16mm

1. One interesting facet of description, as a methodological approach, is that failure can be at least as instructive as success, if not more so. It is as Robert Smithson once proposed: ‘Why not reconstruct one’s inability to see?’ Indeed, this seems a fruitful way to approach 16mm. For what exactly do we see? The problem, I think, is that nothing is seen exactly. Or, more to the point, the film does not structure a way of seeing that is able to sustain a demand for exactness. This is not to say that it is blurry or imprecise, or that it counters exactness by offering us cinematic effects or visual metaphors of fuzziness. Quite on the contrary, we are presented to a rich and detailed flow of branches, leaves and different textures of bark. So it is not that we see things poorly, but that something in the way we see those images instils them with a deficit of objectivity. There is something rather inconsistent about the way they relentlessly glide by, something that

seems to frustrate all efforts of pinning them down satisfactorily.

2. Of course, the referent in question – the forest – has a history of provoking just such trouble. The German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, for example, was stunned by the ‘vegetal chaos’ of the rainforest, amidst which his gaze, anxious for a better perspective, found no room to step back. The Belgian photographer Marcel Gautherot, on the contrary, preferred to advance with his camera into the jungle and patiently wait for the right moment to take a shot (thus dispelling, as he jokingly put it, the urge ‘to cut down a whole forest’ in order to frame one particular tree he liked).1 What both attitudes attest to, albeit in quite different and often-suggestive ways, is the impulse to constitute the forest as an object of representation. 16mm displays a remarkably different approach in this respect; one that can be better grasped by the Tupí term Ka’aeté (deep forest),

which, as Daniel Steegmann explains, means ‘a place without history where things are not formed and the animals can metamorphose.’ Such a change of perspective can have profound implications. So, for instance, Bruno Latour’s ambitious argument for a renewed epistemology based on what he terms the ‘circulating reference’ mobilizes the forest as an example of the impossibility of casting the real and our representations of it as two poles in a relation of correspondence; scientific truth becomes instead one huge reconstruction of our inability to see.

3. 16mm was filmed with a device especially designed for that purpose. An overhead trolley was attached to the camera and connected to its motor so that for each metre of film that was shot the camera was similarly propelled one metre forward along a cable. As a result, the film consists of one long travelling shot that advances at a steady pace into the forest – a manoeuvre that invites comparison, no doubt, with

Michael Snow’s influential structural film Wavelength.

Structural film, it has been often noted, is an eminently modernist endeavour in that it reflects on film’s complex, aggregative condition as a medium, thus prompting viewers to develop an analogous consciousness of their phenomenological investment in that experience (and therefore, one might expect, in their perception of the world at large).2 The final minutes of Wavelength, for example, present a striking reflection on how the cinematic experience of spatial depth – Snow’s film is a 45-minute zoom into a Canal Street loft – is premised on the medium’s characteristic temporality, which is in turn complicated by the viewer’s mnemonic and projective faculties. As the camera finally closes on a picture of the sea, we are suddenly reminded that the screen, like the image that now occupies it entirely, is a flat surface. And the reason we realize it is flat is because this image, unlike the rest of the film, is still; what is more, since the last 40 minutes of zooming and action

(of sorts) are still fresh in our minds, we also realize that this is a still image within a moving image. In short, the image of the sea represents a receding space, just like that of the loft, but this similarity guarantees no experiential affinity between the two spaces, for filmic depth is first and foremost a matter of time. And yet, it is only by being confronted by this sudden disjunction between temporality and spatial continuity that we become aware of how our previous experience of depth was coming about.

4. At first glance, 16mm seems to lack a common feature of many structural or self-reflexive films, namely the allegoric allusion to the medium itself. Nothing in the forest’s diffuse scenery can be taken to mean anything in particular, as opposed, say, to the way the curved windows in Tacita Dean’s Bubble House can be said to echo a CinemaScope screen. There is one barely visible exception, though: the overhead cable extending ahead of the camera and disappearing into the forest like a flimsy vanishing line. As minimal as it is, this is an indication not only of the filming process,

but also of 16mm’s radical take on temporality and movement. Once again, the motor that propels the trolley is the same one that drives the film past the shutter, so that for every metre the camera advances into the forest, one metre of footage is shot; the cable is thus a surrogate of the film strip itself. A token of temporality that, paradoxically, is also the single static element onscreen, in contrast with a filmed forest that is entirely in flow.

5. In Wavelength, the quasi-stillness of the space, along with the way it is framed, from a position of surveillance, prompt us to view it as a definite setting or a stage. It is worth recalling that the film begins with a split second of empty space before the first characters enter the scene; or that a murder is later staged so as to imply that something might have happened outside the scene. All in all, the camera’s unwavering refusal to follow such narrative cues is intentionally pitted against our anticipation that something else may still take place in the loft; the film retains, as its critical horizon, this form of relation between inside and outside that goes by the name ‘scene’.

Credits:

Design and camera modification: Stefan Knauer / Effektum, BerlinCinematography: Pedro Urano and Daniel SteegmannPhotography direction: Pedro UranoSound design, recordings and audio mixing: Dan ZimmermannProducction: Daniela SantosSet assistants: Amilcar Packer, Bruno CaracolProducction assistant: Vinicius PereiraTelecine Rio: Victor Lamas, Casablancas laboratórios, Rio de JaneiroTelecine Barcelona: Pepe Alonso, Imagefilm, BarcelonaDevelopment and offline telecine Lab: Casablanca laboratorios, Rio de JaneiroPositive prints: Andec Filmtechnik, BerlínScan 2k: Imagefilm, Barcelona

I want to thank: Cleber Tumasonis from Casablanca, David Serra and Irma Arrieta from ImageFilm, Susanne Pfeffer, Juliana Zimmermann, Bernardo Issa y Luana Cunha from parque nacional da Tijuca, Agustín Perez Rubio, Carlos Ordás, and maria Inés Rodrígues from Musac, Helmut Batista, Denise Milfont and Oto Milfont Batista, Sergio Martins and Ana Wambier, and specially to Renata Lucas.

This project was realized with the help of CoNCA, Generalitat de Catalunya, produced with The Musac Grants for Artistic Creation.

The camera’s indifference towards what it registers is further radicalized in 16mm. The point – which renders 16mm ultimately at odds with the ethos of structural film – is no longer to generate a friction between the viewer and the camera’s viewpoint, but to purge the latter of intentionality. In other words, there is no longer a phenomenological analogy, or parallelism, however uneasy, between the camera and the viewer. Of course, we can (or cannot help to) engage in certain mental projections while watching the film, or focus on particular bits of forest that glide by. And yet, we cannot relate this to the camera’s own ‘gaze’, as if we needed to either confirm or frustrate it; the camera’s viewpoint is not directly linked to ours in any meaningful way.

6. One problem of film theory – a problem it inherits from its Althusserian affiliation – is that its critical perspective is entirely focused on the subject’s imaginary relation with the real (even if the term ‘symbolic’ is sometimes employed, it is ultimately assimilated to an imaginary perspective).3 To put it a bit simplistically, it all boils down to the point of whether our intuitive experience or representation of things is ideologically misleading, and consequently of whether it can be self-critically corrected or sophisticated.

A similar critique has been made of the modernist idea of the medium, arguing that it ultimately installs ‘a vacuum of class and historical relations’ by emphasizing the ‘individual, phenomenologically inflected consciousness.’4 As for Althusser’s theory of ideology, Frederic Jameson famously supplemented it with his notion of ‘cognitive mapping’; from this perspective, the urgent question is not how to conceive of a better means of representing things to subjects, but how to deal with a system that is non-intuitive to the point of evading traditional notions of representation.

The forest is deeply symptomatic in this respect – no wonder it has insistently occupied minds, from Rugendas to Latour –, and 16mm is a film about that symptom. We can search as much as we want, within the film, for an indication of how it treats our expectations and projections, but this effort is ultimately meaningless. There is nothing there, in this particular sense, for us to reflect upon. And yet, there is much to be learned by considering how 16mm sustains, for almost five minutes, and against all odds, a clear image of non-representability.

1 I take these examples from the excellent introduction by Milton Hatoum and Samuel Jr. Titan for the book Norte, with photographs by Marcel Gautherot (São Paulo, Instituto Moreira Salles, 2009).2 See Tamara Trodd’s compelling critique of Rosalind Krauss in ‘Film at the End of the Twentieth Century: Obsolescence and the Medium in the Work of Tacita Dean’, Object, number 6 (2003/2004), pp. 47-67.3 Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), pp. 20-24.4 Trodd, op. cit, pp 50-52.

Essa publicação foi feita em ocasião da apresentação do projeto 16mm de Daniel Steegmann Mangrané na seção Present Future da Artíssima 2012 no stand da Galeria Mendes Wood

www.mendeswood.com