![]() A man stumbles into the space from off-screen and dies on the floor, at the bottom of the frame much later, a woman comes in, finds the body and (without much visible panic) phones the police. A fragmented narrative, almost a mystery story, in fact plays out during the long zoom. ![]() A flat and fairly abstract, yet elegant greyscale picture of waves gradually replaces the more concrete office space. (The visual pun on ‘wavelength’ seems to metaphorically compliment the film’s experiments in synaesthesia). The whole exercise draws attention to how variations in light and sound – in wavelengths – in fact alter, and indeed create, the space and time in which the camera is placed.Īll of this happens while the camera itself remains fascinated with a small and initially distant photograph of water, at the back of the room, which is only clearly visible in the last few minutes of the film. Through intense concentration, gradual re-framing, changes in film stock and dramatic doctoring, the space is continuously made strange and re-assessed. Most of the variation in mood and aesthetics is created through dramatic color filters placed on the scene, gradually rising sine waves in the soundtrack, and jarring cuts which juxtapose day and night lighting in the room, or translucently overlay previous footage. Over the course of nearly forty-five minutes, the lens slowly zooms into a space on the far wall between two windows. The camera is initially placed in a well-composed but rather empty mid-shot in an unused first floor office space, with four windows, a street outside, and scant furniture. There might not be another film which is so centrally fascinated with, or anxious about, a single object, a single image. For our purposes it can demonstrate the form of scrutiny which a camera can exercise towards the mis-en-abyme. Snow’s Wavelength, produced in 1966 and first screened in 1967, quickly became a touchstone for various discussions in this field for its intensive focus on the technicalities of camerawork, soundtrack, lighting and color effects. Snow was influential in the Canadian and New York avant garde art and film scenes in the 1960s, in which artists, directors, critics and theorists were increasingly taking an interest in the purely formal effects and capacities of visual art. The experimental prototype for this imagery in recent cinema is Michael Snow’s Wavelength. Over the course of various films, tacitly or explicitly queer, from The Shining to A Fantastic Woman, libidinal secrets and anxieties have been placed not only in the closet, but into abyss not only are sexual anxieties hidden, but they create an enfolding and deepening negative space that, like a black hole, begins to entomb the whole surrounding filmscape. ![]() So, in Mulholland Drive, we will see how desires between women are repressed, confused and frustrated, and through Leilo and Glazer’s work, we will see how trans women are figured in terms of secrets, with very different resolutions. Sedgwick is primarily concerned with secret desires between men, but here I will consider secrets of a wider scope. Not only are gay experiences necessarily secluded in a homophobic repressive and oppressive culture, according to Sedgwick, but paranoid concern with hidden truths itself implies a kind of sexual anxiety, a latent panic regarding the truth and reliability of our desires. Like Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet, I am concerned with how queer, homo- and bi- sexual desires, as well as trans identities, are tied up with the keeping of secrets – and vice versa. Here, I will outline how the appearance of the mis-en-abyme as a visual motif in contemporary cinema has produced particular anxious and queer effects. It implies a space beyond what is properly seen, not simply a realist presence over the horizon, but a pocket within (yet secluded from) the immediately visible, cohesive space of the portrait. To place a scene within a scene, and a scene within an abyss, at once extends, opens and disturbs the landscape of an image. A clear and famous example is Jan van Eyck’s 1434 ‘Arnolfini Portrait’, in which the mirror against the far wall of a room reflects the backs of a posing couple, as well as two other figures not present in the scene proper. The term ‘mis-en-abyme’ translates from French as ‘placed into abyss’ the concept is used in art and film criticism to describe a visual situation where one image is placed within another. ![]()
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