Phenomenology's Material Presence

Video, Vision and Experience

Gabrielle A. Hezekiah

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781841503103
• eBook ISBN: 9781841503837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Phenomenology's Material Presence: Video, Vision and Experience is an exploration of phenomenology and the aesthetics of the moving image. Drawing on the insights of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this seminal work addresses key questions related to the notion of encounter in cinematic viewing. How does video make visible the act of looking and the act of being seen? How does it intimate the presence of that which cannot be seen? What is the role of video's material body in facilitating this process? Using a poetic essay style, and three videos by Trinidadian film-maker Robert Yao Ramesar, this book suggests that video performs its own act of phenomenological inquiry. Phenomenology's Material Presence invites the reader to explore the role of consciousness in our experience of the visual and brings continental philosophy and postcolonial cinema into conversation.

CHAPTER 1
ACTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

All questions of existence and reality are bracketed in the phenomenological reduction. That they are bracketed does, however, not mean that they are gone. They are there, but we are no longer asking what is real and what is not real. Instead we ask: What is involved in being real? What are the structures of consciousness thanks to which we experience something as real? And how do they differ from the structures of our consciousness when we experience something as dream or phantasy?

– Dagfinn Føllesdal (“The Thetic Role of Consciousness,” 2003: 11–12)

Heritage: A Wedding in Moriah begins with towering figures in top hats and coats. They carry large umbrellas and move across our field of vision against a startling “yellow” sun. We look up to them—and to the sun—from ground level. The image is in sepia and moves in slow motion. There is the music of fiddles and drums. The first title comes on-screen and is followed by blackout. The next scene is of a procession of couples also in fancy dress. They seem to skip lightly along the road. Their clothes have movement. The subtitle appears and we reenter the black. Next we see musicians—mostly seated on the ground—providing a visual for the sound. We look up to the trees. A man emerges from a car. We see an older woman walking towards a large open gate. We see her from behind. The image blacks out. A group of men appears, again in coattails and hats. Again there is the sun and the figures truly stand out. They consume the screen. There is more black—and a man and woman appear. The camera focuses on the folds of a dress—pleats and puckers and stark whiteness. It examines one area of the dress and moves up to women’s faces. They are awash in “white.” Cut to black. We move in with the camera in slow, halting motion to a necklace on a young woman’s neck. The pearls seem almost to call to us and we zoom in tentatively yet with purpose. The young woman’s dress is light in colour. She turns and we see her in profile. She is smiling. It is as if she knows we have been watching, although she does not look at us directly. It is the first time that we feel acknowledged. We have approached her at eye-level. We see her face against a backdrop of others—almost layered—and against the light. We see depth. The music continues.

Cut to black. We linger on the faces of young children and zoom out. We are in the scene. We black out—out of consciousness? When we return we are in the midst of the dress we have seen earlier, and this time we move up to a hand holding a bouquet. The woman presents a sharp silhouette against trees and sunlit sky (we see her in profile) even though her dress is light in colour. How is it that we see contrast when there is so little darkness there? We next see a man smoking a pipe; his face in exquisite fullness stares directly at us. He wears an earring. He is the top layer in a series of faces. He comes out at us although he remains in the frame. His fullness occupies it. The camera approaches and recedes thickly, as if through a veil. The image seems to disintegrate in the process. We move on to other characters in this wedding procession, many dancing as they walk, this time with more close-ups and more shots at eye-level. There is no narrative order here—or none that we can discern. We see in long shot also and there is now distance and closeness. The music diminishes and a woman’s voice penetrates the soundscape. She is a heckler commenting on the wedding. We do not see her. We see the bride, her father and the bridal party making their way along the road. The visual tone has changed. The colour is almost black and white. The building we see is stone—maybe it is the church. And we move inside—of that building? And we look over women’s hats as they sit in church. Back outside there are drums being heated and tuned over fire, then the shadow of a figure on the road. Cut to black. The procession continues and we recognize faces. The voice of the woman continues. As the murmurs of the church crowd intervene (they are muffled, we can tell that they are inside the church), softening the sound, the procession seems to dissolve. We see the mass movement of people from above and then return to the street. Spectators have joined in or move along its outskirts. More black, more movement. An older man drums almost ecstatically, hitting the skin of the drum against the heel of his hand. The camera takes us back to fire and drums being tuned. Long shots, close-ups, shots from way below. Blackness. Spectators. Umbrellas and a brilliant sun. The procession continues its slow motion. An elderly woman inadvertently finds herself at the centre of our view. She is facing us. Credits begin. They punctuate the image. They do not roll.

Heritage sits somewhere between memory and dream. It presents a re-enactment of a traditional wedding at the Tobago Heritage Festival. Its characters are all acting. The ceremony is not “real.” Yet I feel that I am a part of this procession, on the outside looking in and on the inside looking out. It is not that I can fully inhabit the characters’ bodies or that they fully inhabit mine. It is that I have been there, in this scene, and I come forward now to meet myself looking at myself as I might have been. It is a memory of what has not been. And it is also dream. I drift in and out of scenes in no logical order. Present, past and future intermingle freely. Ramesar’s Heritage is a re-enactment parading as memory and experienced as dream.

Performing the Reduction

Philosopher Natalie Depraz offers a deeply insightful interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction by establishing the method of the reduction as a “disciplined embodied practice” (Depraz 1999: 95) and outlining the tensions surrounding objectivity and subjectivity in philosophical discourse. Depraz suggests that the co-existence of the practical/embodied/existential and theoretical dimensions is “at the heart of the very gesture of the reduction” (Depraz 1999: 96). She suggests further that reflection and incarnation, contemplation and action cross-fertilize to become eventually indistinguishable one from another. Depraz is concerned with elucidating the strategies at work in three reductions—the psychological, the transcendental and the eidetic. The psychological reduction involves disengagement and a subsequent “freeing up” of experience. I free myself from the object in order to take cognizance of the act of consciousness which is directed towards it. This stepping back is not a removal from the world or from the reality of the object but a leading back to experience and an enlarging and intensifying of experience that frees me from the pre-givenness of the world. The psychological reduction must be made and remade as the subject repeatedly becomes re-immersed in the worldliness of the object. There is a temporal lag between the return to the act of consciousness (or perceptual act) and the experience of perception itself. The return to the perceptual act is situated “in the aftermath of the perception of the object” (Depraz 1999: 98). This is the same for the immediate past (the past retentionally held in mind) and the present remembering of a past situation.

Heritage presents a series of retentional acts as the present remembering of a past situation and slows motion to allow for probing or exploration. Heritage holds the procession of characters in suspension so that we might free ourselves from the objects per se and spend time on the act of perceiving them. This reflection is always a recapitulation—“the two perceptual registers (object/act)” are not contemporaneous (Depraz 1999: 99). The reflection on the act of perception is therefore inherently fragile and Depraz interprets Husserl’s introduction of the epoché—in the transcendental reduction—as an effort to confer stability on the process. Epoché, in Depraz’s formulation, corresponds to a “gesture of suspension with regard to the habitual course of one’s thoughts, brought about by an interruption of their continuous flowing” (Depraz 1999: 99). In this view, it is the mundane thought—the thought tied to the perceived object in the world and to it alone—that turns the subject away from the observation of the perceptual act. And it is the thought, rather than the world, that is bracketed. The epoché is not negation. The thought ceases to be relevant to the investigation.

In this way, I enlarge my field of experience by intensifying it, by allowing another dimension to emerge from it, a dimension which precisely frees me from the ordinary pre-givenness of the world…I learn to look at the world in another way, not that the first is negated or even radically altered in its being, nor that certain objects are henceforward substituted for others but, from the simple fact that my manner of perceiving, my visual disposition, has changed, objects are going to be given to me in another light. (Depraz 1999: 98)

This is the context within which Heritage might be interpreted. The object before us on-screen is no longer, by virtue of Ramesar’s distancing and interrogative techniques, merely itself. It becomes more than its ordinary givenness and we are able to perceive the act of consciousness which brings it to us. But this experience is transitory. We slip all too easily into the natural attitude. At every moment, says Depraz, she is caught up once again in the perceived object and must make an effort to return to the perceptual act or “the visual act in its very occurrence” (Depraz 1999: 98). There is a temporal lag always in the passage from the object to the act. Heritage bridges a gap between the retentional and the remembering. The retention of what has been presented to us in the video (the immediate past or near-present) is taken up by our consciousness as personal memory (a remembering) of having been a part of the procession in the world beyond the video, in the past. The shift in attention from one to the other is reflected in Ramesar’s shift from long shots to close-ups.

The depth of field which we find in Heritage also contributes to the feeling of distance. High contrast clearly delineates all objects in the foreground. Each person exists atop the others. The sense of depth and layering is reminiscent of a stereoscopic view. A stereoscopic view presents two slightly different views of the same scene and layers them to produce the impression of a three dimensional scene, particularly of the figures in the foreground. The images in the foreground are clearly demarcated and appear to have volume. The stereoscopic view gives the observer the sense of having “been there,” but the images do not move towards the viewer as do the characters of Heritage. The raised quality of the image—the “lifting” quality in Ramesar’s video—brings an air of texture. Yet it also creates space. In the stereoscopic view, the space is real—it is a result of the placing together of slightly different views. In Heritage, the illusion of space comes from the gap created by the movement of consciousness between the object of perception and the reflection upon the act of perception, as well as the spaces or gaps within the image itself.⁸ The gaps within the image allow an entry point for our own physicality and consciousness. They also allow the illusion of distance between the characters and their background—this is a function both of backlighting and of shooting directly into the sun, in keeping with Ramesar’s vision for Caribbeing. The edges of the characters stand as an indication of a gap between foreground and background, and this conceptually allows the experience and impression of space. Behind the characters and before the background is a field.

Stills from Heritage: A Wedding in Moriah. Courtesy the artist.

Ramesar has indicated that one of his techniques is aimed at a type of “bastardization” of the still and moving image and between film and video (Ramesar 2004). Heritage appears to lift the characters out of print and guide them towards a holding cell of consciousness. In essence, the characters seem to come to life in a liminal space between a photographic past and the viewer’s filmic present. The characters in Heritage seem to exist in photographs of the past moving towards us in the present. Images in photographs exist in a deathlike state. The characters in Heritage call us in to witness and experience that limbo between life and death, sleep and wake, dream and wakeful consciousness. We search them for memories, we search them for clues, and when they transform themselves into memory they hover forever at the edge of consciousness. We enter and are transformed in our looking. This space is in fact a space between movements. As a consequence of this “lifting,” we proceed to an expansion of consciousness.

Depraz’s temporal lag affords us an opportunity to contemplate that which is created in between spaces. The temporal lag allows us to think about the gaps in Heritage as the distance between perception itself and consciousness of the perceptual act. It allows us to see that consciousness as able to insert itself into the gaps. It allows us to imagine that the consciousness of the characters and the consciousness of the viewer meet in that space and commingle—and that in this commingling, the consciousness of the viewer is invited to attend to the physicality of the character by entering the character’s space of the frame. Once we return to perception itself we are there, in the frame, on the screen and in the body (not our own). And that link that we feel—the trace that connects our present body outside of the frame (our viewing body) with our body that acts within the frame—is the thread that holds together the act and reflection upon the act.

In Heritage, Ramesar plays with low angles and eye-level shots in ways that reinforce a movement back and forth between childhood and adult memory, past and near-present. Only the children are shot at eye-level at the beginning of the tape, reinforcing the notion that a child’s perspective is at play. The camera hovers around the swirls of ladies’ skirts and moves up to capture the faces of the owners bathed in washes of light. The effect is almost one of revelation as the towering figures stand against the washes. A combination of close-ups and long shots gives the sense of distance and immersion. Shadows and high contrast provide detail and volume. We are invited to look—the details are offered up. The camera draws us towards faces—there is intimacy and familiarity. We are asked to pay attention here—to capture, lock onto, engage. We are removed from the perspective of childhood to an attitude of the present by the insertion of voice. It is as if the video’s characters intend that we should shift perspective. It is not the camera which intends but the characters themselves through direct looking/gazing and engagement with the camera. The entire video is dreamlike while, at the same time, its sepia tones evoke a sense of history. It is a series of photographs come to life—staccato movements halting across a surface—dandies and ladies stepping out of early twentieth century photography and into consciousness.

Memory and Dream

Cinema concentrates the experience of time and so enhances experience, makes it significantly longer, more invested, more typical, more memorable. This diffusion of idea and feeling into time is nothing much to do with screentime, with the clock time of the image on the screen. It is to do with duration, the experience of time, a kind of memory happening now.

– Susan Dermody (“The Pressure of the Unconscious upon the Image: The Subjective Voice in Documentary,” 1995: 303)

Susan Dermody (1995) has written of the dream state induced by a form of associative rhythm in film. In these films, there is a sense of ritual which invokes drama but subsequently leaves drama for dream. Dermody’s claim is suggestive since it causes us to think about the role of time in the experience of memory. Heritage meanders in the way that dreams often do. We have the impression of snatches of personal memory from which our dreams are drawn. The disembodied voices of woman and priest serve to further heighten this sense of a dream-space, within which sensory information may come to us from anywhere and is incorporated into the general feeling of “being there.” We flit about from middle to beginning to end as is our wont in the dream state. Dermody is influenced by the writing of film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky writes that people go to the cinema for “time lost or spent or not yet had” (Tarkovsky 1987: 63). Although his critique of poetic cinema in the same volume does not appear to support the underlying impulses of Ramesar’s work, his insight into the experience of time within film is helpful. According to Tarkovsky, the cinema image comes into being during shooting. Editing creates film’s structure but not its rhythm. Film’s rhythm is inherent in the image. In this view, Ramesar’s Heritage would seem to be a work of time created in each shot. Yet the slow motion that is the most enduring characteristic of the work is introduced in the editing. It gives the characters their halting motion—and the camera its tentative gesture—and it is produced after the fact. How can we account for the experience of flow and discontinuity—of memory and dream?

Tarkovsky is not wrong to suggest that time and rhythm inhere in the image at the time of shooting. The trace of the time of the original event may be transferred to the film and thus inhere in the image. Marks (2002) has suggested that both analogue and digital video bear indexical traces of the events they record. If this is the case, and if time is an inherent part of the organization of an event—of the organization of an object as an object and an event as an event—then I would suggest that something essential about the time of the event may be captured in the shooting and conveyed to us as the tape. Editing can help us to tap into a particular configuration of time that organizes the original and transforms the video into an experience of time that seems somehow “proper” to the event. The young woman with the pearl necklace turns slowly towards us and away from a group of others. The man with the pipe stares directly at us and does not move. It is difficult to imagine them moving or standing still at any other speed. Stillness and motion convey a sense of time. The blackouts that punctuate my experience of time, making vision discontinuous, also give the video its rhythm. The blackouts, paradoxically, also contribute to the flow or stream of consciousness. They develop their own pattern and rhythm and are expressive in their own right. Events in Heritage do not unfold in linear fashion. Yet from the towering figures, to the procession, to the man exiting the car, to the details of the dress the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Acts of Consciousness
• Chapter 2: Being and Consciousness
• Chapter 3: Being, Consciousness and Time
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Videography