Program and notes, “Enfolded Tales”

Two programs that explore embodied and implicit forms of storytelling. 
20th Annual Conference on Literature and Film, Florida State University, Tallahassee, January 2004

Curated by Laura U. Marks
© Laura U. Marks 2004

Program 1
Muron
Nigol Bezjian, Lebanon, 2003, video, 100:00

Program 2

Wouldn't It Be Nice 
Emmanuelle Antille, Switzerland, 1999, video, 14:00

Twilight Psalm III: Walking Distance 
Phil Solomon, U.S., 1999, 16mm, 15:00

The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs
Walid Ra’ad, U.S./Lebanon, 2000, DV, 16:54

The Room 
Amal Kenawy, Egypt, 2003, video, 12:00

Standard Gauge
Morgan Fisher, U.S., 1984, 16mm, 35:00

Weighing… and Wanting 
William Kentridge, South Africa, 1997, 35mm, 6:30

I borrow the term enfoldment from quantum physics, where it was most beautifully expressed in the writings of David Bohm. Bohm observed the behavior of subatomic particles that are far apart but act as though they “know” what each other is doing. He concluded that, below the quantum level, all matter is interconnected. Bohm’s theory of implicate order describes an underlying order of the universe that cannot be seen, it can only be known through its perceptible effects. For example, the action of electrons can be understood in terms of a wave function. The wave is implicate, the electrons explicate: the wave is enfolded (in matter), the particles are unfolded (from the wave). 
I have been working on a triadic model of relations of implication-explication or enfolding-unfolding, Experience : Information : Image. The most fundamental of these three levels, Experience, is infinite and ultimately unknowable. Experience is deeply enfolded. I don’t mean individual experience: we can “have experience,” but one of the joys (and terrors) of life is the knowledge that our own experience is but a drop in an infinite vastness.  Experience arrives to us selectively unfolded at the level of Information: sets of data, quantifiable actions. Finally, the Image, or what is perceptible to the senses, is a selective explication of either Experience or Information. Experience, in turn, folds both Information and Image back into its infinite self.
This model is useful for thinking about stories. Think of story as the unfolded layer, what finally emerges. This program emphasizes what the story emerges from and how it is teased out. Some stories come from experience encoded as information: example. Experience is unfolded selectively, insofar as it is considered useful or worth encoding; some experience resists unfolding. This program is about the latter kinds of experience: stories that unfold directly from experience, from some nugget of dense impacted past. Resists narrativizing, wants to remain material. Film must stay close to it, coax it out. Like Lyrical Nitrate, they show how underneath the stories told by a film, the surface of the film is a body that suffers, that has experience. (Can understand video similarly, as a gang of electrons magnetically unified to a surface; as the surface suffers demagnetization, the electrons pursue other paths…)
Those enfolded bits of experience may be understood as fetishes, or fossils: in Skin I described how meaning can be communicated through physical contact without taking the detour through narrative. Informed by Benjamin’s mimesis, and also the anthropological understanding of a fetish, an object that means in itself. Similarly, a fossil is one of those image-objects that cannot be interpreted, that resists the unfolding into information. Film, video may tell stories by getting close to an object that enfolds experience, touching it, and taking on some of its being. Or it may touch experience itself and embody it.  
In Muron, the object that has experience is a vat of holy oil, carefully presided over by Armenian priests as it cooks. This oil does not represent the Armenian identity, it is the Armenian identity. Contains drops of the first oil made in 301 AD. Physically links every Armenian who’s ever been baptized, as they have all been touched by the same stuff. Including Bezjian, an Armenian living in Beirut, who videotaped the process at the Armenian diocese not far from the city. Nigol Bezjian stays physically close to this oil and the ingredients and processes that compose it. He uses haptic techniques to communicate its physicality: blur, soft focus, sounds that synaesthetically convey its texture. Wants us to feel the oil by looking at it. Important to a people who live largely in diaspora, to try to perform audiovisually the sensuous  experience that unites them.
In Twilight Psalm II: Walking Distance, Phil Solomon coaxes memory from the surface of the film itself. He chemically treats old filmstrips so that their surface becomes massy and thick, a skin over the image. Likek Standard Gauge, it is the material film’s own memory that is emphasized, embodied. The few images that are decipherable struggle through its weight, like people walking in quicksand. Solomon made this film when suffering from a serious illness, and the film embodies his own sense of mortality.
Amal Kenawy is a performance artist living in Cairo, and The Room is in part a performance document in this city where most opportunities to make video are linked to theater. The Room is partly remarkable for the vast range of techniques Kenawy uses to metaphorize the experience of a bride forced into a marriage: tableau, clay animation, and sculptural objects. But beyond metaphor, The Room embodies this feeling of imprisonment quite viscerally in the suffering of objects: you’ll see what I mean.
Walid Ra’ad’s The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs is premised on the idea that some stories simply cannot be told: here, stories of the Lebanese civil war, which remain occulted and officially unrecognized in this country that is trying not to heal but simply to forget. A series of three vignettes shows how objects remember when humans refuse to: indecipherable photographs, mementos that accompanied a woman in her diasporan travels. Ra’ad attributes this video to the Atlas Group, a fictional archive of Civil War that tries to decipher its meaning from unlikely documents, much the way an analyst tries to decipher a patient’s symptoms of trauma. These objects are enfolded the way symptoms are enfolded, and the process of explicating them is similarly fraught.
Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Swiss artist Emmanuelle Antille is a bit anomalous in this program, as it presents scenes that appear closer to conventional narrative. It looks like a bourgeois family reunion. But if we follow the idea that narratives enfold from dense, illegible artifacts, the focus shifts to the artifacts of experience. The family members’ encounters look the way real family encounters feel: affective, condensed, untranslatable. They have a troubling, sensuous quality, that cannot be domesticated into regular narrative.
In Standard Gauge, the physical body of film scraps is the object to be massaged for its stories. Morgan Fisher handles each one for the camera and unfolds their scarred surfaces the story of the film industry, the practices embedded physically in aspects that movies usually ignore: the volatile history of nitrate, the ideology of color embodied by the China Girl, the tradeoff of sensuousness for economy in the abandonment of the imbibition dye process, and his own uneven career as a Hollywood editor. Before the movies represent stories, they embody another story, the back story of the industry and the people who work in it. This was Fisher’s last film; after that he started doing the same thing with painting…
The last film in the program is Weighing… and Wanting  by the South African artist William Kentridge. It appears to be a story of guilt and the desire for redemption—being weighed and found wanting—that describes the position of South African post-apartheid. But again, I did not choose this film for its story, but rather its way of embodying emotions like grief, guilt, and longing directly in objects and in the film’s own tactile qualities. It is an animation drawn in charcoal, a fragile medium that invites you to sympathize with its own tenacity and mortality. The film also attempts, like the works by Amal Kenawy and Walid Ra’ad, to decipher the impacted, opaque memory of objects.
This is a long and difficult program, and though there are moments of humor its overall feel is somewhat dark. I think the best way to experience it is to keep in mind the observation of Charles Sanders Peirce that, viewing a thing from the outside, it appears to be matter; viewing it from the inside, it appears to be consciousness. Try to open yourself to feel along with inanimate objects, to indulge them with your sympathy, and to be aware of the delicate quickening of stories beginning to unfold.
***
Beneath their scarred surfaces, the experimental works in this program are brimming with stories. These stories arrive not explicated, as happens more often in the movies, but enfolded: embodied in objects, and embodied in the medium itself. They must be unfolded tenderly.
Some of these narratives are human histories enfolded in the things that witnessed them; some are stories of objects themselves, inviting an extra-human identification. Indeed sometimes the story of the medium is more powerful than the narrative it bears on its skin. We may consider this witness of the object to be fetishism, generously construed in the anthropological sense as the condensation, embodiment, and transmission of experience. Some of these relations of enfoldment and unfoldment may be interpreted as simple metaphors: a bleeding heart, a rock-hard conscience. Yet I suggest that the powerful affect of these works arises from their fetishistic quality: these metaphors cannot be expressed in words alone but require the vigorous materiality of their media to make sense. 
Charles Sanders Peirce wrote that viewing a thing from the outside, it appears to be matter; viewing it from the inside, it appears to be consciousness. So it is with these recalcitrant works. With a bit of empathy on your part, the tales will unfold. 

Muron 
Nigol Bezjian, Lebanon, 2003, video, 100:00
An embodied narrative told from the ‘point of view’ of a bubbling vat of holy oil, this documentary bears witness to the material body of a spiritual identity. Muron is the fragrant holy oil that has been used in all Armenian baptisms since 301 AD. Every seven years a new batch is prepared with great ceremony by the monks of the Armenian Holy See in Antelias, Lebanon, and mixed into the old. Bezjian follows every step of the process from the gathering and grinding of spices to the ritual stirrings of the oil to its application in the baptism of the humblest souls. Muron uses every haptic and sensuous trick to communicate the heat, fragrance, and duration of the oil’s metamorphosis. The materiality of communication through touch and smell unites the people of the Armenian diaspora, and it also brings the spectator into intimate contact with this very sensuous work. 

Standard Gauge
Morgan Fisher, U.S., 1984, 16mm, 35:00
An unabashed love poem to Hollywood film—not the stories printed on it, but the celluloid and acetate themselves. Fisher’s last film, before he moved to writing and painting, draws on his experience as a Hollywood editor working intimately with the medium, holding it in his hands. Each frame has stories to tell of the industry, the nameless people who served it, and the molecular life of the material. 

Twilight Psalm III: Walking Distance 
Phil Solomon, U.S., 1999, 16mm, 15:00
If there were a film from Pompeii, this would be it. The life of the emulsion itself, and its embodiment of memory, is the beginning point of Twilight Psalm II. Solomon chemically treated fragments of film to make the mortal body of the support visible through the figurative bodies in the image. Human and other figures, when they are discernible at all, appear to be stumbling through tar, or snowstorms or sandstorms. “I was thinking of the emulsion having a consciousness welling up like memory,” Solomon says. 

The Room 
Amal Kenawy, Egypt, 2003, video, 12:00
The story enfolded here is easily enough understood, but the performance of its unfolding is riveting. Kenawy’s sculptural objects embody, poetically and quite viscerally, the entrapment felt by a sacrificial bride. 

I Think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep
Walid Ra’ad, U.S./Lebanon, 2000, DV, 6:28
This precious scrap of video footage records the moments a Beirut security agent strayed from his post to watch the sunset. The orange globe melting into the Mediterranean condenses the joy of a man who, having lived in East Beirut during the war, longed for the simple pleasure of the watching the sun set from the Corniche on the west side of the city. Like Ra’ad’s other archival work, it treats video as an archival artifact, not a transparent means of communication. Indeed in Ra’ad’s hands video and photographs bury more than they reveal. Its partialness forces us to acknowledge what stories remain buried and untold, and the fortuitous manner by which certain stories are permitted to unfold from their objects.

Wouldn't It Be Nice 
Emmanuelle Antille, Switzerland, 1999, video, 14:00
The predictable encounters of a family get-together are diverted into a series of strange and sensuous encounters. Their poetic rituals suggest a sort of mutation of narrative unfolding: an expression, perhaps, of latent meanings waiting beneath the usual stories.

Weighing… and Wanting 
William Kentridge, South Africa, 1997, 35mm, 6:30
This animation is drawn in charcoal, a medium whose volatility Kentridge exploits for its sense of mortality. A man is troubled. The MRI scanning his brain extends its analysis to the outer world, as though memory and geology are indistinguishable. Weighing… and Wanting deals with conscience and accountability, and while this appears to relate to a private scenario it powerfully describes the self-interrogation of Kentridge’s South Africa, post-apartheid. The film demonstrates the fossil-like quality of certain images that, once cracked, radioactively affect all the images around them.

Laura U. Marks is a theorist and curator of experimental media. She is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke, 2000) and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota, 2002). Dr. Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor of Art and Culture Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.