As a longtime devotee of observing from a scholarly distance, I had never been grabbed before -- or, indeed, 'clasped' or 'fastened' (the original meanings of the Ancient Greek verb
haptein) -- by Laura Marks' notion of 'haptic visuality'. But after I had made some
video essays about films, the desire to explore hapticity and its workings took hold. This is how the above video/text collages and the below notes came into being.
While I still believe that Marks' concept could benefit from a more thorough thinking through in relation to
audiovisuality, hapticity -- a grasp of what can be sensed of an object in close contact with it -- seems to me now to be very helpful in conceiving what
can take place in the process of creating videographic film studies. It can also help us more fully to understand videographic studies as objects to be experienced themselves.
In the old days, the only people who really got to
touch films were those who worked on them, particularly film editors. As Annette Michelson (1990) and others have argued, the democratization of the 'heady delights' of editing (Michelson, 1990: 22) was brought about by the introduction of video technology in the 1970s and 80s. Now, with the relatively wide availability of digital technology, we can even more easily share 'the euphoria one feels at the editing table [...] a sharpening cognitive focus and [...] a ludic sovereignty, grounded in that deep gratification of a fantasy of infantile omnipotence " [Michelson, 1990: 23].
But, are there other ways in which 'touching film' is just a fantasy? In videographic film studies, do videographers actually touch or handle the real
matter of the film? Or are we only ever able to
touch upon the film experience?
Our film experiences? Do video essays only make objects of, or objectify, our film experiences, our insuperable memories of them, our own cinematic projections?
These questions may not flag up significantly new limitations. Film critical video essays do seem to work, it seems to me, in the same 'intersubjective' zone as that of written film criticism. As Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton argue of this zone, 'we are immersed in the film as the critic sees it, hence brought to share a deeply involved perspective' (2011: 9).
Yet, in videographical criticism, is there not a different intersubjective relation, a more
transitional one, to the physicality or materiality of the objective elements of films that the video essays reproduce? Like written essays, video essays may well '"stir our recall"' (Klevan and Clayton, 2011: 9) of a film moment or sequence, but they usually do this by confronting us with a replay of the actual sequence, too. How might this difference count?
If nothing else, this confrontation with, or, to put it more gently, this inevitable re-immersion in the film experience, ought to make videographic critics pursue
humility in their analytical observations with an even greater focus, make them especially 'willing to alter [their analyses] according to what [they come into] contact with [...] give up ideas when they stop touching the other’s surface' (
Marks, 2004: 80).
A further, built-in, random element in non-linear digital video editing -- the fact that this process frequently confronts the editor with graphic matter from the film (e.g. thumbnails) that s/he may not specifically have chosen to dwell on -- may also encourage a particularly humble, usefully (at times)
non-instrumental form of looking that Swalwell (
2002) detects in Marks' notion of hapticity.
As Marks writes, 'Whether criticism is haptic, in touch with its object, is a matter of the point at which the words lift off' (
2004: 80). Haptic criticism must be what happens, then, when the words
don't lift off the surface of the film object, if they (or any of the other film-analytical elements conveyed through montage or other non-linear editing techniques and tools)
remain on the surface of the film object, as they often do in videographic film studies. In addition to this, video essays on films may often be an especially '
superficial' form of criticism, frequently using slow motion or zoom-in effects to allow those experiencing them to close in on the grain or detail of the film image.
With so many words, or other filmanalytical strategies, simultaneously available to be sensed on the surface of the image and, in terms of sound strategies (such as voiceovers or other added elements), seeming to emanate from it, videographical film studies may be curiously haptic objects, then. It is useful to remember that the art historical concept of haptic visuality
emerged from the scholarly and artistic traditions of
formalism, which made procedures such as
defamiliarization central to their practice. Defamiliarization -- the uncanny distancing effect of an altered perspective on (such as a hyper-proximity to) an otherwise familiar object -- may be one of the greatest benefits of the particular hapticity of videographical film criticism.
Finally, does
TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? practice what it preaches? Or, does it only practice one of the things it preaches? It isn't, primarily, a piece of haptic film criticism produced in close contact with the film. Instead, it's a film-theory object which 'grabs' from it, transforms what it grabs, and lifts off, or not, from there.
Persona doesn't exactly disappear, though, either from the literal or metaphorical frames of the collage. Like many of Ingmar Bergman's works, this 1966 film treats (and inhabits) the perilous zone of borderlines between one person and another, its characters act out extreme forms of
projective identification and
introjection. Indeed,
Persona explores some of the real psychological dangers of 'hapticity', of not being able to separate, or to see others detachedly - 'optically'. Some of those perils still find themselves evoked in the elements I selected for inclusion.
But, by selecting one sequence from others, by slowing it, and by replacing the film's soundtrack, the video collage does mitigate those dangers. It suspends them in order to close in on a visual track which simultaneously presents a 'haptic image' (the blurry, interchanging faces - made more haptic, possibly, by the slowed motion and zoom in)
and an 'optical', or more clearly defined one (the
Rückenfigur-esque image of the boy, who is himself pictured
having a haptic experience). The combination of these images may well hint at Laura Marks' (and my) ideal critical frame. Marks writes,
