Picnic Gods — Straightjacket

I started a band and we made a song!

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (Zerkalo [Зеркало]) and the Five Senses

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo [Зеркало] seems to envelop its viewer. It is easy to feel confused while watching it, but the mood is unmistakable, if hard to put into words. There is irony in this fact, as the necessary alienation of language seems at least obliquely relevant to themes in the film.

The idea that things in reality do not always fit together very neatly seems important. Inter-generationality seems central to what Tarkovsky is saying here, but also that time, itself, plays a large role in our construction of reality (as in the construction of this [and perhaps any] film). The story follows a non-linear path that constantly juxtaposes different generations of a family against one another and the story is punctuated by footage of important Soviet events.

What I find most brilliant in Tarkovsky’s film are two tensions that I see. First, Tarkovsky makes films that often feel surreal. I see Tarkovsky’s particular brand of surrealism as particularly potent in its palpable realism and the wonderment achieved in many of the visual effects that he creates. In part, Tarkovsky seems to owe this to his engagement of the senses: one feels the water dripping from the ceiling as the woman’s wet hair moves somewhat unnaturally in the dank room (and seeming to predict Hideo Nakata’s 1998 film Ringu); the slowly coagulating tears on the nearly-frozen face of the boy create an effect both visual and haptic; when the light burns out and the boy finds himself alone in the stranger’s dark house, one feels the loneliness, the loss, the abandonment, and the disconcerting disorientation; and so on. In the formulation of this surrealism, then, the obverse might be Tarkovsky’s filmic tricks, along with his reflexive gestures. At times, he uses the elements to create eerie effects: the wind picking up as a strange man finally leaves; the rain pouring down at especially heightened moments; water dripping from the dilapidated ceiling; a strange, stoic woman unflinchingly placing her hand in a flame; and so on. The film never allows much time to pass without foregrounding its subjectivity: through the seemingly deliberate shadow of the microphone boon; an actor staring into the camera; the use of Soviet film documentary footage; the beautiful, but displacing camera movements; the poetic voice-overs; etc. This reflexivity also finds itself in the use of the boy as both the protagonist and the protagonist’s son, as well as the use of the same woman as both the mother and the wife, but that more greatly seems to say something about Tarkovsky’s psychology in a way that is worthy of deeper inspection at another time.

Another tension that I found interesting was that between the drama in the events occurring and the kind of brutal restraint mostly exemplified in the characters, to which the appropriate counterpoint might be that of the Hollywood film: the predictable-to-the-point-of-banality storyline made romantic or otherwise saturated with dramaticism. As the rain falls around the characters, the camera slowly pans around to find the characters mostly standing around, watching the building burn down. As the couple fight, the apparent alienation and frustration in their disjointed, misunderstood arguments are met with dull, defeated tones. The beginning of the film’s miraculous rehabilitation of the stuttering teenage boy ends with him smiling and announcing that he can speak, but not with the sense of surprise that one might expect.

Brief Response to Anne Cranny-Francis’s Technology and Touch

On p. 38 of Anne Cranny-Francis’s Technology and Touch: The Biopolitics of Emerging Technologies, she states that political activists “demand” that we “recognize [difference] as a bodily practice that marks our own bodies and determines our bodily relationships with others, including whom we might choose to touch or not.” She supports this kind of thinking by referring to Foucault’s and Heidegger’s hermeneutical conceptions of technology, referring to some of Foucault’s work to be a “powerful intervention.” She refers to the socializing effects that Foucault and Heidegger identify in technology: by engaging with technology, we behave differently from how we might if we were to not use technology.

For Foucault, technology seems to be a system by which we are operated on (through some combination of action directed on us from outside and of self-directed action), subjecting us to particular social norms and values, i.e. Foucault seems quite specific in the attention he gives to the fact that technology helps to shape who we are.

For Heidegger, the concern is related, albeit slightly different. Dasein is the technological frame within which we find ourselves, and by which we see nature as instruments for our lives. Heidegger seems to take issue with the fact that this technological frame is one of many possible realities in which we might find ourselves, despite that it might often be assumed that this is just the way things are or something of that nature. Heidegger seems to suggest that we should look critically on how technology shapes how we think and behave.

However, Cranny-Francis’s position does not seem well-supported by the thoughts of Foucault and Heidegger. In fact, if we are to take Cranny-Francis seriously here, it is hard to fully explain what she might mean, exactly, by “difference.” If it were the case that a difference between people is an external force that “marks our own bodies,” then the hermeneutics of Foucault and of Heidegger would likely have to be for naught. If such differences come only from outside of us, then what is there to be done, other than to resist the symptoms (by which I mean the social effects that this embodiment produces)?

Instead, if we are to take the view of Foucault or Heidegger, then the effects of the embodiment of differences are ones that are likely malleable and subject to change that might be worth advocating for. In particular, Foucault spent a lot of energy focusing on how we participate in our own oppressions, suggesting that we might have a role to play in determining the trajectories of social forces—a position that Cranny-Francis’s statement seems antagonistic to.

The problem in what Cranny-Francis is saying is made somewhat clearer as the line goes on. If, as she suggests, such a difference “determines our bodily relationships with others, including whom we might choose to touch or not,” then we are not the ones deciding with whom we engage and in what ways. Social forces alone determine when, how, and with whom, it is appropriate to touch someone. There is an inherent contradiction here: if there were any hope of empathy or understanding, let alone political action, the determination that Cranny-Francis points to would likely have to have always already been such that there would be no need for this interagential interaction. The alternative to this is that the odd matrix that determines how we all react to one another—and necessarily devoid of any of our input—would be a kind of complicated teleological shifting. This shifting would then have to arbitrarily end in outcomes that are consistent with the desires of those who would appear to be critical of the current state of affairs. Those criticisms, though, would be practically devoid of meaningful content-value because such criticisms are always directed at what would, then, have to be the uncontrollable actions of others.

I suppose that what gets Cranny-Francis in trouble, here, is the absoluteness of what she says. It is not that differences must not help to determine some aspects of social relations, but that is not what she says, and I consider this to be a serious problem, and one that pervades of much of academic writing.