By Hana Elmasry & Daniel Coleman

 

Avoid dying obsessing over past emotional trauma. Heart ache has always existed. Why does heartache not leave conscious thought? It has been a year of Lorca’s Duende: nearly experiencing death through the unspeakable forces upon the soul which can result in complete immersion into art as a coping mechanism. Growing tenfold emotionally and mentally; however, enduring through experience. Feeling as if not fully present within conversation –relating to the tainted, yellow liquid within the pristine, pure white tea cup; them. Perceiving yourself good enough for them, or the next them to follow. No longer the pristine cup. Growing into an adult: seeing the soiled table cloth as yourself rather than the niche of the tea cup.

 

The end is not a break-up; is not a death; is not an orgasm; is not anything but finished.

The process of dealing with the end is a cognitive stretch in which some of have yet to develop the skill of psychological elasticity. Trauma and its post particulars are evident within any end, even a smooth transition has a broken aspect. A break carries trauma but not always negatively. The motion of closure involves pouring in and out of oneself into oneself. To filter the content, to displace the context- to cope or grieve as one sees fit. This is a universal act despite its subjective despondence. This installation shall focus on the idea of the end and the process of closure. Essentially it’ll quickly highlight how one never stops their infinite regress of ruminating unless they make the decision to let go.

 

Seeking to break beyond traditional painting dimensions, emotional and physical damage within an installation setting is introduced. The spatial presentation explores Kant’s philosophy of the sublime within the plastic facade of the kitsch, bad art aesthetic world. Entering the excessively garnished installation results in “Immediate and radical removal of all static, painted scenery and its replacement by dynamic eletromechanical scenic architecture of luminous plastic elements in motion” (Grau).

 

Viewers are forced to move through the intentionally curated atmosphere of cheap objects which leave a poor taste: living up their one-dollar value. The senses are free to play within the stimulating multidisciplinary work. The philosophy of Heidegger’s calculative and meditative thinking intermingles as one explores “a panoramic synthesis of action, a perfectly mystical rite of spiritual dynamism. A period of time for the spiritual abstraction of the new, future religion” (Grau).

 

Although not feasible with a post secondary budget, complete immersion of eerie and sticky sensation throughout the installation was contemplated. Initially considered was the immediate impactful greeting: from the moment their foot touches the ground is the uncomforting and unexpected tackiness of plastic sticky flooring. Not only physically, but visually the flooring daunting as the plastic sheets reflect the low light within the room. Reminiscent of medical sterility, the plastic sheets lay across the floor disconnecting the known and expected flooring of the installation space and themselves. It forces you to change your pace, literally holding part of you behind for just a little longer.  

 

The plastic sterility of the flooring that is unexpectedly sticky is an off-putting signifier of protection. Alluding to an easy clean up solution to a messy event, an existential concern is created – what is my relation to the mess that is present, will be present, or has already taken place? Becoming again, painfully self-aware.

 

Contrasting the architectural awareness of the floor, golden leaves are scattered. The natural world which is altered by the plastic acrylic creates a “synthesis of natural environment and mental impression [which] puts the observer in a birds – eye view position that overcomes the laws of gravity in the image space; in a certain sense, it is disembodiment” (Grau). As the installation demands the viewer to not only feel, but look down to their discomfort and visually feed to the demand of complete immersion. The first encounter relating the awareness of being alive and artificial materials.

 

An ironic shrine to the cheaply fabricated and repurposed objects, so crudely placed on the equal hierarchy of the gold rimed tea cups. The faux plastic candles with the low-cost golden paint job pay homage to a false sense of the romantic warmth expected. The fake flowers work as an aggressive sight as multiple shades of red, blue, chrome, and neon pinks fight for your attention. The altered flowers rebel from the idealized flowers hand painted in a conservative and polite manor on the elegant tea cups. The shrine revolves the conversation of poetic and whimsical visuals and the harsh bad art aesthetic.

 

Presenting the objects on the plinth stands to the viewer creates a forced appreciative gaze. The objects, although cheap, are presented as of value - as if they hold precious times of history. Although repeated within the installation, the museum / gallery presentation of the objects begins a conversation between themselves and the viewer.

 

Echoing the installment of the faux flowers from the shrine is the transformed luggage. The safe and familiar is interrupted and contaminated by the overlay of the spray paint, resulting in the infection of kitsch and bad art. Prim and proper is disrupted and denied again. Spray paint latches onto the tooth of the floral textile as an ugly attempt to appear front and center. Rejection of uniformity and complicity of retaining the flowers leave an unsettling and difficult feeling.

 

Walking through the installation space, the refrain of the uncomfortable eeriness of death or disembodiment is found with the location of sound and the forced direction of foot traffic. The viewer is directed in their experience of the work as soundscapes including tracks and Foley soundscape. Hearing whimsical and unfamiliar sounds question its origination or narrative that it provides; looking for the sound to act as “the refrain [which] brings us back to our first experience of entering that poetic world, making it immediate and at the same time renewing it” (Tarkovsky).

 

Sound strengthens and weakens as the path around the installation is disrupted and divided with black, wooden sculptural elements. As they are contrived by man made wood cuts, obviously crafted and painted to appear pristine, the narrative of the woods lifespan is anchored by the natural twig elements.

 

Displaying discomforting notions of time and death again, if the viewer seeks to ignore the visuals of the sculpture, they are denied as a complete branch sits within the corner of the installation. Natural elements of the branch modified to conform to a plastic death. Challenging Heidegger’s philosophy, each person may think of the sculptural wood and branches in a calculative thought process of their stand in to the notion of death or in a meditative thought – mourning and reacting to their haunting quality.

 

Living amongst the biggest wall of the installation is a film which resolves the objects within the room, as well as conclude the emotional feeling of the end.

 

“First and foremost illusion and immersion. Arnheim emphasizes the difference between filmic reality and human perception primarily in order to better analyze the directors’ possibilities for artistic intervention, yet the career of cinema as an image medium began because it appeared capable of fulfilling the unkept promises of its suggestive precursors, whose effects and affects no longer had the power to captivate the urban masses” (Grau).  

 

The goal is to make the audience go further than using their imagination or free play as to understand. Kant’s theories surrounding free play or imagination will not be the capacity required to experience this film. There is no understanding, at least haphazardly. There is not much room for the viewer to escape to, despite it being multi-dimensional. Despite it also being lucid and blurry, the images within the frames are constraining.  The duality of the looseness vs the restrict and confine orders you to incorporate Frederic Jameson’s ideas on the postmodern sublime. The film creates a hyperspace; in which the senses are intensified, and people are disoriented of the subject in space and time. The world unto itself has no relation to anything as well as no autonomy. Specifically, once the viewer finds themselves within this space, the theory they must incorporate is cognitive mapping. As Jameson states, “An aesthetic of cognitive mapping - a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system” (Jameson, 573). Once the heightened sense of space is established the viewer can now begin to go beyond understanding the emotion of the film and understand why this emotion has occurred.

 

Since we have trapped the viewer in an ambiguous, yet specific, anxious and yet boring space, creating emotion and showing why the emotion has been perceived will require an adjustment of time.

 

The camera’s sequence and how we follow the montage of scenes should portray the reaction, essentially everything is uncovering overtime. In cinema, rhythm expresses the course of time (Tarkovsky, 113). Measuring things correctly- at least right away- is incapable of the viewer because the progression of the narrative is non-linear. The reaction we wish to portray is depressed: under-stimulated and yet anxious and disorienting. In the case of depression, a warped sense of time would be a common why to display the reaction. In the film, The End, we wanted to depress everything, to warp everything to make it feel like it may be moving in tremendously slow motion, not moving, or at a broken sequence. Skewed proportions and focus aid at perceiving something in a lucid manner that compositions well with the idea of a slowed pace. Here we display the long lasting with the ephemeral; we display the feeling of being warped in time seeking closure or dealing with the motion of the end. Alterations and deviations in scene- selection, position, focus or temporal pace mimic the motion of the process. Not only sense of duration but sense of yourself and others- your mental life is thrown out of all proportion. Skewed proportions display the feeling of processing emotion of the end. Context is also skewed because you don’t get a sense of the past. If the viewer notices detail, they understand from the establishing shot and one of the closing shots portray a missing cup from the mise-en-scene. Through that do we symbolically define that an end of something occurred. The film is now the process of how cognitively someone goes through that motion of the end. The cinematography takes u in and deeper within a reality of someone’s perspective. You get to view their mind. It pulls you away as the bouts of depression get harder, physically withdrawing you so you can’t latch on even though you didn’t want to. Sometimes two parts in a sequence don’t fit each other especially if the establishing shots to indicate time are warped.

 

According to Kant, judgments are a mediation between the faculty of understanding and the faculty of reason. For Kant, there are two kinds of judgments: determinate and reflective. Reflective judgments surround, the good, the agreeable, sublime and beauty. Reflective judgments are subjective and universal, because they assume a sensus communis - which means that most people have the common sense to have the same aesthetic judgments or feelings as others. Through symbolism and further displacement of time in cinematography, a sense of relation from the audience will occur. Relative enough to recognize but not enough to empathize. Enough to recognize because subjective universality allows someone to share your experience without necessarily identifying or consoling it.

 

Trying to capture the psychological motion of “an ending” is difficult without the use of a figure or any characters, and even more so when it is an experimental non-linear story. The displacement of time may be recorded contextually in minute details like a missing cup from the establishing shot in the closing shots or in the different colour liquid being poured out. It may even be recorded within post-edits to highlight certain details.

 

Through camera and lens knowledge the representation of duality occurs. A withdrawal as well as an appeal. Disorienting editing creates moods that are further detached and yet unyielding. The film must be watched several time to understand it despite its pace being extremely slow. For one to notice that intimacy is created by allowing the camera to get closer as emotion grows, or by reversing time in order to hold the viewer in an interval, it takes the cognitive mapping Jameson earlier introduced us to. To capture emotion, or drama or anything in cinematography requires no formula, but one integral thing – when we see the character’s feel this emotion. Therefore, the gaze becomes consequentially important. For the viewer to easily feel the emotion the character’s reaction must be portrayed.  If we can see the grief, we can identify. The question arises when emotion needs to be created without the use of a character or their face to help ascertain. Hume and Kant’s idea of beauty and sublime within objects aid at classifying their powers or lack there-of in the film. It also aids to translate gaze within an object. If the viewer needs to be held in time as a gaze would suspend- then the object must be held in space, alone and for a period long enough for the viewer to both become intrigued and distracted. The object must now provide this gaze. If the director wants to pursue a feeling within a gaze, shot details are considered. Sometimes a Dutch angle or a can’t or even a choker shot is what will be the identifiable shot between, disorientation, power or intimacy.

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So, the camera is used to convey emotion. The whole story is told by camera and lens differences, details and delusions. The lens and camera allow you to observe or miss the particulars chosen by the directors and cinematographers. As Tarkovsky elegantly puts it, “In cinema it is all the more the case that observation is the first principle of the image, which always has been inseparable from the photographic record. The film image is made incarnate, visible and four dimensional” (Tarkovsky, 107). Not only do we feel emotion but we feel a fluid experience all because of the camera. The fluid experience can result in a comforting environment but also in the smooth evolution throughout the duration of the film. Consistency within shot transitions allows the viewer to grasp at something to follow through towards the end, especially as many something’s are conspiring in the background or foreground. Again, it also aids the viewer to transition through the whole film despite it being a non-linear narrative.

 

Another cinematographic references that alludes to smooth transition is music and sound. The sound has repetitive qualities that allow the long film to renew itself to the viewer. As Tarkovsky discusses in Sculpting in time and as aforementioned, “The refrain brings us back to our first experience of entering that poetic world, making it immediate and at the same time renewing it” (Tarkovsky, 158). Remaining consistent and a constant for the viewer. It allows the viewer to experience calm within existential dread. It further allows the viewer to experience the duality of an “end”: the haunting and eerie as well as the calm and soothing.  Just like visually how the minimalism of melancholia is juxtaposed with the kitsch (i.e gaudiness or glamour of gold trimmed cups), with noises we can accomplish juxtapositions and various impacts that would seem otherwise ridiculous.

 

            After considering the installation as an experience entirely and analyzing the individual components, it can be concluded:

 

Etc, etc, etc… The End

 

Works Cited

 

Buhner, Stephan Harrod. The Skill of Duende. n.d.

 

Grau, Oliver. "Intermedia Stages of Virtual Reality in the Twentieth Century: Art as Inspiration of Evolving Media ." Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion . n.d.

 

Heidegger, Martin. Memorial Address. n.d.

 

Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” Aesthetics: a comprehensive Anthology, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p. 103‐112.

 

Jameson, Fredric. “from 'The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'.” From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Cahoone, Blackwell Publishing, 2012, p. 564‐574.

 

Kant, Immanuel. “On Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis.” Critique of Judgment, Translated by Werner Pluhar, Hackett Publishing, 1987, p. 159‐162.

 

“Melancholia: Depression on Film.” YouTube, uploaded by Nerdwriter1, 6 April 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPkANZ9HGWE.

 

TarkovskiiÌ, AndreiÌ Arsenevich. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, University of Texas Press, 2014.