickering, slow succession to unnatural speed. Like the opium consumed, the camera’s eye reveals what has been concealed through moral judgements of the profession – prostitution – that the women have feelings they cannot control nor simply cold-heartedly brush-aside just as the men did as they moved on to another, younger body for consumption.

Flicker. Stories within a story, bodies touch and payment exchanges hands. Behind the thick, draped, velvety curtains a stage, a theatre of cruelty unfolds and veils life outside. this is not a place for freedom and sight/site is difficult, foggy and uncertain. Velvet. Opulence, decadence, wealth. A fabric symbolic of thick, plush and flowing wealth and power, privacy and lack of light. Curtains the outside and is lifted upon entrance, like a skirt thick with the unknown desire beneath men enter the premises out of sight from the outside world. This is their place. Their comfort. Their money, their choices away from their family life. A child-like world, unaware or unaffected by others the distance between being paid and paying for is evident, just as the distance between each shutter is noticed and noticeable in attempt to seamlessly produce an image, an experience that explores and shuts out the explorer.

The liminal space, the threshold, a trace that folds in repetition unseen, an instant that Derrida translated from the German Augenblick, which means literally “blink of the eye”. The camera folds, the film enacts the folding, the moment and the unseen/unheard “a blink” that, borrowing from Derrida, deconstructs our presence, our certainty and acknowledges our in-between or distance-attempt-to-gain-closeness in movement. The camera, this film and story is, for me, like the example given of the mirror to explain to students a way into understanding Derrida, deconstruction and Augenblick: I am distanced and spaced from the mirror (physically) as well as myself as seer/seen (physically/emotionally/historically). I am seen both “over there” and “other to me” and so I am not able to see myself, total, whole and blindness is necessary for intimate or close attachments. The film’s blind spots, the flickers, the light and shadow or darkness in desire reveal attempts to achieve intimacy and withdraw through social conventions and potential threats of death – syphilis.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/

©Cate Andrews, 2022.