figments and phantoms: figure(s) from the back
On Rückenfigur, female texts and the practices of ghost-catching.
(i) ghost-catcher
I like to think of myself as a kind of ghost-catcher; in the stories that I tell, through my films, music or writing, in the images I create. Always trying to capture some absence momentarily and preserve its spirit long enough for others to feel it too. Maybe growing up with the gaping holes in my ancestry, brought up in a city where the histories of its making is marked with the violence of erasure, and made to believe that staying silent meant staying safe, ghost-catching comes almost naturally. I can feel the things that are not there, refrain from filling it up, these absences; holes, wounds and the darkness of them, and instead let the them come through like a fucking reckoning. Ok kidding, not so serious. Maybe more like a heartbreak.
How does one catch what is not there? Such cunning things. Only traces, shadows and other faint and flimsy forms. Sometimes the ghost is loud and persistent, coming into being and guiding the way. Ghosts that desire to be caught. That’s all I’ll be seeing for months. Nothing else. Abandoned statues of deities at sea found by the coast, in the sand start appearing in the trees, by the road. I am being followed to ease the catching, given blessings to continue on until everything turns into traces and shadows once more. Nothing else. Then there are ghosts that never come to being. Ghosts with conduits and proxies, manifesting in dreams or some strange exchange with a stranger who may also be a ghost-catcher.
Ghost-catching is a practice of giving attention to something that is difficult to grasp, that goes beyond the obvious. A deep feeling or sense, merely from staying still long enough and knowing always that there is a presence in the absence. There is also longing and yearning to hold this presence, to let it come to being. Ah, even my attempts right now of trying to formulate the practice of it, to put it into words, falls short and feels inadequate. Instead, I looked through my earlier photographs trying to find instead a specific moment where ghost-catching has taken place, where I felt moved to press the trigger, to catch the ghost before it fades back into the unseen.
A woman stands at the doorway of an old warung. It’s 5:05PM on a clock right next to a black and white photo of a man, probably the original owner of the warung. There is a television set balanced precariously on a wooden shelf. The woman looks out, her back facing me. In front of her is a fence and a brick wall. Her face is a ghost, obscured from view. The light falls unevenly across the scene. The man seems to be looking down at her figure, keeping watch. Some authoritative figure. A ghost too in some sense. There are many doorways and openings but no clear way out. I clicked the trigger and catch the ghosts. I wonder if there was someone else behind me watching me steal this image, this loneliness undressing, from one body to the next, but I did not turn my head.
I found out much later there is a German term for this compositional device often used in the paintings of Caspar David Friederich; Rückenfigur or figure from the back…"the figure who is and is not the painter, who is and is not the viewer, who stands at the limit of the picture, with his back to us, so that what we see is not what he sees, but him seeing”. I am the figure of the woman, I am the man in the picture frame, I am the face unseen and seeing,
obscured by the metal body of my camera and I stand at the limits of this picture, a ghost amongst ghosts.
Although Rückenfigur appears several times in a few of my video works, I have never used this compositional device intentionally. Obscuring the face have afforded me ambiguity, and it leaves the solitary figure an open slate for the viewer to feel freely, unburdened by the tyrant of expressions. All that one may get to go on is not much at all and yet every little thing becomes a conjuring of sorts. This is how a ghost is caught.
Safe to say, I might be a little obsessed with Rückenfigur for all the ways in which the body disrupts and coalesces with the surroundings, making and unmaking, singular and intertwine. It is an invitation to see the unseen, to stay present in the absence, to be in some state of absolute nothingness.
(ii) Plunging (softly) into the Void: On FEVER ROOM and Hotel Aporia
The year was 2018. On a whim I bought a ticket to catch a show at Victoria Theatre, slotted on a Saturday night at 10pm. A friend simply had described it as mind-blowing use of projections in a space when I bumped into her hours earlier and I was immediately sold, snapping one of the last few remaining tickets. I had never watched any of the filmmaker’s other works albeit his popularity and had no desire to. I was late coming in and sat, among strangers, on the floor.
This was many years ago so my recollection are just fragments of things. I remember a monologue I could not follow. I remember something about sleep and something about dreams. I remember an inside of a cave and an excavation. I remember hospital beds and lowering of screens. A projection plays on the right of me, a boy and a river and then the right of me, rain pouring. The space was cold and disorienting. I turned my head left and right trying to keep up and gave up midway when both screens played simultaneously. I closed my eyes and felt wet from the sound of rain (or river?) pouring all around me.
What stuck though after all these years was a streetlamp, illuminating the darkness in one of the scene. Slowly it was revealed to be a real object at a distance. How was it revealed? I, for the life of me, cannot seem to recall but I remember how I held onto it while everything else soaked me in this hot fever dream. It was hypnotizing, the hard body of the streetlamp glistening, this ghost trace, this echo, this trick of the eye. What followed was smoke and flashes as thunderclaps scattered around. A singular light source falls upon the many bodies, a tiny dot expanding and contracting. The smoke is a fog is a cloud is a ghost. We slowly transform into silhouettes in a tunnel. We are spinning and falling. We are simultaneously the dreamers dreaming and the dream itself. We are plunging softly into the void.
Many years later, I find myself once again feeling the same ways I did in FEVER ROOM1. At the ground floor of a warehouse space turned museum, I took my shoes off and stepped into one of the six rooms of an immaculate replica of a Ryokan, a Japanese traditional inn. In the darkness I watched with very little context, through the thin projection screen, something about World War II and Japanese Kamikaze soldiers. I was distracted by the sight of the projector from behind the screen, by the sounds from other rooms, by the darkness of the space. There is no door and I see other figures peering in and walking pass. I hear their voices too. I put on my shoes and move onto the next room. On the screen a woman turns on a light at the top of a hanging ceiling lamp rather than a switch. The scene lasts 3 seconds before it cuts to another woman doing the same. This repeats several times before ending with a woman switching off the light as a man lowers himself into a mattress to sleep. All these figures are faceless. Their faces are purposefully blurred out. They are apparitions of time, the ghosts in and of their stories. I felt locked in and headed to the third room barefoot, leaving my shoes behind.
Gradually these disparate narratives (and images) seem to weave some kind of watery coherence, through the correspondences between the artist and his translators, from old texts and history books, from accounts and archives. I begin to feel settled in, begin to feel as though I too was a guest in this strange hotel. Passing the fourth room, I caught sight of school shoes, illuminated by the light of the multiple projections. In the room were eight school girls in their white uniforms. They sat in a row on the tatami, their backs facing me. They are also guests and yet they are also ghosts. I felt submerged, swimming in a time fluid. In the middle, two projections merge into each other; I learn of the animator Yokoyama Ryuchi and his propaganda cartoon Fuku-chan as a faceless cartoon soldier salutes on-screen and faceless men, their hands in salutes too, sing over drinks in a bar2 played on the adjacent screen. The superimposed footages, duplicated and multiplied, mutating into a peculiar dance. The monologues echoed on and the Ryokan seem to reverberate from the dissonance.
Finally I’ve arrived to the last room. I came midway, like the other rooms, and was greeted by an industrial fan behind a screen lit by surprisingly menacing bright neon pink-purple and a low rumble that shook the tatami. I was in the presence of a fan-shaped God. I sat there for a really long time, particularly mesmerised (and humoured) by this room. I am introduced to the concept of absolute nothingness. The room goes black and the fan disappears although I could still feel the wind.
“…A french poet once said that his problem with Asian poetry was that it plunges too quickly into the Void. And it seems to me that the difficulty of defining the void makes it malleable and hence open to all kinds of trans- and de-formation. And the novelist Tanziaki Junichiro once wrote that the alcove in the traditional Japanese room which is always empty, should never be lit too brightly, such that its emptiness is always cast in the shadows because the void should never be viewed headlong….”
So is absolute emptiness3 same as absence? No not really. Yet, in the worlds of Hotel Aporia4 and Fever Room, I have been in the presence of ghosts and their shadows, figments and phantoms of time and space, caught and released and caught again, (making and unmaking) in the recesses of my body, in the darkness of the Void.
(iii) A female text: “So what’s all this for, then?” For me, for us, for them.
The opening chapter of A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa begins like this:
“THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT.
This is a female text composed while folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close and it grows tender and slow, while my hand performs innumerable chores.
This is a female text borne of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of cartoon nursery rhymes.
This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thoughts that swoops, now from my body to yours.”
This is a female text written in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little.”
I walked my child, asleep in the stroller, back into our house in the dark. My headphones played on the rest of the chapter. I hopped into bed and stretched out my legs and think of all the female texts I’ve made, tiny miracles that they even exist. For the rest of the week I trailed Doireann closely, in her search for the ghost of Eibhlin Dubh. As she raised three boys and birthed a girl who almost died. As she pumped her right breast of milk, the machine whirring matching my ceiling fan. Sprawlingly she translates the Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire, an Irish keen, a song to mourn the death of a loved one, shared from female mouth to female ear to female mouth, her words falling out of her mouth and into my ears. As she obsessed over the ghost of Eiblhlin Dubh, I obsessed over her indignation to keep on searching still, even after countless dead ends, to find the open endings of this other woman long gone.
In Chapter 9, we finally arrived to the death of Eibhlin Dubh’s dear husband, Art O Laoghaire who was shot by the order of a landowner and magistrate, a result of a long Protestant-Catholic feud over power and property and left to bleed to death. I do not care for the feud tbh and neither am I particularly moved by the keen. Instead what had left me in a chokehold is Doireann’s desire and determination to catch the ghost of Eibhlin Dubh who had gulped the blood of her dead husband upon finding his body…
“…only a crumpled old hag
who drapped you in her shawl-rag.
Love, your blood was spilling in cascades,
and I couldn’t wipe it away, couldn’t clean it up, no,
no, my palms turned cups and oh I gulped…”
Doireann then asks of this “crumpled old hag”, believing it was the manifestation of Eibhlin, “returned in old age as a powerless witness who cannot change anything, who can only root herself there until her younger self hurries in…”. She described Eibhlin’s howling, “words that somehow summon the voice of her mother, and her mother’s mother, a whole chorus of female voices from her throat articulating the pain of this moment, all hand in hand in hand, all hovering in the rapture of the old words”. Doireann claims this old hag as herself and also us, her readers, as we “give of ourselves to shelter him” and “stand with her to grieve him”…. “This stranger holds all of us”. A female text is also a female witness of shared suffering and loss.
In the book Doireann writes across time, of her younger self, her grief and joys, and of her motherhood. She writes about her pain, particularly her husband’s vasectomy as all her future babies she had been wishing for were deleted. And as she writes, and as I read, I think of my own grief and joys, my own pain and losses. For a week long, Doireann became my ghost and I was singing her keen, between my chores and caregiving duties, right before I fall asleep, at every moment I could find I wanted to hold all of her. And though her loss is not as elaborate, I feel her gulping down the blood spilling out from the holes of absences. The endless and innumerable attempts at locating Eibhlin’s place of burial and family genealogy, only to meet with male assertion at each dead end, fathers, sons and brothers pressed upon the female absences of text, body and story.
“…literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song. I have come across a line of argument in my reading, which posits that, due to the inherent fallibility of memory and the imperfect human vessels that held it, the Caoineadh cannot be considered a work of single authorship. Rather, the theory goes, it must be considered collage, or, perhaps, a folky reworking of older keens. This, to me --- in the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university --- feels like a male assertion pressed upon a female text. After all, the etymology of the word ‘text’ lies in the Latin verby ‘texere’: to weave, to fuse, to braid. The Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies, a phenomenon that seems to me cause for wonder and admiration, rather than suspicion of authorship.”
In Chapter 5, a nurse paid Doireann a home visit and out of curiosity had asked, as she leafs through her notes and writings, “So what’s all this for then?”. As Doireann wept with rage, I raised my fists in frustration. This question hits me too, really hard. The obsession to trace Eibhlin’s life into her death, this endless searching is Doireann’s own desire to find herself, her being and un-being. I think of my own obsessions. What’s all this for, ila, who is all this for? For me of course because there is a comfort in the absence, knowing I am not alone in my search, in my practice of catching ghosts. In the shadows of absence lies a deep knowledge of the cosmos, of the unseen and unnameable, in the slippery worlds that I am allowed to traverse. It is for us, female bodies writing female texts, telling female stories and for them, all the ghosts I have encountered through it all. This is for me, for us and for them and only those who have lived in the absences long enough will understand what this means.
And though it truly hurts to catch a ghost, because most times they return to remain hidden in the darkness refusing to remain this singular thing of my making and I have no choice but to let them go, I find them always and again and again.
Thank you for reading this far my lovers. Hydrate, ressociate and stay in love.
https://artsequator.com/review-apichatpong-weerasethakuls-fever-room/
This particular footage was from Yasujirō Ozu’s Autumn Afternoon. The two men in the scene laments about losing the war and the hand-saluting scene that followed was apparently a parody of a military drill. This was Ozu’s last film before he died.
I refrain from writing more about the Kyoto School and their teachings of absolute nothingness in relation to the work because tbh I read it a million times and cannot seem to understand the concepts well enough to reflect upon them eloquently.
“One way to describe the work Hotel Aporia is as a hotel to which I invite all these different guests. In cinematic terms, we might call it a multi-narrative film where you follow the trajectories of different protagonists. These protagonists might not necessarily cross paths, but rather, what interests me is a kind of resonance between each of the guests.” https://www.harun-farocki-institut.org/en/2022/05/13/screens-layers-algorithms-a-conversation-with-ho-tzu-nyen/