On the First Minute of Abigail Child’s Mayhem, Part 6 of Is This What You Were Born For? (1987)

The suspense soundtrack of Abigail Child’s Mayhem, part 6 of Is This What You Were Born For? (1987) seems generic, but the mere title against a black image and the orchestral musical fragments sliding in and out of each other puts the sound on the same level as the image right from the start. Are we imagining these fragments as different musical lines, motifs, or “voices” from the same original composition (whether or not in different positions)? Is this the sharpening of a compositional unity latently fanning out? Or does a fragment draw the imagination toward other compositions, other musical and cinematic contexts, entangled with yet other images elsewhere and woven together here almost seamlessly?

As Child describes it, “You could say that the sound plays the part of the page, the way its field excites the eye turning the meanings the word sounds make (polyphonic) or that it is modeled after the mind’s divergent attention (jumpy overlaps) or perhaps that the relation of sound to image is prepositional, is a repositioning.”1 The first image is decentered straight away by the surrounding sounds: a suspenseful orchestral fragment slides into a buzzing B-movie soundtrack, over which a motif from the first sound fragment reappears. At the same time, a cartoon sound accentuates the lifted eyes, and clattering and later pounding sounds suggest different situations. The unabashed montage of sound effects focuses the attention to the equally constructed character of the orchestral music and ambient sounds (including voices), which lose their naturalness. In Child’s words, the aim is “to leave you conscious of the simulation, of the construction: by cutting, by interjecting contradiction or an extended accumulation of disparate information, by creating an untotalized surface, unsmooth, unfixed”2 Keeping the construction reflexively visible through explicit spatialization demands the capability of being touched by and of relating to the movements of negativity. As Child writes, “My topography demands negative capability.”3

The jumpy cartoon sound announces the caricatural dimension of the film noir genre that is coming up in a twisted manner. The sensationally high rubbery sound tarnishes the seriousness of the vibrating horns with kitsch – the seriousness of the pathos of wetter-than-wet streets, the seriousness of postromantic quests/investigations, the tragic action or unyielding passivity that a cool tough guy undertakes or undergoes in the all-encompassing atmosphere of corrupt paranoia, (pre-)urban violence and existential angst.4

A blink further, the first image: a close-up of a woman lifting her eyes. In Child’s words: “She’s looking out of the picture. The bars across her face hold her in the picture and hold her from us.”5 The gradated light cuts the characters into strips, the no less black-and-white contrasting clothing holds them together like an image from shop windows and fashion magazines pressed onto our dazed, agitated, lulled faces. We watch gazes, and again and again the film asks the question, “From what place, what fantasy?” Some of the uneasiness and concern of the woman looking left and right – explicitly staged via the soundtrack – we obliquely recognize in the inquisitive, roving men, who are no less in the dark. What gazes can mean, and what is held (in vain) in popular film’s rhetorical units of shots and scenes, is here expressly scattered by way of the quick montage, allowing itself to be connected with other elements elsewhere.

In the shot after these lustily curious men, the light falls softly and hazily on a woman’s face and then on a nervously confused young man with bare shoulders who is wrapped up in the situation, however unpleasant, showing no intention of changing anything or leaving. In the consternation’s aftermath, the men find a dead person and one man finds a startled woman – whereby the light has once again become flickering investigative light. The erotic gaze that strays and browses over the body is linked to the gaze of fantasy and desire that investigators (in the plural) cast on an injured or fallen body. The image of the two investigators returns, followed by an image of a woman looking back into the camera. The faces of the two somewhat anxiously investigating men are, in part, brightly illuminated by what they are bent over. The frequent saturation of the film surface – under- and overexposure, coarse-grain photography, distorted sound – is common in, for example, film noir, documentary films, or fiction films with a documentary visual language. The saturation invokes excess in the face of limited equipment, as if the unrepresentability of extratechnical intensity can only leave a trace in the form of disruption and blinding, a breaking of technology’s capability of producing images. In Mayhem, the film-noir saturation is accentuated and organized in a subversive way. As the light blinds the searching men, a woman looks back into the camera self-consciously and emphatically. The high-speed montage plays a structural role in the breaking of our control, of the capability of experiencing anything at all; it makes, indeed forces, space for our undue absence from ourselves. Through this vacillating, that which has excessively touched us and not been resorbed can haunt the visible and recognizable like a remainder, demanding relentless imaginative work around itself. An unsettling kind of looking back: in Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon, the androgynous figures, which cannot be framed phantasmatically in an unambiguous way, look at the viewer, in contrast with, for example, Degas’s crept-up-on, ogled women. In its protocubist organization, the painting also looks back at the viewer, who can no longer keep the work and the world at a distance.6

When the camera suddenly glides over the bodies much more closely, in fleeting shots, it breaks with the coordinates of the noir universe – the mesmerizing overall image, as maintained by tight Hollywood noir, of men as piercing statues, women as S-shaped fatales, and interiors as gradated mental spaces requires a certain distance. There is a measured limit to the often uneasy proximity of the noir camera and its clamping frame, which insinuates that at any given moment an unseen danger may emerge or strike without possible defense. Child radicalizes this proximity, which turns into ambiguity, opacity, alienation. The brief montage of close-ups creates immersion (as if your nose is pushed into the scene) and manifest abstraction, which is nonetheless inserted into the referential, sequential suction loosely set up by the surrounding fragments. Against the pull of illusion, the detachment and repetition (re-editing) of image and sound fragments installs delay and reflection from the outset. The maximalist montage divides meaning.

Similar to how Paul Auster in The New York Trilogy uses the coordinates of the detective novel in order to dramatically and philosophically push the observation, interpretative urge, and diffused surface of signs, Child develops a “negative” or “inverse melodrama” that explores the world as a “messy, ambiguous space,” in which criticism’s other leg is plodding in pleasure, and suspense is indicative of brewing social tensions that may emerge over time. “The world surface itself has the promise of the ineffable. In this sense, attributing value to the undemonstrable character of the universe, melodrama throws a wrench into rational analysis that seeks to authorize its status outside the context of desire and distortion. Melodrama sees a world under pressure, awaiting meaning or revelation. Suspense thus forms a key melodramatic trope: time becomes foreboding and inevitable, a theatrical tension in a world preoccupied with threat. Suspense as the measure (weather) of the social.”7

This whole suspenseful watching is redeemed, so to speak, by melancholic music and an approaching, blindingly luminous cloud of fog that gradually hides from view one or more figures walking away. This ecstatic “redemption” is a familiar motif, and at the same time the shot bursts from its quotation marks. Child’s abrupt montage not only deprives the image of a potentially revealing continuation but causes it to fold back onto itself so the visual, in opposition to the flowing musical pathos, appears as condensed and resonates as such. Where the figures leave the scene, there is an impenetrably bright and flat white fog, just like earlier in the overexposure by the investigators’ lights. The most resolute or revelatory light derives its authority from the subdued reference to a sacredness that by definition remains obscure. The irrevocable dissolution of the nebulous edges questions the firm tread of those walking away. The dying away and unbounding, the affirmed closeness of loss and vibration is also the condition for life, for example that of the leaving figures. In film noir, the environment is often pregnantly present or autonomous: in this misty shot, the vertical rhythm of the bare space is figuratively at odds with the horizontality along which the figures go their way. The horizontality evokes the figure of the landscape – seemingly surveyable, panoramic, open to movement, wide, unbounded, bounded only by unthought of horizons – along which vertical beams as social pillars raise an impenetrable corridor. When the last feet have slipped by, have walked away and been swallowed up, only the stark floor, walls, and clouds remain, a space to be imagined primarily in a figurative way; an unpopulated space (without social ties), enclosed, oppressive, diffuse, and quite indeterminate, in which things are reflected back as more of the same.

In this shot balancing between quoted cliché and elicited excess, Child points the critical filmmaker to a problem of the ambiguity of cinema, a medium that is as complex and subtle as commercial, as intense as effective. The filmmaker has to relate to a luminous projection screen in a dark hall, corridor, or hole whose seduction (which begins in the comfortably populated vestibule through the advertising images of posters and film stills) can turn into ravenous eroticism. That the relationship to cinema is tantamount to a relationship to its history is part of the premise in a body of work in which appropriation is crucial, and in a film such as Mayhem in which the status of a shot often hangs undecided between historical element or current make. Friedrich Nietzsche thought through the fractured, divided nature of the modern experience in a penetrating way. For modern man, history is a burden that sticks to him: “however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him. It is matter for wonder: the moment, that is here and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after, returns like a spectre to trouble the quiet of a later moment.” And “‘being’ is merely a continual ‘has been,’ a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself,” a sinking that keeps returning beyond presence or absence.8 Can cinema make its haunting history occupy and bring into play cinematographic space in a lucid way, or does cinema fetishizingly cover it up with images that promise and seem to be Everything, conjuring and silent “memorials” as a “triumph” over and “protection” against its division?9 The parentheses in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma suggest that this/these “histor(y/ies)” should not be thought of as a plurality of units, but as an inherent duplication and repetition that does not simply accrue to itself.

Cinema often practices the supreme tension between making appear, as cinema (its specificity and history), the complexity of its brokenness and the temptation to establish an image of Cinema itself as handed down, overfull but abstract; between appearance that does not cover up the repetitive impossibility of appearance and a visual language that dreams revelation by drawing on the familiar repetitions from film history. In the latter case, the division-in-itself of film-historical embedding is abolished by the scar tissue of fetishization – as Child writes, quoting Shklovsky, “To sever the connections which have become scar tissue.”10 The fetish unfolds in the ambivalence of the dream that this or that film (shot, scene, element), more than any other, embodies the heterogeneous mass of cinema as a glorious unity, accompanied by a latent melancholic homage to the best cinema that has, so to speak, already been made, which may give films a weary touch. It seems that in cinema, a courageously fractured style and a blissful familiarity that fends off its inherent strangeness are entangled in an extremely combative way – this would be the economy of cinema, its organization of desire, its distribution of meaning – so that film causes an exploration of the moments when one thing tilts toward the alleged heir to the throne and the other shows a kind of introspection. Serge Daney’s baroque film-scenographic model of a “museum of scenography,” of a “tour” of the spectator in the “museum of his own illusions,” inspired by Raoul Ruiz’s film L’hypothèse du tableau volé, among other things, takes into account historical apparatuses such as theater, puppet theater, tableau vivant, painting, etc. that play a role in film.11 The model, which aims “to return to cinema the complexity it had lost with the advent of sound films,” invites the spectator to “glide slowly past images that themselves glide over each other. With pleasure or with irony.” The model’s quiet museum tone could be an exquisite condition for doing something with our stubbornly repeated cinematic fetishizations by patiently articulating. Child’s work is related to this primacy of and sensitivity to historicization, complex construction (“heterogeneous, unpredictable artifacts”), a being “imbued” with culture, and the impure back-and-forth between illusion and relation. Child is passionate, however, about the nearly uninhibited lapsing of meaning (from spontaneous belief to congealed reflection), about the point at which meaning continues to emerge from and – erasing itself – continues to return to elusiveness, passive indeterminacy, stunning fascination. Her spectator is as much overwhelmed by accumulation and speed as made a partaker of the constellation’s generosity.

In his collection of essays The Book to Come,12 Maurice Blanchot explores by way of the work of modern writers notions of negativity, repetition, and plurality, the imaginary, reading, and literary space and time as nature and condition of possibility, as the impossible heart of modern literature. In Ruiz’s film Le film à venir, a cult permanently screens the same twenty-three-second film fragment in a windowless basement, “la Chambre des Horloges” [“the Room of the Watches”]: “There is not much to see, except – things are never simple – if one engages in the daily practice of what they call ‘enlightened projections.’ By this, our cultists mean a state of deep hypnosis caused by the abusive repetition of the revelatory fragment. Once this state is reached, it seems, one SEES.” That enlightened “seeing” can only be the paradox of a gaze that forever passively reaches for its cultish, dark dimension by which it was always already stared at. It is this – historical – dimension that Child is stirring up when experimenting with violent, destructive operations (“excessive”) on the material. This dimension cannot be directly targeted. Child is bent on allowing it to emerge as if from cracks and holes that have been pried open. It cannot be grasped or seen as a positivity. Going about it, the material is persistently and oppressively traversed, disturbed, contaminated, thwarted, not by something else entirely but by its “own” obscene, nocturnal side, the material insisting on an unheard-of kind of imagination. Such a way of working affirms the impurity of the film image and of artistic strategies.

• 1Abigail Child, “Preface for Prefaces,” in This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995).
• 2Child, “So This Is Called Moving? Interview,” in This Is Called Moving.
• 3Child, “A Motive for Mayhem,” in This Is Called Moving.
• 4See Marc Holthof, “Hollywoods nachtzijde: film noir,” Film en televisie 122 (1976).
• 5Child, “A Motive for Mayhem,” in This Is Called Moving.
• 6See Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, et al., eds., Art since 1900 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004).
• 7Child, “Melodrama and Montage,” in This Is Called Moving.
• 8Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: The Library Arts Press, 1957).
• 9Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, vol 21 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961).
• 10Viktor Shklovsky, quoted by Child, “Preface for Prefaces”, in This Is Called Moving.
• 11Serge Daney, “Het voetlicht (bis),” Een ruimte om in te bewegen (Amsterdam: Octavo, 2011).
• 12Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003).