content warning: suicide, self-harm, gore (blood), wooziness inducing images, consent issues, sharp objects, screaming

Phenomenology considers that “tactility is a mode of perception and expression wherein all parts of the body commit themselves to or are drawn into, a relationship with the world that is at once a mutual and intimate relation of contact” (Baker, 2009, p. 3). It considers the world and at through the body and the moment where the film and the viewer intermingle and where that ‘touch’ of the two creates meaning.

However if it is a touch relationship between two bodies that Phenomenology seeks to explore what happens when one side violates that relationship? When the touching is non-consensual? In that consideration it flips the play between bodies into something more sinister.

In looking at Phenomenology I choose to examine how discomfort can be used to influence the body and how one can play on the body’s instinctual and empathetic reactions to elicit meaning making.

I drove inspiration for this experiment from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty which could be described as a “struggle between art and work, experience and representation, impossibility and reality” (Gorelick, 2011, p. 274). The theatre was focused on physicality and on being able to represent an in-betweenness that could often not be described through language. It also required the audience to be an active participant as it played on shock value and disrupting and decivilising.

It also focused on the approach to showing “life” as it existed in all its cruelties, hence the name. Artaud was a man who spent sections of his life in mental faculties and was described to have madness (Gorelick, 2011). These create a person with a certain worldview and honestly I can relate. The idea of trying to show “life” and in life body, because I feel like the two are linked inextricably because the body as a moving, feeling vessel is therefore very much alive, but the dirty, uncomfortable, confronting side of life that must have been his reality (and it definitely is mine) was very appealing to me.

In bringing the two together I intended to explore uncomfortabllity and violation in the space where the touching of bodies and the audience creation of meaning occurs. Here I hope that what I created spurs bodily reactions, probably of revulsion in the viewer, but the point is that the reaction is not intellectual it is visceral, instinctual creation of subjectivity of the body to the film.

I would also presuppose that “life” is something that can only be experienced through the body therefore applying Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty applies a certain kind of experience between the two bodies, but the point is that it IS an experience. It is not something that can be intellectualised but something that exists between two moments, two bodies, an intangible something. That concept of “life” is interesting because life is something that must be lived and the way that we live in through our body.

Not all experiences are pleasant so in my usual devils advocate go for the weirdest option possible I choose to investigate what it looks like when the experiences that are created in those spaces are uncomfortable, confronting and force the viewers body to react in unpleasant ways. I explored different ways that this relationship could be exploited in both the visual of body horror and the sensory aspects intended to upset the viewer (for example it starts with a very loud scream). There are places where gore is the main element, and others where the implications are much subtler, such as a sequence where I tilted the city skyline back and forth, and put an ocean sound over the top intending to simulate something akin to sea sickness. I also relied on rhythm, particularly the rhythm of the body as there is a heartbeat line that runs throughout most of the piece. I also relied on a ticking rhythm, but with no climax, such sounds usually promote anxiety in people hearing them as we expect sounds to come to an end somewhere, or reach a natural climax and this one doesn’t.

Furthermore as primarily a writer I chose to use words at the beginning of my film to explore the way (contrary to Artaud’s thoughts) language could become part of this liminal space, reaching out and creating part of the equation where the language itself was intrusive and touching the viewer in a sense that it required an instinctual reaction.

I definitely discovered a lot in the process of trying to make something to fit in with the theory given that the finished product is simultaneously not what I intended to create and exactly what I hoped to create. I was not aware of the darkness that I was going into when I started, just hedging my bets on what sounded compelling and challenging for me to create. Now I think I ended up with more questions and with a deeper understanding of the insanity required to create this kind of work and think oh that seems fun.

I guess applying it to my own practice it’s about coming at things from a different angle rather then plot and narrative but about considering how do you want the viewer to engage and react to the work. It also relates to my own practice because it allowed me to explore much darker themes in a more visceral way then I have had permission to explore them in before and in a slightly different medium and from the angle of looking at how the bodies (both of film and of the viewer) would respond to each other, and allowing that to create the meaning.

I don’t quite know if it worked, if the exploration that I created allows for meaning to be inscribed in the places where the touching of two bodies is being violated, and how a certain kind of meaning can come from being disturbed and confronted, how that expands an understanding of the world, of life, of how the body interacts with it. I suppose the if it woks depends on the viewer. There will certainly be those who it’s too much shock value for, those who don’t understand, those who hate it, but I guess on the flip side the instinctual reaction of any of those means it worked. As long as there was some kind of reaction, some kind of meaning ascribed, and some kind of bodily response, then I guess that that was the point.

references: 

Barker, J 2009, The Tactile Eye: touch and the cinematic experience, University of California Press, Los Angles, USA

Chamarette, J 2012, Phenomenology and the future of film: rethinking subjectivity beyond French cinema, Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK

Gorelick, N 2011, ‘Life in Excess: Insurrection and Expenditure in Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty’, The Meaning of Life, Vol 33, no. 2, Wayne State University Press, pp. 263-279