Matthew Tomkinson Dream Work – The blur and the esthetic of genesis Dream Work is an enterprise of deformation for several reasons. The dream-work to which Tscherkassky delivers himself in a conscious and aware way is similar to the work carried out by psychism such as Freud clarified in his work “The Interpretation of Dreams.” It consists in deforming a preexistent cinematographic image, proceeding by extraction, dislocation, of zones of the image, of the frames, this deformation being a prelude to the creation of new images. In this way the announced theme meets the forms put into play; the subject of the narration, since there is narration, is indeed that indicated by the title: a woman lies down, falls asleep, starts to dream. The iconography of Dream Work then takes again that of Outer Space, the images lose their objective fixity to convey short impressions, in a way so fast and dense that their fixation in the mind comes from quantitative and localized accumulation, thus allowing a possible recognition, without which these elements remain in the domain of apperception. Thus different kinds of images appear, which one can associate with the material that Freud regards as launching the dream-work: - “Day-residues”: the residues of everyday life, of the day before, which are used in the work of converting into manifest content, imaged. Stripping, places, people perhaps enter into this category, these elements being characterized by a certain fixity, testifying to their symbolic or conceptual nature. - “Somatic stimuli”: excitations caused by stimuli occurring from inside or outside during sleep. The image of the sleeping woman, which could be an external point of view may only be her own, reflexive image in which she figures her own representation with her desire to sleep, her tactile feelings (caresses, leg massage), as well as the light from the blinds. - “Ancient mnemic traces”: the traces of events from the infantile past with strong emotional load, often archaic. - “lexicon of universal images”: substitutes for certain objects, particularly sexual ones. Perhaps the needles and pins, apart from their reference to Man Ray’s Retour à la raison (1923) have this value, in that they seem to represent the concerns of the dreamer and then to pierce her symbolically. We do not propose to carry out an "analysis" of Dream Work in the psychoanalytical sense, but to read it in terms of “The Interpretation of Dreams” so as to identify certain characteristics of the images brought into play. Thus we will have the occasion to explain the processes of representability of dreams when it seems necessary for analyzing the film. Dream Work uses many processes allowing to assimilate the film image and the dream representation, dismembering traditional iconography. Of these scattered impressions, of this generalized wavering of the image, we are still led to link together some of these apperceptions, in problematic identities. The work of figuration resembles more an enterprise of sculpture than usual cinematographic procedures. Indeed to fix a recognizable element, Tscherkassky prints the element several times on adjacent frame the pattern which interests him using a red laser beam pen: he can thus carry out an intensive kind of creation in which he controls the exact subject, by an ultra-precise method that he puts into use for a duration just as controlled. The passage into the domain of images where the objects’ identities lose their fixity produces the blur in Dream Work. Indeed the objects lose their contours and their ontological permanence, in an impressionist process in black and white, being a prelude to aesthetic creation. From the furtive, unfinished representation of things, new entities appear, bits of gestures, emotional situations, tensions. This is how we can describe blur in the forms of Dream Work, a blur more formal than technical. The interrogation of Outer Space relates to the source of the image. Dream Work links up to the same issues, being the third part of the cinemascope trilogy, while highlighting more specifically the work of creation of these images, as much from a psychic point of view as a phenomenologic one, and especially cinematographic. The sequence in which the filmmaker places thumbtacks on the film before exposing it is the explicit demonstration of this. However the need to work on the image is a recurring problem in experimental cinema, calling into question the sufficiency of the process of cinematographic recording while intervening directly on the filmstrip and more precisely the single frame; exposed film is regarded as a material, in one sense still formless, from which the work of creation will be possible. One tends to believe that because of the intentionnality at the time a photograph is taken, that one necessarily has a representation, a figure. However, a cinematographic image, for a fully thought-out form to appear, must undergo a work of selection, removal of certain elements, additions, focus on others, the blurry indetermination of virtual forms. To carry out a work of the image, to consider that the image still has to be worked on even frame by frame, calls into question the analogical capacity of the original cinematographic process, to regard the film image as an unfinished production. On one hand this image gives us too much, and on the other it does not give us enough. Tscherkassy’s enterprise could be connected to this statement of Mallarmé about poetic creation: "By digging the verse, I found God, and Nothingness" It is by forgetting preexistent forms, by deformation, that one can see new forms appearing. We saw which work was brought into play in the cinematographic realization of the dream-work. It remains to be studied how the images are selected, how they circulate, how the blur is the destiny of such a formal economy. In the laboured rupture of forms, the identities waver: we are no longer sure we recognize the woman, the places, nor even the negative thumbtacks in the center of the image. These images have passed into the domain of uncertainty, thus releasing the virtuality of these appearances in a psychic direction. When we manage to recognize something on the screen, it is intermittently; by the accumulation of stills on a frame-by-frame level. The mind manages to create a bond between these trembling images associating the impressions between them to detect an object, a form. From a certain localization, from a weak permanence, the pattern appears, allowing to perceive a real object and not a furtive apperception. It all happens as if we were located in a world where the spectator had lost the assurance of his point of view, of his capacity to recognize the things around him. As if the bonds tying him to himself and his reason had broken. The empiricism offers to rise to pure perception before the understanding annexes these perceptual residues to a rational entity. To release various perceptions of associations unifying the swarming of what is sensitive. Thus, for the empiricism, from continuity of impression in a space localised one deduces the presence of an object. To question the operation of the understanding with respect to perception makes it possible to understand the constitution of the phenomenal world. According to Hume, understanding functions by three kinds of associations of ideas, which we find put into use in Dream Work: 1. Associations by resemblance: an object remains itself, preserves its being from one moment to the next, this holds true insofar as for at least one of its aspects there is persistence. But one cannot say more in Dream Work, because every object appearance is subject to disappearance. Association by resemblance is the tendency to unify under one idea the multiplicity of visual impressions which is perception. Breaking down the permanence of the images, retrieving the palpitation of sensational impressions, is to highlight the work of the mind, this simplification which causes losing the percept. It is the indistinction of two possibly disparate elements which creates an effect of blur, a perceptive blur more than visual. Mallarmé wrote of Manet: “the subject palpitates with the movement of light and life.” The blinking of the eyelids is an event which should interest any rigorous empiricist: can one affirm that one always has the same thing in front of him before and after a blink of the eye? Can one affirm that from one frame to another one always has the same thing? Thus appears a particular form of flicker, a recurring event in the field of experimental cinema, on the level of the pattern, i.e. the blinking pattern. 2. Associations by contiguity: superimposition is a common cinematographic process allowing plays on meanings by overlaying images, but also included in this type of association are all the effects of editing, whether to create a logical or esthetic link. Contiguity allows ideas to appear starting from the local of various perceptions, even if it means creating contradictory or uncommon mixtures, like with the needle and the body, the thumbtack and the room. By bringing together fragmentary multiplicities we can thus see emerging a new unit, like the blur Brakhage evokes about bringing his fingers together. 3. Associations by causality: these are the principal object of empiricist doubt insofar as they are the fruit of custom whereas they are known as necessary. Dreams free us from this need for logical links, not for a complete absence of logic but the logic of the unconscious, invoking images for the affect they release more than for any kind of resemblance. Thus Dream Work does not follow any clear logical structure; the awakening one could suppose of the sleeper after the ringing of the alarm clock not really being one since the dream iconography which constitutes the film continues thereafter. Thus Tscherkassky’s work first appears to us as an empiricism, a plastic empiricism, in that he questions the mode of perception by which we recognize the world by distorting, splitting up, accumulating the perceptive residues. It is through blur that we are given things to see, a blur which makes similar things dissimilar, dislocating spatial unity. Having elaborated the various plastic forms that Dream Work brings into play, we can start upon its analysis. Far from being a formal film, Dream Work sets up a narration supported by an experimental iconography parallel to its subject matter that we can qualify as a cinematographic essay. The linear study of such a work is made difficult by the difficult analytical framework which is the shot. That leads us to seek new units, more rigorous, justified structurally by their context. 1. The first images are those of the window, vibrant, doubling. A curtain swings in the wind, illuminated by a dramatic light. Superimposed is a landscape, bathed in light, which dissolves into the light of the curtain. The curtain loop/handle seems however the main concern in the image, forming a balanced geometrical construction, especially when the shot tightens. The window becomes, more than a theme, an indication of the subject matter: a question of perception itself. The landscape dissolves into the curtain, the light is projected on this floating screen: it will be a question of forms, of deformations. The curtains are multiplied: diploptic images, such as a sufferer of strabism would perceive them, pushing the perceived into the domain of the hypothetical. Am I really seeing only one thing? Am I seeing things in the right way? If I perceive the same thing several times, are there several things or only one? This doubt frees up formal potentialities. The breeze moving the curtain and thus making the light vary compares the latter to a secretion, the sky spitting out visible material which spreads and takes form in glass, mesh, fabric, eyes. 2. A woman returns home, takes off her shoes, her stockings, brushes her hair, goes into her bedroom. The images dissolve together, describing a progression in this woman’s intimacy until she goes into the room: she enters the room through darkness, her silhouette shadowing on the ground, point of view shown by a high-angle "security video" shot. (the "shot" immediately following stops on the door frame; we see already appearing the importance of architectural openings, the symbolism of passages, catastrophic element in Outer Space, the entrance into the house being synonymous with visual collapse.) She lies down, and the light shimmers on the walls, then on her face. This light will undoubtedly be the somatic stimuli, influencing her face directly which itself becomes a mixture of a current image and a virtual image, the work of deformation begins. The importance of this image is that it causes an imperceptible shift in the mind of this woman. The image partially slips into negative, in such a way that shadow and light become indistinguishable. The door closes again in superimposition, then remains half-opened. 3. Then yet another face appears, one too many, its eyes opened. From a diegetic point of view, this face is the dreamer’s, superimposed over the real one who is dreaming. It is from this moment on that the image becomes really blurry and that the work of editing within each frame begins, the figurative work occurring by accumulation, distortion and removing material. The day-residues (fixing her hair) mix with the somatic stimuli (touching the bedspread) and set off a chain of associations, by forming blocks of feelings (percepts) and their evocative power (affects). This process is that of condensation, by which composite images are formed for too much significant emotional content. "If the objects to be condensed into a unity are too incongruous, the dream-work is content with creating a composite formation with a comparatively distinct nucleus, to which are attached more indefinite modifications. The unification into one image has here been to some extent unsuccessful; the two representations overlap one another, and give rise to something like a contest between the visual images. Similar representations might be obtained in a drawing if one were to attempt to give form to a unified abstraction of disparate perceptual images.” (FREUD IOD 6C 1900, trad A.A.Brill 1913, New York: Macmillan). Thus the woman’s first tendency is fetal regression as well as self-concern, both on the level of touch and symbolism (the vision of her own image). By massaging her leg, a man appears, his face riddled with worry: she cannot think of herself without thinking her own image, she cannot think her own image without thinking of a man. Each image carries its correlative image, which Tscherkassky has carefully actualized in order to recall dream-work. 4. Thus, as soon as she invites the man in, the image of her undressing is superimposed, passing her hand between her thighs, her moaning mixes with the ticking of the clock. “Blinking” faces and necks are added to the central representation of the man, it is a pure figure of desire, which Freud would call a "collective person," assembled from the elements of several men. "The condensation is accomplished by means of omission, inasmuch as the dream is not a faithful translation or projection, point by point, of the dream-thoughts, but a very incomplete and defective reproduction of them." (6A) One thus understands the way in which the figuration functions in the film: by the specific taking away of fragments of images to reconstitute a new figure. 5. This figure immerses itself in the psyche of this woman: when the man appears it is in worry, like a disturbing element of the narcissistic image. Then he factually penetrates the apartment, a simple stage or layer of the woman’s mind, as she opens her thighs to put her hand. Then the door imagery reappears, the man seems to visit the woman in her sleep, discovering her feet (Bergson would have said that this fact is real). 6. The film continues with a self-referential paradox: we again witness entering the apartment, this time in "flicker mode." It is as if we had shifted into another place, as if perception was modified by a disturbing element. This element is light, but not a light which allows seeing things, rather one that forces the vision of things. It remains a celestial secretion, introducing itself nevertheless into the psyche in the form of "somatic stimuli", the sleeping mind fighting to give it a form, according to the desires, frustrations and traumatisms shaking the fantasy. Thus the light takes shape in blurry, uncertain forms, actualizing in forms which are those of language, symbols, sketches of forces that do not solidify into determined forms. How to realize these forces? By splitting up the given forms, as well on the level of found-footage, as on the level of the forms of daily perception, and by accumulating these fragmentary remainders. Tscherkassky only re-uses the ready form to introduce his story. The stable and analogical image is therefore conventional, the topic of the dream allowing figurative work, deforming this image in order to leave simple sign behind. 7. The “movie within the movie” continues, the woman begins to see herself again arriving in the room. As a key enters the lock, a ringing occurs, that we identify with the morning alarm clock, as well as the optical sound track, fissuring The image. We then witness a storm of images in which no frame seems to connect, the alternation of black and white producing an flicker effect. A firework of elements passes under the domain of the imperceptible forming a blur we could qualify as "lumpy"; we have an image having the characteristics of the ametropic image without however coming from the blur dependent on this flaw. Should we then speak of an agnosic image, in what we feel that we are not dealing here with abstract patterns but instead with deformed, unrecognizable visions? Maybe body parts, as a hand for example arises; like the young woman’s foot from Frenhoffer’s masterpiece, this is only a member spouting out of the unformed mass. 8. The images stop again on the naked body. The thumbtack patterns then appear, printed using Man Ray’s rayograph technique. These tacks as well as the needles which follow have a double effect: they highlight the cinematographic process of analogical recording while printing directly on the film; the film is then in itself considered a support. Moreover the strange aspect of these tacks brings them into the domain of the universal symbolic image: they can indicate the male genitals, from the point, or the female one, from the hole which allows the existence of this point. Ambiguous symbol, it seems to attack the woman, the image of her body, the spread legs being used as support for the apparition of these objects. 9. This interior conflict is resolved by the filmstrip turning on itself. The latter appears then in all its thinness, highlighted as cinematographic material. Thus, in all rigour we see the filmmaker with the work, placing the tacks, and cutting the film. The “movie within the movie” self-reference of cinematographic work unites the set of themes and the formal economy. As soon as the scissors are closed again, we return to the story: the woman awakens, seeming enchanted, leaps out of bed and opens the blinds of her window. However the cinematographic illusion is hampered by the flickering, and the images of the filmmaker at work remain on the screen in double-exposure; then the image is duplicated forming a diploptic mirror image, being squeezed and widened, as if the viewer was trying to adjust his binocular vision without being able to find his point of focus. Thus the figure of the woman is duplicated, her image entering the registry of contingency, all that in negative. We don’t know where we are, what is the status of this entity, entity born from a complex device hampered by a radical formal and structural investigation. The image disintegrates into a multitude of spots and the window motif returns, much darker and broken up: the woman has crossed over from L’Arrivée over to Dream Work through all the layers of the image, mimetic, material, psychic to form to form a new one, unheard of and mature: a critical image, conscious of her powers as well as her limits. The study of the blur has enabled us to question the limits of a plastic form. How is a figure formed? By which processes does it come to disappear, or even to change into another? It appears to us that it by the meeting with a disparate element that the mixtures are formed, associations, of which the image is not stabilized, bearing in this indetermination its emotional power. Bergson’s theory of perception finds in the dream its clarification, a highlighting, in that the image appears out of weak feelings (Freud’s somatic stimuli) supplemented by the concerns, memories, neuroses of the subject. From the fuzzy indetermination of the night feelings the subject restores entities, people, objects. The blur makes it possible to go up the constitution of The image perceived, to highlight the unformed mass underlying any perception, the recognition drawing from memory. These mnemic images, they are “clichés”, stereotypes, images covering the complexity of the world, process that Freud calls secondary revision. To reach a pure perception for Bergson, is to go up the process of perception before the objective recognition, to reach an agnosic image, it is with saying without memory, purpose, free. From where we research an “unhuman” perception, blurry because off-centered, an image before there was man. Blur intended to imagine perception of a child: Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night explores the contemplative possibilities of the blur, inserting the image of a baby, giving us to see sets of lights crisscrossed by lines of force. This state of visual dislocation, is that in which one is at the end of Dream Work, the disintegrated, duplicated image, the sound of the wind showing its status as a secretion, assuming the path of processes of forming psychic images as well as filmic. This text was originally written for an accompanying booklet to the VHS « The CinemaScope Trilogy », published by re:voir, Paris 2004. To be ordered at http://www.re-voir.com close