“While automobiles are driving, light bulbs are glowing, theatres are playing Mozart, and physicists in Dahlem are describing the state of an atom based on measurable frequencies and the intensity of its spectral lines, pandemonium breaks out nearby and bares its teeth.”1
This series of images evoking the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous was composed by Ernst Bloch in 1935.2 With the category of “nonsynchronism”,3 he tries to capture the way in which society is shaped by different speeds of development, and to show that different experiences of reality (including differences between the city and the country, class structures, etc.) and psychic states (such as the juxtaposition of rationality and irrationality, the archaic, and forms of psychological regression4) lead to the coexistence of heterogeneous temporal structures. “Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, through the fact that they can be seen today.”5
Technically speaking, a camera only records that external existence. In order to differentiate between different “Nows,” the language of film has developed perspectives through which an external gaze can, through particular effects such as shaky camerawork, shifting angles, and blurred focus, be perceived as a subjective perspective.6 In the different situations found in the case studies in my research – a boy starting school, data about the cycles of busy women, and care concepts for people with dementia – it was important to me from the beginning that heterogeneous perceptions (of time) should be made visible, through camerawork alongside other means. The aim of collecting material about the different temporalities of the present was connected with the task of exploring the heterogeneous materiality of the footage, and of demonstrating that heterogeneity, e.g. by incorporating the viewing of archival images or snippets from television reports into my own recordings. Nor did the material I filmed in the different case-study locations arise systematically or coherently in a uniform film language – partly because I was experimenting with different cameras.7 My field research was therefore also designed as an investigation of the effects of filming techniques on (temporal) perceptions.
As a piece of apparatus, the camera plays a crucial role in determining the visual language of a film, because the way it is used is shaped by its technical characteristics, as is the resulting image quality. I built what I called a ‘looking glass camera’ [V as in Viewfinder], combining analogue optics with a digital recording format. This was an instrument with which I could experiment with the possibilities of capturing and documenting heterogeneous “Nows” or present times. When working with the looking glass camera, the image corresponds to the field of vision through the viewfinder, marked by a central finder lens and optically defamiliarized by the Fresnel lens. This meant that while filming, I was constantly reminded of the fact that I was recording fragments and that the images must be seen as material. Rather than documenting a reality, the looking glass camera allowed me to develop a visual language in which the process of seeing itself becomes part of what is being observed, and there is a constant awareness of the images as material.
The ‘aesthetic’ of the images recorded via the viewfinder of the medium format camera is reminiscent of celluloid film – particularly due to the format, the grain, the (lack of) sharpness and the optically dimmed colors. A ‘look’ is associated with the images, making them ambiguous in terms of their temporal classification.
After all, how do we orientate ourselves visually in time? What allows us to recognize the time from which a recording originates? If, for example, we see an image of a tree on a hill, we can probably guess the season and perhaps also the time of day. But in order to guess the period in which the photograph was taken, we have to rely on other clues. If a car is driving through the landscape in the picture, the car’s model is an indication of whether we are more likely to be in the 1950s, the 1980s, or the present. At the same time, aspects of media aesthetics such as image format, depth of focus and resolution offer further indications of when the image could have been created, and how. The looking glass camera creates images which hover between the time from which the objects in the image seem to originate, and the time associated with the ‘look’ of the pictures themselves. In the editing process, I endeavored to make this tension productive, using it to test out film translations of the temporal confusions with which I was confronted in the case study on dementia.
Dementia is commonly reduced to memory loss. But for the people living with dementia, the actual forgetting is not the problem, according to a provocative comment by Michael Schmieder, a former carer and director of the care home Sonnweid in Wetzikon, Canton Zurich. In our conversation, he pointed out that this is the perspective of healthy people who are afraid of losing their memories. In the experience of those suffering from dementia (and those caring for them), disorientation is much more dominant than the loss of memory.8 “People with dementia live in the here and now, although it is often unclear when in their lives so far their here and now is located.”9 They live in a subjective present which is situated in a time in their own past. If specific objects, activities or expressions which do not fit into the time they are experiencing interrupt the continuity, they become aware that something is wrong about the present. “As healthy people, we rarely live in the here and now,” says Schmieder, and asks whether it might not be our very inability to live in the present that makes dementia seem so threatening.10
When I walked around alone on my visits to care homes,11 I tried to use the potential of the looking glass camera so as to concentrate completely on the moment of finding myself in the present time [B is for Between]. Testing out filming as seeing: how do the care homes and their furnishings look through the looking glass camera? Can something be recognized in the images which is not visible to the naked eye or through a ‘normal camera’? To what extent is it possible to make simultaneous non-simultaneities perceptible through my looking glass camera? And, more generally: How do we orient ourselves in the Now? Can the looking glass camera draw attention to fractures in our perceptions of the present, or even cause them? The disorientation of people with dementia is created by such fractures as the time perceived as today suddenly turns out to be a subjectively different time which does not coincide with the general (collective) present time. The looking glass camera explores the experience of this asynchronicity; the recordings of the present (in the sense of a documentary approach) are defamiliarized (through the ‘look’, the viewfinder lens). But what is it that makes this ‘aesthetic’ disconcerting, creating a confusion of film temporalities among viewers of Face No Dial of a Clock?
For the film and media scholar Mary Ann Doane, there are always at least two temporalities12 at play in the medium of film: the present of the events being shown in real time (being in the film) and the simultaneous consciousness of the historicity of what is being shown (film is itself evidence of what has been; a document). In other words, every film is a feature film, because every film constructs what happens, which feels for the spectator as if it were happening right in front of their eyes and ears. And at the same time, every film is a documentary, because the audience can also analyze every shot as a recording of something that happened: traces of a particular moment in the past. That includes, for example, not just anachronistic cars, or styles which have gone out of fashion, but also the performance and vivacity of the actors, and ultimately traces of film technology itself. Both visible and audible elements, as well as the technology being used, mark the recordings with a date, meaning that they leave clues which make the film recordings a document of their time.
With digital film, a further factor joins the characteristics of dual temporality described by Doane for analogue film. This factor makes it even more difficult to classify film in terms of time. “Technologies such as the film strip, the hissing sound of video and other media-historical hallmarks are often ingrained in the visual language of archival film – they imbue this practice with a particular materiality; just as often, however, digital effects change the image and obscure both the original ‘carrier’ material and the referential indexicality.”13 As Catherine Russell explains in her discussion of film archives as a new language, which she calls archivology, the digital creation of images, in which postproduction becomes a central component, also changes the practices of the traditional found footage film.
The looking glass camera is neither an analogue nor a digital camera, but something in between, a hybrid. In the combination of analogue optics with digital technology, media aspects of temporal perception come into play which evoke an archival impression when we look at the material: the medium format of the camera creates analogue indexicality, and at the same time this appearance is disrupted by the recognizable eyepiece magnifier which is visible in the center of the image – we do not see what is being shown directly (through the lens), but are instead seeing a (digitally) recorded viewfinder field. This feature of the looking glass camera is telling, because it gives the recordings a different status: these images are neither full screen nor final, but are more like notes, raw material.
The digital phone camera which records the viewfinder image also records the black box of the viewfinder, in the middle of which a section of the wobbly, potential image can be seen. This moving image, framed by darkness, captures the searching, makeshift nature of this perspective. Even if material created in this way cannot be called found footage in a narrow sense, it is still based on a similar gesture: collecting images which we happen to find. Like a camera obscura, the looking glass camera optically transforms what can be seen in the field of vision into a (reversed) reflection of a different quality of light: softer, because the focal length is shorter than that of the human eye, and darker, because only a small amount of light is allowed into the body of the camera. The particular aesthetic (perception) created by this gives analogue film technology a certain pathos, which Doane attributes to an archival desire: “What is archived, then, would be the experience of presence. But it is the disjunctiveness of a presence relived, of a presence haunted by historicity.”14
While a conventional digital camera makes the everyday scenes and the surroundings of the care homes appear close to reality, in high-definition sharpness, when the same places are recorded through the dark, dusty lens of the looking glass camera, they appear slightly distant, as if they came from an ‘anticipated past’. Unlike the digital filters which can be added to smartphone recordings in a few seconds to create a ‘retro look’ (for example through different formats, black and white, or contrast), the looking glass camera is not designed to make images look ‘as if they were old’, but aims to destabilize our perceptions through the hybrid recording method, meaning that we reflect on the present and question it, as well as its seemingly ‘contemporary’ attributes, such as the sharpness of high definition resolution. In contrast with the experiences of dementia patients, whose perceptions of the present are interrupted by a foreign ‘future’, I try to use the medium format aesthetic to create an alienation effect, which draws viewers’ attention to the audio-visual aspects of temporal orientation, and can bring about moments in which their perceptions of the present are disrupted.
