PATHOS-FORMULA

THE SCREEN IS DARK. Our nervous system encounters its surface from an intimate distance that communicates to us an indiscernible aural pattern. We hear an alchemical mix of emulsion scratches and footsteps on the pavement reminiscent of military troops marching in step, perhaps performing a routine exercise, perhaps mobilizing for war. There is no reassuring match between the sound of the disciplined boots and an image that would confirm our projection or placate our mounting anxiety. We are perhaps being recruited for a collective ritual or are haunted by a militaristic performance. Within a few minutes, the steps gently fade and we gradually discern the contours of an uncanny clinical scene. Dimly lit drains and tubes connect, on the upper side of the frame, to what appears like contours of a bottle-shaped life-support system, vertically extending a long plastic cord across the frame. The movement of the camera follows the gravity of the liquid being inoculated and reaches the bottom of the frame, plunged in darkness. It connects to an unidentifiable and immobile diseased form of life yet an organic body is nowhere to be seen. A connection between something ailing out there and the makeshift medical equipment is never established. It remains concealed, as it were, under the thick shadowy world partially situated in the extreme lower side of the frame, below the frame, hors-champs. Musical notes emanating from a flute replace the footsteps, rise up, and are refracted towards our ears in a strange perpendicular motion, reaching us, as it were, from the underworld. Our eyes are poorly equipped and vainly compensate for the invisibility of the scene, following faithfully and hypnotically the leader, the camera movement, always in the same direction, reaching further down to connect the tube with its diseased source.

We are no longer spectators who merely hear and see. We are patients, immersed in this medical dispositif, overcome by an illness the etiology of which remains opaque to our intrusive clinical gaze but of which these images, sounds, and camera movements appear, nonetheless, to be the symptoms. As the camera slowly proceeds downward, it reaches the lower part of the frame. A brief silent and dark interval is opened for a fraction of a second.