For
me, Carolee Schneemann’s 16mm film Fuses (1964-1967)
is the ideal place to begin this project. It’s a remarkably complex film around
which many of my ideas of liquidy bodies have crystallized. It acted as the
introductory example of work to the Jonathan Katz lecture I discussed in the
last post, and I was recently lucky enough to see a remastered version of the
film at a screening of Erotic
Experimental Films of the 60s at the Centre Segal, curated by one of McGill’s
own English professors, Ara Osterwell. In an uncharacteristically delineated
manner, I’d like to break down the different ways that “liquidy intelligences”
operate in this film. It’s not a structure I intend to follow with every post,
but since the watery influences are so multilayered in Fuses, I believe it will be a good exercise to get my juices
flowing, so to speak (pardon the pun, and expect plenty more to come…)
1.
Fluid
Sexual Bodies
Fuses depicts Schneemann having sex in
the afternoon with her then partner, the composer James Tenney, as observed by
their cat, Kitch. The content is disjointed, without a deliberate narrative,
and their bodies collapse and flow into each other in a series of overlaid
images. As Katz indicated, this frenetic treatment of filmic content was an
effort to merge male and female genitalia together, to dissolve the
distinctions between separate bodies during the act of heterosexual
intercourse. There is something beautifully intimate about this film –
self-shot by Schneemann, the only participants in the entire endeavour are
those depicted on screen: Schneemann, her lover, her cat. A typical
subject/object binarism does not apply here: Schneemann is at once filmmaker
and filmed body, and nor is their sexual relationship about the objectification
of one body for the pleasure of another: as Schneemann has written about the
project on her own website:
I
wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to
what I felt-- the intimacy of the lovemaking... And I wanted to put into that
materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves
and recombines and is transparent and dense-- as one feels during lovemaking...
It is different from any pornographic work that you've ever seen-- that's why
people are still looking at it! And there's no objectification or fetishization
of the woman.
2.
Flowing
Vision
Which brings me
to my next point: Fuses supports a
mode of vision that is fundamentally decentered and affectively charged. If
typical heterosexual pornography is based upon the clear visualization of sex;
a voyeuristic pleasure in seeing the (typically penetrative) act in its
entirety, Schneemann’s deliberately obscured and feverish images seem to imply the bodily experience of sexual desire
over a clear/logical/’dry’ visual representation of its actions. This fluid
form of seeing could reflect what Laura U. Marks (in her amazing book The Skin of the Film, which I will be
undoubtedly referring to throughout this project) has imagined as a “haptic” mode
of visuality: a multi-sensory – almost synesthetic – form of seeing developed
by experimental film and video artists, which collapses the distance between
viewer and viewed, allowing the eye to graze across the screen like a caress:
Haptic images are erotic in that they
construct an intersubjective relationship between beholder and image. The
viewer is called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, to engage with the
traces the image leaves. By interacting up close with an image, close enough
that figure and ground comingle, the viewer relinquishes her own sense of
separatedness from the image – not to know it, but to give herself up to her
desire for it. (The Skin of the Film, 183).
If a typically
optical (or dry/static/mechanical, to borrow from Jeff Wall’s dichotomy) mode
of seeing is one that maintains a separation between viewer and viewed,
Schneemann’s radically fluid form of vision could threaten to engulf the viewer
entirely, problematizing our seemingly coherent and concrete position as separate from that which we gaze upon.
What could it mean, as a viewer, to be seduced/dissolved/subsumed into
Schneemann’s Fuses? Could a complete
dissolution ever occur, or does that remain a fantasy, a fleeting sensation?
3.
The
Liquid Capacities of Film
Lastly, in Fuses Schneemann has exerted a liquidy
influence over the materiality of the film itself. Having repeatedly burnt,
scratched, collaged, and layered abstract impressions and colours across the
celluloid, Schneemann’s film seems to crackle, ooze, and undulate across the
screen. Her film is by no means a static medium – its liquidy, entropic
degradation is emphasized as a deliberate feature of Schneemann’s endeavour. It
strikes me that her film treatment is all too appropriate for her subject
matter: both the desire/intimacy she depicts and the damaged film she employs
are equally fragile and frenzied, creating rich, embodied, yet precarious forms
of engagement that seem to collapse sensory experiences typically understood as
separate into a complex mass of feeling: I see the overlaid images/feel the
film’s scratched textures/smell its burnt chemical processes, just as I see
Schneemann and Tenney’s intertwined bodies/feel their caresses/hear their
whispers and moans. The links I’m providing here don’t really do it justice,
but watching Fuses in its entirety is
a remarkably decentering, intimate, and alluring experience. A bit racy – but
the perfect place to start my project!
Links:
Fuses
on Ubuweb –
Fuses on
Youtube – I’m including this shorter clip as well because the quality is
significantly better than the Ubuweb version – although it has some obnoxious
music added, feel free to mute it:
Discussion of Fuses on Schneemann’s own website:
Info on that screening I went to at
the Centre Segal –
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