"In the apocalypse the walls do fall; the walls separating inside and outside; public and private; body physical and metaphysical." - Norman O. Brown

The representation of the body and the reproduction of narrative meaning in the dominant cinema go hand in hand. Happily, there exists a strong tradition of resistance to this automatic coupling, a tradition which includes a broad spectrum of non- or anti-narrative; as well as non- or anti-representational cinemas. These cinemas differ as much from each other as they do from the mainstream. They have often been lumped together under the generic brandnames "underground", "experimental", "avant-garde". All too often it is precisely the unique qualities of a work that place it outside of the existing genre prescriptions that also place it outside of history. Our drive to taxonomy does not favour the outsider; we are inclined to open a file called "outsiders" and very often these strangers make peculiar bedfellows.

A brief scan of contemporary cinemas resisting the marriage between body and meaning would have to be haphazardly eclectic: Japanese single-shot dismemberment videos next to the post-Transgression New York super 8mm crowd next to Eraserhead inspired South Africans working within the belly of the beast next to MTV-obsessed Slovakian film students. Given that any such scan would be arbitrary anyway, I would like to concentrate this article on one particular work that strikes me as being of no small significance in the context of body representation. It is no coincidence that this work was made on video: the advent of the DV Cam system's superior resolution and stability has placed image making possibilities into the hands of a geometrically expanded number of people. Few however have come up with material of the calibre of English video makers Damon Barr and Marie-Anne Ferral.

Barr and Ferral make videos about bodies, not about people. Their work is "abstract", not in the sense of Rothko but rather of De Koning. Their approach to the body is interesting because it is not merely fashionable fin-de-siecle decadence and corruption cliche, and neither is it non-narrative in the perjorative sense of incoherent or incohesive. In fact their work is successfully disturbing beyond the level of image content precisely because it acquires gradually, while watching, a sense of strategic and systematic re-vision of not only the representation of the body, but indeed of the body itself. Their sophisticated work begs the question: does the body change if we represent it differently?

First Document, a twenty minute long video piece released in early 1992 on their own Image 37 Productions label in England in a limited, numbered edition of 200, is that rare thing, a fully mature first work. The video is black and white and the image surface is highly materialized, ie. it gives the appearance of having been blown-up to the extent that the grain is almost more visible than the "content" which it was ostensibly supposed to represent.

This materiality is beautifully mirrored in the soundtrack which constantly connects and responds to the texture of the image as opposed to the content. At this point already Barr and Ferral have diverged considerably from the traditional relationship of image and sound, which is almost exclusively involved in cementing and reinforcing our belief in the diegesis that is being represented. A traditional film score would serve to heighten the scary moments of the video, or build up a sense of anticipation just before something happened. Music would therefore be related to the events happening to those things being represented that we identify with (people). Barr and Ferral radically reasses the notion of the subject of a film in First Document by marrying the music's development to the shifting patterns of the image's grain.

This could be understood superficially as an attempt to demand that their video is not about events, but the representation of events; a video about the video image itself. However the sheer intensity of the pro-filmic events which do take place undermine any attempt to place the video within a strictly materialist context; hence the piece's real confrontational power. First Document is not unique in this respect - the posibility of marrying the soundtrack to the materiality of the image while simultaneously refusing to denude the image of its status as priviliged bearer of meaning had been sighted already in 1988 in Elias E. Merhige's Begotten. Interestingly his film, despite being shot on 16mm film, as opposed to video, looks very much like Barr and Ferral's - and they also share a preoccupation with the desecration and battering of the body's boundaries.

One of the first clearly identifiable images is an extreme close-up of a mouth and tongue. It appears that the tongue is engaged in kissing with another tongue. Because an image of a woman's face has burst in a few times, one assumes that at least one of the tongues is hers. Whether the other tongue belongs to a man or a woman is never clarified, indeed one never sees the face of the other tongue holder. The video never explicitly associates this tongue to that of the face of the woman that we are shown at various intervals. One tends to connect the two because that is what one does when one sees images, we add them up and extrapolate meanings from the juxtapositions. Because of the extremity of the closeup it is virtually impossible to identify emotionally with the tongue. One is not aroused by the kissing imagery, it in fact makes kissing seem like an extraordinarily strange practice (which it is!).

A bit later in the video the teeth of the woman begin biting at the flesh of another person. This is once again displayed in extreme close. The effect is peculiar -it is far removed from eroticism and looks in fact like an attempt at cannibal practice. Yet this uneasy sense of the meatness of living human flesh is reached not through "acting" or a story, but through a choice of framing. This framing practice serves throughout the video to perceive the body as something quite other than a repository for the soul, or indeed the place of any sentience whatsoever. It is a thing, a fleshy, flabby, vaguely repulsive, definitely Godless surface.

The condition of being a surface is of course inherent in the limitation of sight. Tactility is denied the cinema goer and no mattter how sharp the pixels of HDTV are, what remains is the glassy surface of the tube. Barr and Ferral employ an extremely effective system of image friezing to exemplify this uncanny surfaceness of their represented bodies. The screen simply stops moving at various intervals, and the queasy heaving mass of bodiness becomes nothing more than form and shape, patches of black, white and grey grain. These contemplative moments of stasis are paradoxically moving, we find ourselves responding emtionally to a body of textural information, a body that is neither vaguely human nor even livinglike, a body of sheer abstraction. This is a radical moment.

It is at these moments in the video that one is given time to reflect on an aspect of First Document that differs strongly from dominant notions of the body's place in cinematic representation. Throughout the duration of the work there is never any spatial context given to the body surfaces that we encounter. These bodies don't occur in space - they are space. The world has been reduced to a body - not the well-disciplined body ruled by a "head" which makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable - but rather an ungendered, radically fractured, impossibly incomplete set of surfaces that do not connect with each other, do not form part of a properly orientated "whole". These body parts that are "all there is" deny us the spatial comfort of left and right, top and bottom, forward and backward: we are not centered in our heads looking out. Barr and Ferral have in fact precluded the possibility for an anthropocentric identification with the world - their camera is non-human.

As the video progresses the element of worms is introduced. And then a razor. The razor begins to play at the skin's surface. These shots are always extreme close ups. One's perception of the body's geography is dissolved. One is not sure quite where the razor is being pressed into. Occcassionally a nipple is clarified, and later an underarm becomes distinct, but the overall impression is simply of the softness of body tissue being threatened by the steely sharpness of the razor. A short series of three full face closeups of the woman's face now introduce for the first time in the video an element of anthropocentric empathy. Juxtaposed with the razor shots one assumes that it is the woman who is being "threatened" by the razor. Her face appears to be held in place by a hand. This genderless hand at one point submerges a finger into her mouth. One is unsure if the woman is enjoying this activity or being forced into it. One cannot imagine enjoying being sliced open with a razor so one feels panic-stricken and empathises with her plight. However, if she IS enjoying the act then one cannot empathise with her because to do so would endanger one's own body - one recoils from the frightening inhumanness of her possible enjoyment.

An extreme closeup of a finger probing at what might be a nipple. This shot celebrates the very thingness of things. Touching is represented and of course immediately impossible. We are watching this video, there is no getting inside of the image. The surface of this image is as flat and cold and dead and unpassable as the skin being represented is contoured, warm, living and infinitely enterable. The razor penetrates the skin and now follows a brilliantly edited sequence which cross cuts the woman's apparently screaming face with the extreme close up of the razor's penetration and the gouts of blood emerging from the incision. Throughout this sequence the music consistently reinforces the notion of the grain of the image and its movement, running contrary to how a horror or thriller film would sound during a comparable image sequence.

The final imagery of the film is perhaps its most disturbing: the thousands of worms that have occassionally flashed into view are now seen to be located in the eyes and mouth of a man. The man is obviously alive and the worms pour out of his mouth. At this point the image becomes multilayered and a stunning build up of the razor, the worms and the extreme close teeth and tongue creates an architecture of taboo sexuality, death and desire that is unforgettable.

Archive Emetica , the second short film by Damon Barr and Marie-Anne Ferral is 23 minutes long, was released on video in late 1992 although most of the footage was shot on super 8mm film. Despite it similarities in content, the work disappoints because it fails to carry through the radical formal programme that First Document hints at. If less radical in intent, Archive Emetica remains a stunningly edited work that traverses territory previously seen only in works by the Viennese Aktionismus group, the New York Cinema of Transgression filmmakers and from "overground" cinema; Lynch's Eraserhead and Andrzej Zulawski's Possession, notably the scene in which Isabelle Adjani is fucked by the meat monster she has created out of her own abortion and the meat of various murdered victims.

The achievement of Archive Emetica is that it is never a mere registration of a taboo breaking performance, as for example Joe Christ's Communion In Room 411 wherein a couple of young lovelies slice up their own nipples with razors. Ferral's animation and Barr's editing and image processing combine to produce a work wherein content is always matched with form.

Reassessing the body in terms of how it is represented might appear to be the job of the Sensa Solipsist, for whom what exists is the private world of one's own sensations or representations. This condition may be described as Internal World Solipsism, as opposed to the Observed World Solipsism of the Ephemerata Solipsist for whom any portions of the world not actually perceived by oneself do not exist.

If we consider First Document in terms of Solipsism then the work's achievement will be all the more remarkable. Let us presume that that which exists consists entirely of that which we can comprehend through the senses or that which we can represent. This argument would imply that we could change the world by changing our representation of it. What we choose to represent, is. In this context a world that is the body and a body that is the world (the basic premise of First Document) seems perfectly logical. There is no need to place the body in context, because by excluding from our sight the (real world) context of the body we do not bring the world into being. If we cannot see the world then it does not exist. We have not created the world, we have only created the body. It exists because we see it. Furthermore, referrring to the Ephemerata Solipsist, since that which we do not perceive does not exist, and since in First Document we do not perceive all of the (real world) body, the real world body does not exist, and only those tiny portions of the body that we do see, do in fact exist. This cutting off from the senses of the belief in the body's existence allows for an act that would be hideously inconceivable in a non-solipsistic world: the act of putting a razor into one's own flesh. Underneath the skin there is...nothing. If we cannot see it it does not exist. The need to cut, to slice into the surface of the skin and reveal...blood, flesh, bone..material, this need is mirrored in the need to cut and slice into the frame of vision: the need to frame and re-frame, indeed to represent.

The perfect concurrency of what First Document is about, and what it is, of what we see happening in the diegesis of activity and what we see happening in its formal construction is not merely indicative of a "good" piece of art. The implication of this document is that we indeed can change our bodies (our world) by changing the ways in which we represent them.

Dominant modes of cinematic representation proceed from a notion of boundary between self and external world. This boundary sets up a dialectic relationship and the discourse of this relationship is story: narrativity. But the body's representation and narrativity are not as ineluctably bound together as would appear. Wittgenstein says that we could not confidently claim to understand a man who could not remember if he always had two hands. Or again, if I should mistakenly claim to be a woman, and then explain the mistake as a failure to check, it would become questionable whether I understood the words I was using. Yet again, if one doubted the existence of one's body or denied commonsense truths, one would be taken for a half-wit or regarded as demented. The sceptical questioning of everyday truths amounts to the annihilation of all yardsticks and the toppling of all judgement. What is at stake here is the very matter of making sense.

Dominant modes of cinematic representation proceed from a notion of boundary between self and external world. This boundary initiates a dialectical relationship, and the discourse of this relationship is "story": narrativity. However, narrativity and the body's representation are not as ineluctably bound together as would appear to be the case.

Barr and Ferral's First Document attains a perfect congruency between what it is about and what it is; ie. between what happens in the diegesis of activity and what happens in its formal construction. The boundary inherent in the discourse of subject/object is dissolved and body and external world merge. What they merge into I am not quite sure, it may be a radical, "third" body - the new body hinted at in the possibility of a marriage between science and biology, or in fact this body might be the "one" body - the body before the "I" of individuation, before a consciousness of the external is attained.

The effect of this merging is to radically undermine the concept of representation itself (or meaningful representation at the very least). For a representation to "mean" something, it has to be "about" something and therefore be external to that something. The body of First Document, because it does not refer to an actual body - whether spatical or biological - occurs only in the video itself. The video document has become the "thing in itself" and has ceased to represent anything, has ceased to have meaning. (At least, it has ceased to have meaning in a world still clinging to the notion of subject-object).

The "meaninglessness" of First Document strikes me as being very much of the times. Contemporary artists have not only given up trying to make sense of (to order) the world, they have also given up trying to make sense of - and within - art, thus bypassing the still recognizably Utopian drives of the abstract expressionists and surrealists.

Stop Making Sense - the title of Jonathan Demme's film of the Talking Heads in concert - could have been this generation's motto, if the notions of "generations" and "mottos" were not already redundant. Intriguingly enough this very senselessness which would appear at first glance to be a full frontal onslaught on the pillars upon which the dominant ideology has been built, has in fact been eagerly embraced by certain quarters in order to enhance sales. Contemporary blockbusters like The Matrix 2 and Terminator 3 proudly display their narrative redundancy from shot 1: even Hollywood has picked up on this sensibility.

Senselessness, chaos, speed, vanishing, erasure, battery, transparency, noise, redundancy: these are the concepts to which the meaningfully represented body is being subjected to. The headlong rush away from meaning is of course apocalyptic, godless, soulless. Those clinging to pre-Nietzschean ideals would denounce this tendency as solipsistic and irresponsible as indeed it is. A call to embrace this dissolution is unnecessary; it's happening anyway. First Document won't be the last. And only the framed survive.

Bibliography

Aids and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag, New York, 1988.
Love's Body, Norman O. Brown, New York, 1966.
Rationalized Epistemology, Albert A. Johnstone, New York, 1991.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002