SPECTATE: A moulding of the photograph as it [does not] exist
SPECTATE is a series of flash essays. It is an evolving record of words concerned with the act of looking.
“The cinema does something strangely paradoxical. It makes a moulding of the object as it exists in time and, furthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of the object.”
Andre Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?
Somewhere in the corner of the quiet room a candle had finished burning and the young man finally took to his seat. Thin streaks of smoke plumed from the base of its holder and the smell of old fire was birthed, caught in the wallpaper, grey and dull. The room was cold, but no colder than outside, where a distant ringing of bells broke from the hollow of a stone church, through the stillness. When the bells were wrestled to a close, silence came, and room was cold and quiet again.
Under lamplight glow, the young man sat at his dining room table. It was a small table, wooden and round, and stable even when shaken. It had been chipped at its edges over the years but still remained usable. The table lived, like the young man, at the end of a long, thin corridor-like room, directly opposite a set of thick drapes that were soil brown in colour. Lonely, in front of the curtains was a television, box-shaped and plastic, and on it a black and white film was playing, turning its frames over in static. It was the living situation much like that of many young men, he imagined, and surely one that was repeated in the front rooms of houses across the city.
At the table, in the gap between stacked ceramic bowls and old books, the young man sat with a photograph. No larger than half of a postcard, the photograph was of a family and, though the paper had faded into a muddy yellow, the young man recognised the instant in which the photograph was taken; a holiday, or a visit, in autumn to a tree-lined suburb. In the photograph the family were smiling and seated, and he recognised both of those instances too.
He sat ready with a pencil in his hand, and a bundle of tracing paper neatly piled up away to his right. He had practiced this before, the tracing of a photograph. The walls of the room were lined with framed photographs and their accompanying tracings. Perfect representations. A sort of mould akin to a casting, to be retraced when he could find time.
He shuffled the small photograph into place underneath a piece of clear paper. He saw the family as if viewing them through a cloud. The young man looked over to where the candle had been burning earlier, and then back to the photograph. The film continued playing on the television, casting onto the grey walls, on top of the photographs and their tracings. Grey smoke settled over the photograph, still like the old church bells.
He began his drawing by tracing around the trees. When he was finished and content with their depiction, he moved his pencil to the first family member. Without warning the photograph shifted in its place, dislocating itself from the tracing paper. He set the pencil down gently and began to bring the two pieces of paper into alignment, preparing his hand to move the pencil onto their bodies. Before placing his first line he saw that the family were no longer smiling. The tracing was ruined, and so he started again.
On the television screen a family, like the one in the photograph, appeared briefly. The young man was too busy with the photograph, with the tracing paper, and with his reproduction, and so he did not notice them.
On a new piece of paper he began with the trees again. Oak trees fresh with acorns and new leaves. Broad in the background of the photograph, framing the heads of the family in a saturated yellow glow. Mesmerised by the yellow, the light from his lamp, the yellow of the photograph. The young man looked up from the paper and stared down the tunnel of the room, into the film. It appeared bright, trapezoidal with its edges turned outwards, like a basket funnel for the young man to fall into. No longer black and white, as the young man remembered it to be, the film burned with several colours and elongated movements.
Back at the table the family had disappeared from the photograph, replaced by the fast growth of new oak trees, already hardy and in full plumage. The young man rushed to trace the new image, eyes wide and hands shaking. He had to capture the photograph as it existed now, not as it had been. He cared little that the family were no longer there. Rapidly he sketched the trees, leaving thin frail lines around their leaves and trunks. The lines quickly grew in density, smudging under the weight of his palm pressed tightly to the paper. In them he saw remnants of the family, and how they had appeared on the television screen. No longer in colour, or haloed by a bright and burning yellow, but silhouetted in black and white, as if the film had rewound itself through time and space to place them there again, together.
Something began to happen beneath the tip of his pencil, underneath the tracing paper. The trees were moving. A sharp wind was being cast over the printed foliage, modulating the surface of the paper. It had become sharply defined, fresh and pressed to a thin, smooth surface. He rushed again, to the trace the movement once more. To capture it plainly, without mistake. He saw the family on the television screen, smiling, like they had in the first photograph, and quickened his work.
In the first photograph.
He kept tracing, deploying clever movement with his pencil to hold down the swaying trees. The lines built on the paper and on top of each other, as if they were concrete setting in a wooden base.
The photograph, his new mould, grew upwards and outwards, the oak tree slipping between the fibres of the paper. The photograph learned movement, disobeying its state as an impression, an imprint of a moment.
The man continued to trace without stopping and as he did, a cloud settled over the television screen. The film transmitted through the blur, towards the young man at his table, towards death, and waited for him to finish.