Lungs to Ears
In her artist statement, Sarah Bliss describes herself as “a filmmaker, artist, educator, and Buddhist practitioner who facilitates presence and attunement with the sensate, desiring body.” She works artisanally with hand-processed film but also welcomes digital video and performance into her practice, as Transit(ive) demonstrates. A key characteristic of current film performances is their tendency to bring the traditionally unseen projection event to the fore and to explore the physical properties of film. Unlike live performances, in the case of Transit(ive) the original 16mm film projection was captured by a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera without losing its haptic qualities, as I shall explain.
The act of expiration, literally “breathing out,” is often associated with death. Transit(ive) is a video document of death and loss, as well as a techno-spiritual reunion with the artist’s father following his death.[16] The night he died, she recorded his fading breathing, which later became the video’s audio track. As she indicates, the noun “transit” and its adjective “transitive” have many meanings.
In common usage, a transit is a journey. It is also the vehicle or the system that makes a journey possible. In astronomy, a transit is the passage of a lesser body across the sun. In engineering, a transit is an optical instrument, a telescope, which very precisely measures the relationship between objects.[17]
Several days after her father’s passing, Bliss struggled to comprehend what had happened to that entity she had known as her father. She would discover that light from a 16mm projector could act as a form of transit because it allowed her to make the relationship to her father’s disembodied spirit material. In her studio, she threaded clear leader through the projector and switched it on. The beam of light emanating from the projector’s bulb passed through the leader, ran past the lens, across the room, and onto a wall. She darkened the room and let the audio memo of her father’s final breaths fill the space, allowing herself to be open to whatever might happen. As she watched the transit of light resulting from her setup and listened to the recording, she felt his strong presence in the room. She yearned to touch him, but when she reached out, she found herself touching the projector’s lens: “I began to caress the lens, and instantaneously, the light on the wall responded. It rippled, swelled, and danced. It faded, burnt out, surged forward again. Shape-shifting, it answered my touch.”[18]
Transit(ive) was initially conceived as a live projection performance. However, after several attempts, Bliss realized that the translation or reinterpretation of the 16mm projection by a DSLR’s video camera lent the image a distinctive, vibrant pulse. As Bliss explains, “the pulsations of the digital medium, created during the DSLR’s video capture of film projection (as opposed to video made from a digital scan of celluloid film) are the result of two factors: flicker created by the camera’s capture of the black frame made with each closure of the projector’s shutter, and the camera’s blending of film frames, the result of the unequal frame rates of projector and DSLR (which are not exactly the same even if the camera is set to 24fps.).”[19] Bliss emphasizes how fundamental these visual artifacts are to the work, stating that “they explicitly record the physical traces through which objects communicate.”[20] The original sound recording of her father's breath, perceptible throughout the film, was then added as a separate audio track.
During the first fifteen seconds of the video – remember, we are watching a video of a film and not the film projection itself – we face a black screen. Then, a white rectangle of light with rounded corners (a hallmark of 16mm projection) appears; for the remaining six minutes of the film, we witness its morphing and shapeshifting with mesmerized fascination. At times, the light completely fills the frame; in other instances, the shape of the light changes as part of the frame is obscured by the filmmaker’s fingers. The bright light emitted by the projector bulb and traveling through the transparent leader has nothing ethereal about it. Instead, we perceive thin vertical scratches and, on several occasions, magnified dust particles, resulting from the leader’s own transit through the projector. As Bliss points out, there are actual dust and scratches on the celluloid leader. These are visible in the image the film projector throws onto the wall. The DSLR records all of these material relics in the projected image.[21]
The traces of mechanical impairment on the surface demonstrate that photochemical film is a fragile substance. At the same time, dust accumulation can be seen as “another relic of things past,”[22] as Bliss puts it. About three minutes into the video/film, the light beam from the projector starts to twist, distort, and contort, and the flat rectangle eventually turns into a three-dimensional, constantly morphing, soft-edged light sculpture. In material terms, the filmmaker achieved this striking effect by manually manipulating the lens – Bliss calls it “caressing” – lengthening and shortening it so as to soften or sharpen the image.
After this somewhat detailed description of the visuals, we can examine how image and sound are interrelated in Transit(ive). The cell phone Bliss used to record her father’s breath as he lay dying was, simply, a pragmatic choice, as it happened to be the only device she had at hand. The phone, similar to the projector, can be considered a “transit” or a vehicle, since it enabled her to journey in time and space and to reunite with her father. On the soundtrack, his strenuous struggle for air – moaning, groaning, snoring, and gasping at varying intensities, punctuated by phases of silence – is palpably present. These aural traces of breathing, along with the abstract but nonetheless “corporeal” visuals, come across as an intensified manifestation of physicality. They are directly related to the body – both the father’s lungs and the filmmaker’s fingers operating the lens – and redirect us to haptic modes of looking and listening.
How the filmmaker listens to her father’s utterances during the making of Transit(ive) can be identified as haptic listening. A slight ground noise is present in the breathing memo, produced by the mobile phone’s built-in microphone. External factors, like the phone’s closeness to the sound source, also affect the sound quality. The recording exhibits an “uneven” flow, a term employed by Michel Chion to refer generally to materializing sound indices. These “unevennesses in the course of a sound […] denote a resistance, breach, or hitch in the movement or the mechanical process producing the sound” (Chion 1994: 115).
Bliss’s affective reaction to the recording is not only due to its source (her father’s breathing) or its meaning (an expression of one’s end of life) but also to its not-entirely-perfect quality. Even the final digital version of Transit(ive) compels the viewer – and the listener – to resort to haptic modes of perception. Manual interaction with the projector lens, the destabilizing pulse induced by the digital re-filming, and the magnified scratches and dust all convey a tactile, visual experience. Similarly, the sense of touch is essential when it comes to listening, as it directs attention to the textural surface of the sounds. Focusing on the tonal and rhythmic qualities of the breath brings the listener close to this surface and privileges a sensory reaction from lungs to ear.