In the cinema, a black screen envelops viewers in darkness. In the absence of images, the dark space forms an indefinite continuity between the screen and the audience. When we can’t see anything, we begin to feel the atmosphere more strongly in our whole bodies. A tension arises in the darkness between being ‘pulled into the film’ and being pushed out of it, left to our own devices. As Robert Misek has shown, the black screen can be utilized in film for a range of effects: to create tension and refer to the approaching unknown; to mark a temporal transition or jump in the story; to reflect something invisible or absent; or to draw attention to the mediality of cinema and point out the discontinuities in human perception.38 As specific as the different purposes of the black screen may be, its effects remain ambiguous. Precisely because it does not show anything and spreads darkness, it allows the images (and sounds) preceding it and following it to develop a different effect. In this sense, the black screen can be understood as a blank space – not flat, but ‘hollow’: a resonating body for affect.
The black screen became particularly relevant for me in the editing process when it came to the subject of Alzheimer: as an interruption in the flow of images and thoughts, as a placeholder for missing images, as a vacuum or as a default state signaling absence; but also creating space for viewers to produce their own images in the broadest sense (ideas, thoughts etc.).
Illustrating the experience of disintegrating memory by inserting black screens might seem to make sense, but it means disregarding the complexity of dementia. Rather than focusing on the failure of memory, I searched for a means of making cognitive confusion comprehensible through film. Asynchronous temporal perception in dementia does not consist in the vanishing of images or of the present, but rather the opposite: the experience of being in the here and now of a different time. It is no longer possible to make sense of the images [A is for Archive, for Automobile].
What breaks down in dementia is the notion of memory: do mental images stop being memories just because the words to describe them and narrate them no longer come to mind [X]? And if memory is no longer perceived as memory, but as the present – how is the present perceived?
In the film-essay Face No Dial of a Clock I experimented with using an extract from interview transcripts with Alois Alzheimer, among other things, to evoke the breakdown of cognitive connections between perceptions, mental images and the ways in which those images are named, located, and communicated, using an alternating montage sequence. The black screen which is used often throughout the film-essay – whether to separate sequences, to emphasize the image on the other half of the screen, or to shift our attention to the voiceover –, has a self-reflective force here: we are asked not to see darkness simply as a standard background, filling the gaps between images or making these gaps visible, but instead to perceive darkness itself as a phenomenon representing absence-presence, separation-connection and surface-depth simultaneously.
An example: while the voiceover quotes the interview transcript of the doctor with his first Alzheimer patient, Auguste Deter, the double image shifts between different outdoor views of a care center and the suspension of images. Arhythmically, the sequence of image/no image alternates with the pattern of questions and answers. The confusion expressed in the answers of the patient is reflected in discontinuities in the flow of images. However, in this montage sequence, I was not concerned with the parallels between displacements in images and in the mind, but with the destabilization and disruption of meanings and the possible effects and affects which are caused by this. If images/perceptions and words stop being comprehensible in common sense terms, they become a source of pressure. For such a state of being lost, the black screens in this sequence seem to me to be an in-between space offering protection, a refuge in a hollow space where viewers are kept and shielded from the images, which become incomprehensible surfaces, disconnected from each other. Even when an image or a word no longer makes any sense, it can still have an emotional effect. The relationship between an image as a space of thought (Denkraum) – such as the image of a reversed sign with the word Anmeldung, meaning ‘registration’ – and the black screen as an absence (as the ‘nothingness’ when memory does not function) – can flip in this way: what is visually recognizable is confusing, ambiguous, whereas the darkness that follows offers space. Not simply as a pause between impressions that demand interpretation, but as a momentary liberation from the requirement that what is being shown should be recognizable: the darkness of the black screen is as much a spatial phenomenon as a material one, and remains ambiguous between dark depths (through the lack of light) and black surface (through materials that absorb light).39 The sense of a refuge in the darkness should be evoked by this indefinability and opacity, in which the boundaries are dissolved between external and internal perceptions.
Having gained these insights from the editing process, I introduced a third form alongside the possibilities of image and black screen – the grey screen. This made it possible to interpose a contrasting element among the black screens, underlining the spatial aspect of perception beyond the visual: the grey screen not only interrupts the flow of images but also disturbs our immersion in the film, of which the black screen is also a part, given its conventional associations. The greyness briefly makes the film or computer screen come to the fore, and should thus create a sense of distance to the device showing the film, and to the viewing situation. In contrast with the black screen, the grey screen is lighter, and due to this subtle difference the grey screen tends to draw attention to the surface of the device. This can lead to different effects depending on the context and the device: if a grey screen is projected onto a screen in a dark space, the reflection of light on the white background can emphasize the relative nature of the black screen. Black appears as a darker grey, because as soon as even a small amount of light is projected, the white projection screen reflects this dimly into the surrounding space, so that darkness becomes perceptible as a volume as the film is screened. However, if the grey screen is shown in a light room on a computer screen, it seems dull and graphical in contrast with the black screen – it lacks any sense of depth. But here, too, this means that our attention can be shifted to the viewing situation: the dull-seeming surface of the grey LCD screen is unfamiliar, because even when it is switched off (black) or on standby (usually blue), the screen shines or glows. The grey screen leads us to perceive the black screen as nuanced and ambiguous – not absolute (nothingness), but dark (relative, changing).
A Denkraum, or space for thought, is present when the meanings of what is being shown remain open and uncertain, and recipients themselves have to become thinkers. Not everything becomes clear, clarified, explicable. “Actually, the thinker does not think, but rather transforms himself into an area of intellectual experience, without simplifying it.”40 As Adorno points out in his influential text, ‘The Essay as Form’, in this kind of thinking – for me, the essay is a form of Denkraum – different strands and directions are woven together “as in a carpet,” and “the fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of this texture.”41 While Adorno understood the essay exclusively as a textual form which could not be translated into any other medium, Nora Alter reflects in her discussion of audio-visual essays that video technology seems to be particularly suited to density as a Denkraum, since it offers recipients an active role beyond viewing itself, through the possibility of rewinding and pausing. “The form of experience that is thereby produced is not unlike the traditional reading of a difficult text in which it is not uncommon for the reader to pause and reread particularly complex passages.”42
The fragmentary character of the essay lies in the combination of density and incompleteness. This tension, along with the complexity of the content, is reinforced in film essays by the various connections that are possible between sound and image. The voiceover in the film-essay Face No Dial of a Clock is mainly asynchronous with the images [G is for Gutter / H is for Historical Present] and evokes a situation which joins the visible double images as a third, imagined image [J is for Juxtaposition]. Thus, for example, in the opening sequence, in which the narrator describes a dialogue between two women who disagree about the beginning of spring, the motif of the calendar is brought to mind. In the lefthand image, we look through a window at a dim landscape during a heavy snowfall and a busy road, while a small child chatters unintelligibly. In the righthand image, there is a bathtub; there is no movement apart from the water dripping from the tap and falling rhythmically into the bath. There are many possible ways of ‘reading’ this constellation, and the search for connections between the elements brings up questions: what do I associate with the beginning of spring? Why should someone ‘claim’ that spring has begun? When does a calendar become useless? Depending on the question, doors open to different spaces of thought, but whatever happens, this is a searching, questioning entry into the process of thinking.
The thinking to be done by recipients in an essay is not closed or representable in the sense of a finished idea, a treatise or an argumentation, but is instead an interplay between certainty and uncertainty, and readers have to enter into this.43 Thinking in, during, and with the film, and therefore producing filmic thought, necessarily requires a balancing act between the images as occasions for thought – stimuli for viewers’ own thought processes – and coherence in viewers’ thinking as they continue to follow the film and grasp the threads of the topic. As a time-based medium, film requires chronological viewing and sets the tempo of the process of perception, within which fragmentary montage can open up spaces of thought through nonlinear configurations. In contrast with an essayistic installation, in which cinematic montages are translated into the spatial, as I was able to explore in an art space as a test project [Z is for Zettelkasten]: the Denkraum opens up in a spatial setting through very different conditions, as the viewer has to relate the elements in the physical space to each other without temporal limitations, and can then concentrate on viewing the individual fragments of film. Film-based exhibitions are characterized by lateral “doubled montage” (Mieke Bal).44 After the experiment with installation, I decided on the form of a film-essay as one of my PhD pieces,45 because I realized that the chronology of film viewing as a precondition is more suitable for the thought-motifs I develop.
‘Thought-motifs’ is my term for the elements which emerge, in my engagement with asynchronicity, as objects and motivations for thinking about heterogeneous temporalities. On the one hand, thought-motifs can be seen as the results of my film-based research process. In this case, they are evidence of a past thought process in the editing of the film. On the other hand, thought-motifs can also be understood as elements which are only actually realized in the process of reception: like the motifs in a musical score, thought-motifs are nudges, hints, tips, and encouragement to think. In other words, their potential only unfolds when the film is viewed. Thought-motifs only emerge in the film-essay Face No Dial of a Clock in the course of the film, setting thinking in motion – gently and imperceptibly, or suddenly and abruptly – when something is repeated, insisted on, or connected with something else, or when something flashes up, strikes us, sticks in our minds. This something cannot be captured in words, and nor can it be represented by a single image, because it contains complex questions, relationships, similarities and differences.46 To return to the example of the opening sequence discussed above: the thought-motif of the calendar (if it is to be labelled with a word after all) then reappears later in the film in a different way, explicitly in a shot in the École Internationale in which we see the pages of a 1932 calendar, or in the scene in which Jacob shows me the calendar hanging on the fridge, and indirectly in the repeated images of landscapes which were filmed in different seasons. Thought-motifs can be visual, auditory and/or conceptual. They can be understood as material for thinking, as the smallest units that can be woven together into a mental image [S is for Socks], like the weaving together of different threads which combine to form the pattern of a carpet.
