Phil Hoffman’s Camera
Lucida by Brenda Longfellow
Phil tells an apocryphal story in my class at
It was his first
dead body and his first photo assignment and whether or not this event
represented a primal scene in the gestation of Hoffman the filmmaker, what is
apparent in the body of films he has produced over the last twenty years is a
profound meditation on the relation between death and the image, on the
distinction between the sensual phenomenal world and the moment of time frozen
in the flatness of a mortuary image.
In Camera
Lucida/ Reflections on Photography, a book which serves so resonantly in
reading Hoffman’s work, Roland Barthes argues that photograph has a historical
relation with the “crisis of death” which he sees evolving in the second half
of the nineteenth century.[1] Instead of trying to locate Photography in
its social and economic context, he argues:
we should also inquire as to the anthropological
place of Death and of the new image. For Death must be somewhere in a society;
if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere;
perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.
Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the
intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion,
outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one
separating the initial pose from the final point. [2](92)
Even with the incredible proliferation of image
culture, the representation of death, that is, actual death, as opposed to the
plethora of fictional deaths which fill popular culture, remains, as Amos Vogel
puts it, “the one last taboo in cinema.”[3]
If natural death in previous centuries, was integrated into the life of the
community and culturally naturalized through ritual and religion, the
increasing medicalization and technologization of death in the West, removed
the experience from everyday life and invested it within impersonal legal and
medical institutions. In these new contexts, death remains antiseptically
invisible and shrouded in a veil of prudery.[4]
Outside of the consistently diminishing power of official religion, the personal, emotional and philosophical
content of death has barely begun to be addressed.
Vivian Sobchack has argued that the taboo of
representing death in our culture is powerfully connected to “the mysterious
and often frightening semiosis of the body.”[5]
Death, in this instance, represents one of those primal threshold states,
marking as it does as the distinction
between being and non being, the transformation of human matter from one state
into another. The act of photographing a corpse is experienced as trauma
precisely because the corpse utterly confounds these cultural codes. Sobchack
provides an elegant quote from “The Sacral Power of Death in Contemporary
Experience,” which gets to the heart of this matter :
The flesh is more than instrumental to control and
more than sensitive, it is also revelatory. A man reveals himself to his
neighbour in and through the living flesh. He is one with his countenance,
gestures, and the physical details of his speech. As some have put it, he not
only has a body, he is his body. Part of the terror of
death, then is that it threatens him with a loss of his revelatory power. The
dreadfulness of the corpse lies in its claim to be the body of the person,
while it is wholly unrevealing of the person. What was once so expressive of
the human soul has suddenly become a mask.[6]
A corpse conveys the shocking transformation of the
subject into a brute objecthood, devoid of consciousness, devoid of
intentionality. For the young Phil, what I believe was traumatic about
photographing his grandfather’s corpse was not only the cruelty of the silent
and still body of a loved one but the insight it yielded, that photography, as
a technology of reproduction, is inherently complicit in the transformation of
subject into object. Every photograph, Barthes writes, is a reminder of Death
because every photograph opens up that irreparable gap (which the photograph of
the corpse is, perhaps, the limit case), between the intentionality and
sensuality of the lived body and the flatness of the photographed body. Every
photograph confronts us with the real absence of the loved one and with
the irreversibility of time’s relentless
forward movement. Every photograph is thus tinged with melancholy because of
the loss which is ontologically inscribed in its very technology.
On the Pond (1978), Hoffman’s first
film is paradigmatic of the importance of this insight in his work. This is
certainly the film where the role of the photograph as an organizer of memory and as an index of an
irretrievable past, the that has been
that Barthes speaks of is the most prominent. The central structuring element
in the film is a series of black and white family photographs of Phil, his
parents and three sisters which are all thematically related to winter
recreation, mainly ice skating and playing hockey at a pond in front of the
family cottage. The sound is entirely non synchronous. Mapped onto that divide
between sound and image, moreover, is
the irreparable gap between the past of the images and the present of the
auditory track which is filled with the family’s shrieks of recognition,
delight and unabashed nostalgia. At one point, Franny, Phil’s sister laments “I
want to go back” and it is precisely that desire and its ontological impossibility
that structures the emotional content of the film. The voice of the filmmaker,
however, is rarely heard in the family chorus yet he implicates himself in this
nostalgia through a visual recreation featuring a young boy playing hockey on a
pond. In this repeated image of the boy, it is as if Hoffman takes up that
desire articulated by his sister, dissolving the veil between past and present
through an act of imagination and filmmaking that restores a memory to the
present. But it is a false and impossible
note, a fantasy of a return to boyhood that can only be realized through the
intercession of a fictional signifer as removed from the contemporary real as
the family archive of family photos are.
As other writers in this collection are providing
detailed readings of Phil’s middle works, I want only to linger on the opening
images of Passing Through/Torn Formations
as an additional indication of the thematic which I see running through all his
work. Passing Through/Torn Formations
opens in silence as a handheld camera continually pans over the face of Babji,
Phil’s maternal grandmother, who lies dying in an institutional setting, a
hospice or hospital whose cool institutional veneer has been somewhat humanized
by the family photos, mementoes and cards pinned to the wall by her bed. Phil’s
mother is feeding Babji, whose face, without her false teeth, is ravaged and
skeletal. The camera lingers over the protruding veins in Babji’s thin arms,
her stiffened hands, her gaunt cheeks, her eyes black with pain. Her “creatureliness,” as Sobchack puts it,
foregrounded by the palpable fragility and vulnerability of her all too human
body. Here again, Hoffman finds himself in a room recording a death. The
trauma, however, is acted out by the persistence of movement, by the
repetitions of that pan which refuses to rest in a final composition, which
continually moves toward the curtain on the window as if to escape the
claustrophobia of a room of the dying and of death. The eerie silence of the
sequence confounds the sequence’s location in a real time and sends it,
reeling, into the future-an image “catastrophe” in which the knowledge of
certain death is already vested in the present/past of the image.
In Camera
Lucida, while Barthes claimed that the cinematic image (as opposed to the
still photographic image) avoided this sense of catastrophe through the
continual unfolding of one offscreen space into another, it is clear that he is
referring to the shot/reverse shot grammar of classical cinema and not to any
particular ontology of the moving image.
Indeed, in an essay which might in some respects be seen as the Ur text
of Barthes’ insights in Camera Lucida,
André Bazin, in his famous essay, The
Ontology of the Photographic Image (first published in 1945)[7],
already argued for the inextricable
connection between photography and cinema precisely through their mutual
capacity to “embalm time” against the certainty of death. In that instance, the
difference between cinema as a time based medium and the photograph is erased
in the more profound consideration given to how both are produced (through the
photo-chemical action of light on film) as traces of the real.
A crucial distinction needs to be made, however,
between fictional and documentary signifiers in film and photography. Vivian
Sobchack argues that this difference inheres, not so much in the property of an
image, as in the phenomenal experience of a spectator. As spectators, we have an entirely different relationship to
the representation of bodies we understand share the same world as we do.
Unlike the fictional signifier of death or of bodily destruction which figures
solely for its entertainment value, the indexical qualities of the body
represented in documentary (and in experimental documentary) call forth “an ethical
space” that is, the visible representation or sign of the viewer’s subjective,
lived, and moral relationship with the viewed. [8]
That is why, for me, the image of Phil’s mother
feeding Babji is so moving. It calls forth a flood of memories of feeding my
own parents on their deathbeds. And while using all of the experimental
cinematic codes that defy realism: repetition, overprocessed stock, silence
etc., the sequence, nonetheless, conveys the past/presence of an actual lived
body, one that solicits our profound empathy.
If the indexical quality of that body in the
opening sequence anchors the film in a relationship to the real and to the
acknowledgement of impending death, the remainder of the film proposes memory,
storytelling and retracing the past as defenses against that inevitability. As
rich and layered as a dream, the film voyages between Poland, the land of Babji
and his mother’s birth and Kitchener, home of Uncle Wally, the crazy one, the
black sheep, the family skeleton. If family history was registered as overly
bucolic in On the Pond, Passing Through/Torn Formations delves
into the other side, the dark histories of madness and murder, abandonment and
depression, the stories that the public archive of family photos does not tell.
Supported by the richly textured pans of stones, crumbling fences and
pavements, Passing Through is
metaphorically associated with an archaeological dig through history but the
result, in this instance, is not a seamless whole artifact but a jagged and
disjointed assemblage of multiple shards of stories. Like the dream, these
stories are layered, like the images themselves, one on top of the other to
form a palimpsest of memory, memory as palimpsest. No coherent gestalt or
linear family history can be forged from these fragments. What is left to
the filmmaker is to bear ethical witness to that impossibility, to continually
record and photograph life, hunting and collecting images of everyday life
against loss and against forgetting.
Phil Hoffman’s new film, (untitled as of this
writing) also opens with a long silent sequence featuring his late partner,
Marian McMahon frolicking in the snow at their farmhouse in eastern
the Photograph mechanically repeats what could
never be repeated existentially. In the Photograph, the event is never
transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the
corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the
sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This ...in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable
expression. The off centred detail...the materiality of the particular that.
..won’t and cannot be named.[9]
If so much of Phil’s work involves a meditation on
death and the image, that meditation has its most personal articulation in his
new work. It is a film explicitly about death, about the particular death of
Marian, lover and life partner and about the emotional fallout experienced by
the filmmaker as a result of that loss. It is a film about mourning, about how
to mourn, about styles of mourning. In the latter part of the film a question
is posed by Marian in voice over: “What ritual would you invent for death,
would it be public or private ?” Hoffman responds “Public.” This film is his
public elegy and while intimately and achingly sad, it is also a film, to
borrow a strange word from Peter Harcourt, about redemption and the redemptive
possibilities of that mourning.
In "Mourning and Melancholia" Freud
described mourning as process “so intense” that it resembles a temporary
psychosis. Overcome with grief, unable to reconcile oneself with the painful
actuality of loss, the subject clings to the lost love object “through the
medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis... Each single one of the memories
and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and
hypercathected” (253) but each is met by “the verdict of reality” that the
object no longer exists.[10]
In normal “successful” mourning the narcissistic satisfactions of the ego win
out and, though a painful and slow process, libido is eventually withdrawn from
the lost object and transferred onto a new one. Proper mourning, then,
according to Freud, is like a narrative, it has a beginning, middle and end
(and in that order) and its goal is to restore order, to reintegrate the
subject to back into the world and into the reality principle.
But what if the proper is resisted and the subject
refuses to disassociate affective connection with the lost loved one ? In one
of the most lyrical sequences in the film, a text by Hoffman dissolves in over
a photo of a seaside landscape taken by Marian in Spain: “If I could brighten
up this part of the picture, I might illuminate the conditions of her death,
the purpose of her life and the reason why, during the instant of Marian’s
passage, I felt content with her leaving, a feeling I no longer hold.” His body
still longs for her, he confesses, his mind still imagines her, his soul still
aches. The loss remains fully present.
In Mémoires:
For Paul de Man,[11]
Derrida puzzles as well with this issue of “proper” mourning. Within the
classical Freudian conception of the term, successful mourning is equivalent to
the assimilation of the object into the self and to an eventual forgetting of
the loved one. But does this assimilation, this “eating of the other,” Derrida
asks, not eradicate the irreducible altereity of the other ? This is a
profoundly ethical question for Derrida : how to honour the otherness of the
other while at the same time acknowledging that within the act of mourning, the
other is always an object “image, idol, or ideal” that one constructs oneself.
For me that is the resonance associated with the
second long sequence in the film which uses video footage of Marian working in
her day job as a VON (Victoria Order of Nurses). In the footage, she is the most punky and
weird of VON’s with her butch haircut, smoking cigarettes, speculating
philosophically on the issue of touching a stranger’s body. At one point,
however, she confronts Phil (hiding behind his 3/4 inch video camera in the
back seat) accusing him of not understanding how difficult it is to be filmed
and how much the camera mediates and makes strange their relation. It is an
important moment precisely because it honours the otherness of the other. The
only synch sequence in the film, it anchors Marian in her lifeworld, not simply
as an image, idol or memory but as a sensate and intentional subject in her own
right and one, furthermore, who explicitly defies the naturalness of a camera
recording her image.
What one misses in mourning, speculates
Derrida, is the response of the other,
the voice of the other, the return serve in the dialogue that has structured
the couple. Making the film in her absence, with the bits of images and audio
fragments left behind, allows Hoffman, the filmmaker, to reconstitute that
dialogue. In one sequence, for example, images of a trip to
The recovery of the loved one’s voice is also
undertaken in the sequence featuring the photograph Marian had taken in
In Mourning
and Melancholy Freud experiences some difficulty in definitely
distinguishing between the two psychic states. In one instance he posits
melancholy as a an unresolved form of mourning where instead of assimilating
the other into the ego, the ego identifies with the lost object, as he puts it:
“the shadow of the object fell upon the ego [and] the ego is altered by
identification.”[12]
For Derrida, this is precisely the formulation of love where the other is taken
into oneself, not in the service of obliterating difference but of preserving
otherness, an otherness whose effect is to alter my being. While I do believe
this is the style of mourning and love that Hoffman proposes in his film, let
me suggest that Freud’s alternative conceptualization of melancholy may be of
some use here. In the second formulation, melancholy is without a specified
object. The subject experiences overwhelming sadness but without being able to
attribute it to any particular cause: it is a generalized sense of loss. This
generalized sense of loss has an uncanny resonance with a thematic that I have
argued is central both to Barthes’ formulations in Camera Lucida and to the cinematic oeuvre of Philip Hoffman. In
those instances, melancholia has to do, not with the particularity of this
death, but perhaps with Death itself, its inevitability and the appraisal of
the fleetingness and ephemerality of life. It is this emotional quality which
makes photography and experimental film among the more melancholic of arts.
[1]. Roland Barthes, Camera
Lucida, Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1983).
[2]. Barthes, 92.
[3]. Amos Vogel as quoted in
Vivian Sobchack, Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death,
Representation, and Documentary, Quarterly Review of Film Studies,
vol.9, no.4 (1984), 283.
[4]. Perhaps only the Aids crisis and the politics
of representation it has generated has forced images of death and the dying
body again into public consciousness.
[5]. Sobchack, 286.
[6]. William F. May, as quoted
in Vivian Sobchack, 288. (Original citation: The Sacral Power of Death
in Contemporary Experience, in Death in American Experience, ed.
Arien Mack (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), p.116.)
[7]. Andre Bazin, The
Ontology of the Photographic Image, What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh
Gray, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
[8]. Sobchack, 292.
[9]. Barthes, 40.
[10]. Sigmund Freud, Mourning
and Melancohia, On Metapsychology, vol 11, trans.James Strachey
(Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984), 253.
[11]. Jacques Derrida,
Memoires: For Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathon Culler Eduardo
Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf. Ed. Avital Ronell and Eduardo Cadava.(New York:
Columbia UP, 1989). Much of my argument
re Derrida is drawn from Penelope Deutscher, Mourning the Other,
Cultural Cannibalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce
Irigaray), differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies,
vol. 10.3 (1998), 159-184.
[12]. Freud, 258.