THE TIME OF HANDS
If the off-camera exists, it means that we can see without seeing. The most common, the most readable, isn’t even necessary to be shown in order to be seen. The cinema would be this huge construction of the off-camera where things acquire this strange status, to be recognized with a minimum of images. […]
To center is to decide what will be filmed, what will be shown, seen, viewed, in the continuity of a metamorphosis, made visible through the spatial and temporal continuity of the framing. The continuous allows to preserve what is surprising. When I film a body, I film all of it, without any framing, with the topographies being quite complex so that fragmentations, duplications and multiplications can happen, and even more striking that they could not have been predicted. Each time that I film a larger entity there is a decision to be made: a troop, a crowd, a flow, an architecture, a museum, a fight, a parade, a crossroads, a shopping mall, a highway, an airport, a city, the sea, the sky, a mountain range, a swarm, a forest, what makes this ensemble unique? What are the limits: the group, some people, the whole scene? What is important is to keep the framing, to stay on the inside and that nothing misses in order to understand the image. What surges then is the unsettling truth of what is visible, still in excess of what is expected. In the same way, I choose to center a part, it’s this part that can become a whole. […]
There are two kinds of images: the centrifugals (who discard themselves on the common places of the off-camera and who exclude all the unexpected from their framing) and centripetals, who stand in the framing and accept everything that was unexpected.
The hands and teeth have a different status, we must first understand that, with Leroi-Gourhan, it is the hand that talks and the useful gesture is a matter of teeth. The hand is always carrier of sense, saturated of meaning. It indicates, points, indexes, demonstrates, prohibits and tells stories, the history of painting is there to illustrate. All the instruments, tools, machines, the crushing molars that have become bifacial, hammer and rolling mill train, canine needles, punches and nails, incisors knives and jigsaw. The face around the mouth, the neck under the jaw, the arms at the end of the hands, are there like temporary impossibilities of the framing, as if the hands and the teeth could not escape out of the frame of the words and the instruments anymore.
Filming the hands would thus mean accepting this pairing of gesture and speech, hands and teeth, and finding the means to maintain the framing. Working on the erasure of the off-camera through the framing. It is also demonstrating that we have to film centripetal at all cost in order to resist the purely illustrative image (in the service of politics, of morality and of the narrative).
[…] This work on the hands started when our hands and our faces became our enemies, due to hygiene, the large-scale factory of the enemy today. It was necessary to find the right framing, after realizing that all communicational processes that have been distanced passed through images that were completely off-camera: the internet image, Skype or Zoom, is an unreadable image, of an insulting mediocrity, that needs to be understood as a definitive victory of the off-camera, which has entered the framing of the “normal” image: we cannot see anything except for what we know we need to see.
[…] It is by working the framing as a duration that I have realized the importance of the “temporal straitjacket”. The use of time, analyzed by Hartmut Rosa, is today without any doubt the principal technique of behavioral training. While being called and copied on the rhythm of technical objects, the “temporal straitjacket” prohibits any room for liberty through the proliferation of a daily agenda that is infinitely subdivided. This prosthetic temporality dictates a succession of tasks that has definitely erased the wanderings of the living, living of which remains only the dimension granted to the technique. We know that there is an affinity in the principle between the living and the technique since Gyzmau and Thyngumee, but that this affinity is being transformed by the power and the principle of overwhelming submission, the more we live it and the less we are aware of this.
This temporal logic can be found on all levels of daily life. The result is a shocking succession of unchanging rituals – and independent psychological structures […] If we take the example of the evening grooming, the brushing of the teeth generally takes a place in the ritual that will not be changed. It comes in its own time, always preceded by the same ablution and followed by another ablution that is not interchangeable. And the washing of the teeth itself is subject to this law, applicable to all the chosen sequences, no matter how small they are: the beginning starts inevitably by the same tooth, followed by another one, and the time that is unequally divided between each dental enamel surface rigorously identical day after day, as little variation as the order in which the surfaces of successive skin are considered washed during a shower. Our small habits that have been shook by the virus, the suffocation that the confinement should have liberated us from, should have appeared at least as empty as the threat that covides us. But.
Filming the way that people wash their hands by the time that this gesture acquires a vital importance, is often remembering that washing our hands has always been, since the beginning of hygiene, a question of life or death, and it is testing this habit that summarizes these injunctions of living to avoid death: for too long confined in time in order not to feel the confinement in the space as being surprisingly normal. So, I asked people who were once close to me and now far – and to people who were once far from me and now close due to the confinement that we suffered together – to film from far their ritual of washing their hands. To film the gestures, without any water or soap in their succession that is both idiosyncratic and common.
To film using Skype, this absurd way of communicating in the denied defilement of the image of its speaker becoming a pure technical index of its identity in the most administrative sense of the word, permanent damage of the dignity of the face. To film without knowing that these sessions would come. I have taken over certain gestures, I have tried to understand them in order to see them in their invisible strangeness in the beginning, but, if I play them in front of the camera, they thicken to become more and more invisible. How to reconcile, the time of the watch, the time of the prosthetics, and the density of the organ? Or how to leave them be irreconciled? I am only at the start of this, but I already see the time of hands rising, a time that has nothing to do.
Laurent Goldring