Noite da Fe / Night of Faith

Periods of public refrain are necessary for the mind to unravel its velvet webs and dripping veins. I refrain in order for the exchange to be complete. There are thoughts and processes which belong to the realm of silence, silent tongues and pulsing steps. The immaterial thoughts laid upon this silent page turn into textures, colors, lights, gestures and this harmonic cacophony descends into the dark night. El Greco. The night of faith, Joao da Cruz. A woman inside a room as night descends. “The very eye of the night” watches and accompanies her. A pas-de-deuxbetween the eye and the woman. A tango, an elegy, a thought, a gestures, a space, a movement, an image.

El Greco

“Therese” , Cavalier

A clip from Cavalier’s “Therese” – not Avila, but Therese de Lisieux, who is very connected to Avila because of her sensibility in writing and her ‘romantic’ love of God-. The film reads the life of Therese in terms of her religious life in conflict with her unconsummated sexuality.

Woman / God / World / Man / Woman

The nature of this project is exactly its fluidity. Thinking and seeing as being and feeling immersed in water. In the comings and goings of these waves, my manifesto of intention which will also progressively transform and mutate, now gains a more concrete body. I realize that my question is not entirely about the idea of an specificity to a feminist kind of sensibility in film. What i question is film’s capacity to allude to subjectivity. When working within a medium that by nature infers mediation, a technological mediation, the subject will be constructed upon the walls of this mediation – something that Brackage was consistently trying to overcome in his films. Further, the central character is St. Teresa of Avila†, who have been silently speaking along the lines of my research on femininity and the divine. Now it is time to give Teresa her voice, as the central character of this project. The character who will express and re-construct a feminine imaginary, through her spiritual power. Amen.

We need to reconfigure the relationships between woman and world, woman and god, woman and father, woman and man in order to move into a new age of more fluid and ethical relationships. Film is essentially a medium that enables a reconfiguration of time-space relations and furthermore a medium which- in particular forms- consistently strives to ‘penetrate’ or allude to a sense of human subjectivity. If film can pose questions of interiority and exteriority through its capacity to sculpture time and place, then it is through film that I would like to express my own visions of a reconfiguration of the feminine subject in relation to faith, subjectivity and corporeality.

†

D’Est

“I would like to make a grand journey … I’d like to shoot everything. Everything that moves me. Faces, streets, cars going by and buses, train stations and plains (…) oceans, streams and brooks, trees and forests. Fields and factories (…) Food, interiors, doors, windows, meals being prepared….”
“I want to film in order to understand”
(Chantel Akerman cited in Bruno, G 2001, p. 102-103)

“…the land one possess is always a form of barbarism and blood, while the land one traverses without taking it reminds them of a book…” (Chantel Akerman cited in Bruno, G 2001, p. 102)

extract from: D’Est (dir. Chantel Akerman 1993)

Atlas of Emotion

Giuliana Bruno’s “Atlas of Emotion” is written with a means to create a topography of the history of cinema in relation to art, film and architecture. Therein, the book had chapters and passages that were of use for this research paper, centrally because Bruno weaves a feminist perspective through her dissertations of space as gendered space. These passages where mainly extracted from the chapter Traveling Domestic, the Movie “House”, where she addresses specific films in relation to their depiction of the domestic space as being symbolized by woman, as home, as womb, as return. Bruno depicts a very detailed analysis of film’s ability to mobilize and de-mobilize spatial conventions and time-space relations, in its shaping or sculpturing of time and space. The writing’s on Antonioni’s
“Red Desert” were specially interesting, since in the work of Antonioni the relationship between space and subjectivity is central to the symbolic nature of his work.

Here, I use Bruno as a means to illuminate / elucidate the relationship between film and feminist writing by means of proposing a re-organization of time-space relations, following my readings of Irigaray. Bruno was an illuminating writer for this research, specially in relation to my film project, where my intuitions and ideas on how to construct a feminine aesthetic were deeply discussed by Bruno in her views on the works of Chantel Akerman and Antonioni.

“Filmic movement is a cultural passage. A practice of imaging that participates in the modern philosophical project of mobilizing space, cinema has been home to various forms of nomadism, including some gendered female” (Bruno, G 2001, p. 95)

“We must retrace the genealogy of the female subject’s positions in site-seeing, undoing the fixidity of binary systems that have immobilized her and effaced her from the map of mobility” (Bruno. G 2001, p. 85)

Manisfesto of Intention

We need to reconfigure the relationships between man and woman, man and world, man and god, man and man (Irigaray, 1993a) in order to move into a new age of more fluid relationships and towards an internal enlightment. Film is essentially a medium that enables the reconfiguration of time / space relations which are crucial to the formation of this new sensibility and economy of a new ethics of sexual difference.

I intend to develop a film that expresses the relationships between woman and the divine, as a means to allude to the idea of a sensible transcendental in order to create a meaningful work about the feminine universe.

Why?

It matters because art (in this, my medium is cinema) can express and represent the gaps, the intervals, the pauses that are intrinsically necessary for our collective meditation on our conditions (as Self, as Being, as Body, as Mind).

Drawing Connections

An intrinsic concept of feminist studies is the idea of the feminine universe being a universe of subjectivity, multiplicity, openness… This concept is developed from questions of the female body and psychic. Of the multiplicities of impulses and directions that run in the studies of the feminine psychic. With the beginning of psychoanalysis, the studies of the feminine psychic started with Freud whose study of the case Dora is the founding ground to the introduction of his concept and diagnosis of her hysteria, which was seemingly a consequence of sexual repression. Freud’s studies on hysteric woman is a central focus of attack from the perspective of feminist writers, who frame Freud’s theory as demonstrative of the oppresive discourse of patriarchy. Freud configures the female sex as not sex, as castrated.

I am here introducing the basic concepts of psychoanalysis in order to contextualize the work of Luce Irigaray, who is a central figure in what American philosophers call French Feminism. Irigaray proposes that in order for us move beyond this age of oppressive patriarchy we must reconfigure the relations between man/man, man/world, man/god, man/woman (from Ethics of Sexual Difference). In this proposition, Irigaray lays out the central conceptual concern of this project.

Woman ought to be able to find herself among other things, through the images of herself already deposited in history and the condition of production of the work of man (“Ethics of Sexual Difference”)

Woman must be able to reconfigure herself outside of a culture that has confined and oppressed her Sex, her Being, her Mind. This is not a social political fight, but one that invites for an internal transformation, something that touches on the metaphysics of a transcendental sensibility, which will take on a form of the soul, the spirit, the divine.

In further reading of Giuliana Bruno I found that the connection between my interest in feminist writing and experimental film, is the capacity that film, as a medium for art and expression, has to renegotiate time / space relations. Herein, I believe that feminist film practices will intrinsically be related to experimental forms, since it questions and challenges the hierarchy, patriarchy and oppressiveness of our social-sexual order.

“Film space is the very vehicle of this mobilized thinking, for, among other things, its site-seeing offers us a way to mobilize the very space of sexual dwelling”

The question is how to interweave and meditate upon issues and concepts of and for the representation of these ideas. It fluctuates in the depths of my dreaming.

Phenomenological Surprises

As i immerse myself in thoughts and ideas of phenomenology, subjectivity and intuition, it seems that the universe starts also conspiring in accordance. It was three years ago, that my first mentor Pedro Tapajos, mentioned to me Giulliana De Bruno. He mentioned Bruno as a response to my profound interest in the cinema of Antonioni, the book Atlas of E-Motion, was written as a topography of sentiment, tracing the seminal quality of cinema: motion and emotion. In this research of phenomenology as a process of conciliating the objective world with our subjective universes, I see cinema as the perfect medium that battles infinity to express this concilition. How to express e-motions? Emotions? Subject and object. I come to think there was a time for Giulliana and I meet, and this has become it. In her study Bruno dedicates a whole chapter to what she calls Travelling Domestic: The Movie House. I still have not had the time I need to dedicate to this book, but yet there is something peculiar about this encounter with Bruno following my re-encounter with Maya Deren, whose Meshes of The Afternoon depicts very much the conflict between the external and internal universes of the central woman, herself. My interest in spaces, motion and emotion is what intrinsically guides my practice and research. Being a daughter of modernism (coming from Brasilia, Brasil), architectural spaces and its impact on shaping and forming our subjective selves is imprinted in my mind. Bruno mentions on her introduction the impact of Le Corbusier’s ramps in  Harvard University, where she lectures, and how passing those ramps every day started to shape the idea for the book. In this, i think of the way in which the phenomenological approach to research can in the right minds influence works which are reflexive of our observe of the material universe filtered and imagined through our subjectivity. The idea of “movement through inner spaces” very much interests me, in the sense of expressing movement in stillness, of an allusion or illusion of movement through phenomenological reductions.

(…)Breaking the dichotomy between voyage and home as assigned social-sexual spaces, we see gender difference is written on this moving landscape (Bruno, G 1998, p.17)

The Conflicting Siamese Twins: Faith & Knowledge

The zero line of a research process begins with a conflict. A conflict between ideas, and conflict of what we know, what we see and what we perceive. I like to see this conflict under the light of a conflict between faith – herein i mean faith as in intuition – and knowledge – as truth, rationality. Faith and knowledge are like Siamese sisters who can never really face one another. One knows, the other feels. One is air, the other earth. They would not survive without one another, they are eternally bound together in their search for meaning.

In their eternal search for meaning, the sisters are the symbol of the quest for discovery. As we know, discoveries are a complex networks of signs, symbols, technique, technology and meaning tangled in a ever fluid relationship. Within this inherent fluidity, there is a method within the madness, be it a method of intuition, self-reflexivity or even counting.

The sisters here fight as much as they collaborate. Whilst Knowledge is working on her primary, quantitative, applied and pure research… Faith is working on observing connections and the behavior of the other. She is immersed in the poetic, ficto, conceptual and creative research. Faith is observing phenomena, her research is inherently phenomenological. To research in terms of phenomenology is to live empirically your research, to observe and reflect upon your place within the madness of research, to remember that faith is your mantra is this journey and that everything you live, see, observe and think are what the research method is. To research phenomenologically is to live your work, your research and expand its frameworks within the connections and experiences that occur in the fluxus of your process.

The sisters middle names are objective, for Knowledge , and subjective for Faith . Their tangled existence comes from the matter that objective is in truth subjective reality (Descartes 1912/1988) . The objective universe is hostage of the chain of associations and meaning created by the subjective universe. I here discuss the elementary ideas of subjectivity, objectivity, knowledge and faith, to identify the primary aspects of a research process. In order to choose a method for research one must identify what kind of sister they are. It is only through self-reflexivity, that one can delineate the areas and methods for their research, their practice, their conflict. The method can be as pragmatic and as idealistic as their author. The research method is reflexive of its author’s intrinsic self and interest, as much as the subject matter of his/hers investigation.

In this dissertation, I believe intrinsically in the phenomenological approach (Faith is a close friend) in fluid combination with the poetic, the ficto, the conceptual and the creative. These methods reflect directly in the kinds of interests and practices that I will here be developing and reflecting upon: the feminine universe and uses of film as means to create a feminine language.

Ecriture Feminine, an approach to a research method, or madness

Writing is also integrative in perhaps the most basic possible sense: the organic, the functional. (…) both the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Writing is markedly bispheral. Left: liner written product processing material linearity. Right: source of intuition.
(…)
“The right hemisphere seems to be the source of intuition, of sudden gestalts, of flashes of images, of abstractions occurring as visual or spatial wholes, as the initiating metaphors for the creative process” (Emig, Janet “Writing as Mode of Learning” College Composition and Communication Vol. 28, N. 2. (May 1977), pp. 122-128

Emig’s article on using writing as a mode of learning is a simple, yet useful article in ode to the power and process of writing as a research method. The ideas are simple and direct. Writing has the power to make of the abstract something material- becoming of a trace of thought; writing carries an intrinsic power and induction of synthesis and analysis. Through the practice of writing, my research will become more concrete and therefore the project will gain body, shape and form. Writing is also the primary form of practice from which a greater body of research will be given sense. Writing poetry, film, theses, analysis, speeches, manifestos, stories, narratives, thoughts… All forms of writing within their own privileges and enclosures are practices of structuring or de-structuring our universe of symbols and signs, our impulse to give meaning and make sense. Writing as a form of meditation, of contemplation, of confessing, of analyzing, of synthesizing, of creating, of restructuring, and constructing the infinite universe of our floating ideas. So here in this ode to writing as a form of empirical, subjective and phenomenological research, I define and draw the lines for the primary conceptions of my research methodology, which in all its chaos, will eventually create a harmonious cacophony.

The practice of writing is also intrinsically linked to the veins of my research project. That which is the emblem of French Post Feminists philophers: Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixous (centrally) call une Ecriture Feminine. Here I very briefly (this subject requires a lot more attention) introduce Irigaray’s virtuous and complex concept of ecriture feminine, a concept which is central to the conception of this project, this research and further this immersion into the conception of a feminine language, or more like langage, as in the practice and conception of writing and creating symbols and signs, in its full symbolic sense.

This quote from Helene Cixous captures the nature of ecriture feminine, here she ponders upon what a feminine language would be, become…

She lets the other language speak-the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death…. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.
(…)
Oral drive, anal drive, vocal drive-all these drives are our strengths, and among them is the gestation drive-just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood

These embryonic and visceral drives shall become and be in language, in image, in thought, in life.