Tele Fresco - Act 6 from 2 Nice on Vimeo.
Cinema is predicated on the “look” – an idea acutely observed by feminist film critic, Laura Mulvey, but not contained solely to the “male gaze” of her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” – in which the viewer’s beliefs and passions—in both voyeuristic and self-reflexive manners—are structured to induce a range of emotions from encouraging unfettered revelry and schadenfreude to the sadomasochistic cinema of late Pasolini or the existential heaviness of Tarr. Yet, in the grips of realism that is omnipotent camera of CCTV, the surveillance state, and reality television, contemporary popular cinema proffers the farce of objectivity in which everything is unmediated. Film is not so much about what we see in any descriptive fashion, not a Cartesian mind moving about in a cinematic universe; rather, cinema is a place for value, a place in which we inscribe value and meaning, about how we know the world in particular ways. I should qualify this prescriptive notion for cinema by saying that I am not advocating a Pragmatism agenda in which cinema offers an arena to test and revise our beliefs until we come to some satisfactory description of the empirical real. My question is not “what does it take to know the world?” but “what difference does it make for our sense of the world to be concerned with knowing it in particular ways outside of the paradigm of objectivity?”
The most recent installment of Love Letters, Act 6: Longing, is a triumph in the way it cultivates particular gaze.
Formally, the footage of the film is split between two primary sources, the non-diegetic archival footage of a boxing match which is interlarded with the sullen faces of the videos two stars. The emotional tone of the two stories is markedly different as the former bespeaks the lust of battle, with its romantic fuzz and nationalistic fervor (saluting the U.S. flag) while the later takes up these same images but with a awareness of loss and tarnish to strike an ultimate note of melancholy. Most interesting, however, is that the line between these two sources is transient, continually bleeding one story into the other and unsettling the chronological hierarchy. The result is a cinematic world of memory in which the past is made to exist with the more-present without distinction. It is a world in which we follow two characters as they reflect pensively, but also a world in which we see their memories, in which we inhabit the eros-tinged loss of such shots as the portrait profiles (a quality that I think is only extended in the transformation of Ginuwine’s bawdy “So Anxious” into eros-filled lament). For like all yearning, eros is always most powerful when it is unfilled, when it retains all its potential of fulfillment. Eros is a wanting in both senses—a desiring and also lack, a presence and a presence of absence. In a video in which the two characters never appear next to one another, the presence of absence is palpable.
All of this is accomplished and extended further through editing effects that underline the temporal aspects of the video. The manipulation of the frame rate and editing that make it appear as if the digital film is being played on deteriorated film stock call attention to the film’s artifice but also the falsehood of our own chronologically understood objective reality.
Tele Fresco’s use of voice samples adds to the cinematic gaze that the viewer is encouraged to take. Tele Fresco samples Anna Karina’s character Nana in Godard's Vivre Sa Vie as she sits in a café talking to a friend:
On est toujours responsable de ce que l’on fait. Et libre. Je leve la main, je suis responsable; je tourne la tete a droite, je suis responsable; je suis malheureuse, je suis responsable; je fume une cigarette, je suis responsable; je ferme mes yeux; je suis responsable. J’oublie que je suis responsabe mais je le suis. Ce que je te disais de s’evader c’est de la blague. Apres tout, tout est beau. Il n’y a qu’a s’interesser au choses pour les trouver belles.
Nana has left her husband and son to pursue a career in acting. Unable to make gain entrance into the Parisian acting circle, Nana turns to prostitution where she meets her eventual death. There is no more relevant turn than the condemnation of escapism: “What I was telling you of escape, is a joke. After all, everything is beautiful. You only have to take an interest in things to see their beauty.” Nana’s refrain of “je suis responable” is hardly unambiguous as one is left to wonder how responsible she is. Can one will oneself to see the beauty in the world in the face of such loss, such depravation as the death of young, idealistic girl as one can lift one’s own hand or smoke a cigarette? This thesis is besmirched by Nana’s death, a counterpoint that leaves the viewer fending off encroaching nihilism. Act 6, in its stark contrast between a glorified past and grief-stricken present proffers a similar question. Perhaps the question, with all its historical and interpersonal implications (U.S.A.’s romantic past, popular music’s romantic past, our own relationships) finds its answer in the arena of always unfulfilled eros, which is the nature of memory and memorial.
Objectivity is the tool of the religion of Science. Subjectivity is the lens through which we actually see the world. Seeing the world any way but objectively is the only possible way a human can see it. Objective perspective is the fiction of the character we create for ourselves, the one we aspire to being and knowing, though we can never truly achieve all of their aspects. It is worth pursuing so long as we can acknowledge our place within that pursuit and I think our place is so much more interesting.
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