Whether in everyday metaphors or in poetry, language testifies to physical sensation as the link between interior and external experience. Thus, the philosopher Michel Serres discusses the ambiguity of the French word temps, which means both time and weather, and concludes that in the emerging urban, globalized and technological cultures, our abstract phrases for time are mainly disconnected from our physical exposure to different weather conditions.133 He argues that despite this (or because of it), language remains reliant on physio-motoric orientation and connection with our physical surroundings, particularly in order to transmit emotional and mental experiences. This is reminiscent of Siri Hustvedt’s essay in which she questions the binary notion of body and soul and its implications, and seeks images in language which think of emotions beyond this duality [H is for Historical Present]. “Our bodies and their locations in space are vital to our conscious thinking lives. […] Our spirits rise and fall. Inside and outside metaphors are continually at work. […] Our moods are light or dark but can also be blue.”134
Where there is a bus at all, it only runs every two hours and there is always some distance to walk. If you look at the early history of these institutions, one of the home managers tells me, what were then called “asylums” were always built outside of town, isolated.
Although the three research days are far apart in location and in time, I get rain each time, on all three arrivals. So I always check in at the reception in wet clothes. Maybe it’s the fickle weather that rubs off on my mood, or maybe it’s the other way around: that I recognize my mixed feelings in the mirror of the sky.
Extract from the voiceover of the film-essay Face No Dial of a Clock, 01:40–02:40
The voiceover of the film-essay uses language partly to convey diffuse feelings, perceptions and experiences. The relationship between language and image is not illustrative, and nor is it metaphorical. The use of montage aims to make bodily experience the starting point for thinking, through the adoption, repetition, and shifting of motifs of physical observations from interior to exterior and vice versa. For example, the wet clothes which cling heavily to my skin and make me think about the fact that these dementia care centers are not easily reached without a car, and about what that can mean for relatives who want to visit regularly. The wet clothes also make me aware of how vulnerable the body is as soon as it is outside of buildings, unequipped or poorly equipped, and exposed to the weather.
The body, according to Michel Serres, is constantly busy synchronizing itself with polychrony.135 Chronometric temporality, he argues, is only one level of the present with which the body is occupied. It is equally dependent on meteorological and biological coordination, although in the everyday experience of privileged living spaces in western society, these temporalities can be obscured or regulated by a host of technologies and systems (electricity, heating, air-conditioning, insurance, healthcare systems, transport, global markets, etc.). In this sense, the polychronic mélange of chronometric, biological, and meteorological temporalities which Serres evokes is more than a “remembering back” to natural rhythms. Instead, it is about initiating thought processes on the basis of bodily experiences, thought processes which should help us to be more attentive in our encounters with diverse, complex relations: from those inside our bodies to social relations, ecological relations (e.g. using jetlag as a basis to think about our concepts of health), global transportation of goods and people, right up to our contemporary relationship with the more-than-human world.
Eigenzeit (literally ‘own time’), meaning processes of growth, learning, and change which take place through cyclical events and need a specific length of time, can be found in many places in nature, including the seasons. In the film-essay, motifs of natural processes are examined to uncover their effects: how are they connected with individual human Eigenzeit? How is our health and state of mind affected by processes observable in nature?
In the parallel image and sound sequences, the film-essay tries in two ways – in what is being represented, and in the form of representation – to make use of cyclical time. One such sequence, repeating itself in varying ways, came about from parallel shots of the same landscape – the camera pans over fields and hills, so that at one point we see it simultaneously in spring and in late summer, and later in late summer and winter. As the film is viewed, the combination of several temporalities should be palpable as a physical implication: watching these simultaneous sequences, it is not about perceiving the linear passing of time through images of ‘the same place at two different points in time’, but instead the interaction involved in comparison enables the gaze to circulate between the two images. My intention is that the invitation to relate the simultaneous temporal components to each other in the moment of viewing should give rise to a flowing kind of viewing, in which the body of the viewer is positioned ‘between the seasons’ [J is for Juxtaposition]. A cyclical concept of time becomes a physical experience as soon as our own lives are understood as part of the cycle.
After more than forty minutes in which we almost constantly hear talking, the moment in the film-essay when our gaze wanders across the landscape and only the surrounding noises of the birds and the air can be heard takes on a powerful quietness. Perhaps the last sentences of the voiceover re-echo, explaining that the cycle tracker is a measure against fertility issues and praising it as a lifelong surveillance device for the female body. But perhaps the wordless sequence also causes thought to fall silent. Such scenes ‘without words’, first in the sense of a lack of language within the scene, or moments without comment, pauses in the voiceover, are when viewers are able to let their thoughts wander, and perhaps also trigger mute communication between internal promptings and the visible.
According to Siegfried Kracauer, a film recording can only unfold the reality of such “psychophysical correspondences”136 when it reflects an indeterminacy. Natural objects – Kracauer names a gloomy landscape or a laughing face as examples – have cultural meanings, but these can change depending on the context. Thus, the somber landscape, depending on the context, can also mean “defiant intrepidity”, and the laughing face can mean “hysterical fear”.137
“Natural objects, then, are sourrounded with a fringe of meanings liable to touch off various moods, emotions, runs of inarticulate thoughts; in other words, they have a theoretically unlimited number of psychological and mental correspondences. […] It is not only the given objects which function as stimuli; psychological events also form nuclei, and of course they on their part have physical correspondences.”138
In my use of landscape sequences, I also see similarities with what the film critic Noël Burch has described as “pillow shots”.139 These are characterized as insertions which interrupt the narrative without a clear reason and which do not explicitly contribute anything to it. In a shot which is usually still, a visual element – a landscape, a room empty of people – is shown for considerable time, without anything happening in the sense of a plot. Despite or because of the laconic nature of what is being shown (garden hedge, washing line, huts, electricity masts, etc.), these scenes communicate a feeling, an atmosphere (such as peace or calm). And even without the shot allowing us to recognize an (unambiguous) symbolic meaning, it enables a range of emotional resonances.140 Like subjective camerawork, which lets the observer see what the character sees, pillow shots are able to transfer the invisible feelings of a character to the viewer, or at least to give the viewer time to trace those feelings.
