Loving a Disappearing Image

© Laura U. Marks
Originally published in Cinémas (Fall 1997), ed. Denise Pérusse and Denis
Bellemare. 93-112. This revised version appears in Touch: Sensuous Theory
and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, forthcoming
November 2002).

Many recent experimental films and videos, flouting the maximization of the
visible that usually characterizes their media, are presenting a diminished
visibility: their images are, quite simply, hard to see. In some cases this
diminished visibility is a reflection upon the deterioration that occurs when film
and videotape age. Interestingly, a number of these same works also deal with
the loss of coherence of the human body, as with AIDS and other diseases.
The following essay continues my research into haptic, or tactile, visuality, here
to ask what are the consequences for 1. dying images and 2. images of death,
when the locus of identification and subjectivity is shifted from the human figure
to an image dispersed across the surface of the screen.
In defining a look tied to new ways of experiencing death, these works
appeal to a form of subjectivity that is dispersed in terms of ego/identity and yet
embodied physically. What this look enacts is something like a perpetual
mourning, something like melancholia in its refusal to have done with death.
Ultimately, it cannot be described by these Freudian terms. These images
appeal to a look that does not recoil from death but acknowledges death as
part of our being. Faded films, decaying videotapes, projected videos that flaunt
their tenuous connection to the reality they index, all appeal to a look of love and
loss.
There are many ways that the visual coherence and plenitude of the
image can be denied to the viewer. Among these are the ways films and tapes
physically break down, so that to watch a film or video is to witness its slow
death. Another is the way significance relies not upon the viewer’s ability to
identify signs, but in a dispersion of the viewer’s look across the surface of the
image. The works I will discuss reconfigure identification so that it is not with a
coherent subject but with non-human or inanimate objects, and with the body of
the image itself. They compel identification with a process, which is material
but non-human. Amplifying their melancholy quality of the works I have chosen
to discuss, many of their archival images are erotic. These works are Phil
Solomon’s Twilight Psalm II: Walking Distance (1999), Frank’s Cock (1994)
and Letters from Home (1996) by Mike Hoolboom; “The Hundred Videos”
(1992-96) and Everybody Loves Nothing (1997) by Steve Reinke; De Profundis
(1996) by Lawrence Brose; The Color of Love (1994) by Peggy Ahwesh;
XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX, a performance by Ken Jacobs, based on a film
recovered in 1980; and the images in Tom Waugh’s 1996 book, Hard to
Imagine.

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Cinema’s dying body
I began this research contemplating the conundrum of having a body that is not
one’s own, a betraying, disintegrating body. A body that slowly or quickly
becomes other, at least insofar as one’s identity is premised on wholeness.
This happens with all of us as we age, and it happens acceleratedly for people
who have AIDS or other diseases that invade and redefine their bodies. In
Letters from Home, Mike Hoolboom expresses the paradox of having a body
that is yours but not, when a character relates a dream that he was taken to a
room where a handful of crystals was spilled on a table, each of which, he
realized, represented an aspect of his personality. “There was my love of the
screwdriver and the universal wrench; the break with my sister; my weakness
for men in hairpieces.” The man displaying these crystals to him becomes a
doctor and tells him he is HIV-positive. “And sure enough, he pointed to an off-
color stone that was slowly wearing down everything around it.”
To have an aging body, as we all do, raises the question of why we are
compelled to identify with images of wholeness, as classical film theory would
have it; the question of whether this still is, or indeed was ever the case; and
the question of what it would be like to identify with an image that is
disintegrating. Following Vivian Sobchack, I suggest that identification is a
bodily relationship with the screen;1 thus when we witness a disappearing
image we may respond with a sense of our own disappearance. Cinema
disappears as we watch, and indeed as we do not watch, slowly deteriorating
in its cans and demagnetizing in its cases.2 Film and video, due to their
physical nature, disintegrate in front of our eyes: a condition that archivists and
teachers are in a special position to mourn. When I open the can of a color film
that has not been viewed in 20 years, the thrill of rediscovering these patiently
waiting images is tempered by their sad condition, once-differentiated hues
now a uniformly muddy pinkish brown. When I watch an analog tape from the
early days of video experimentation, the image appears to have lifted off in
strips. The less important the film or tape (and by extension, its potential
audience) was considered, the less likely that it will have been archived with
care, and thus the more likely it is that the rediscovery of the object will be such
a bittersweet pleasure. These expected and unexpected disasters remind us
that our mechanically reproduced media are indeed unique.
When I began to teach film studies I realized that the students will never
really see a film in class: it’s always a film that’s half-disappeared, or a
projected video that just teases us, with its stripes of pastel color, that there
might be an image in there somewhere, that there once was an indexical
relationship to real things, real bodies. One response to this situation can be to
see the actual, physical film or video we see as a mnemonic for the ideal film,
the Platonic film, once seen in 35mm in a good theater. This seems to be Seth
Feldman’s argument in “What Was Cinema?”, in which he suggests
melancholically that the institution of “cinema” has ceased to exist, given that

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most film viewing experiences occur through the medium of video, at home or
projected, and will increasingly take place through digital media.2 A notion of
the ideal film, which our viewing experiences can only approximate, is also the
basis of Paolo Cherchi Usai’s thoughtful argument that cinema history itself
would not be possible without the disappearance of its object.

Cinema history is born of an absence. Since, if all moving images were

present in their initial state, there would be no history of cinema, it can only
explain why these images had disappeared, and their hypothetical value in the
cultural memory of an epoch; it is their manner of disappearance that induces a
periodization..3

Cherchi Usai suggests that images take on history as a function of loss: if not
of their physical materiality, then of their initial conditions of viewing. Cinema
history, then, is a melancholic act from the start, for even in the presence of the
fullness of the image one is aware that it is disappearing before our eyes. The
cinematic object is gradually transformed from what the image represents to
the complex of histories of its destruction. The goal of cinema history is to
account for its disappearance and its transformation into another object.4
A response to the partial and decayed images that pass themselves off
for Mädchen in Uniform or an early Ant Farm experiment on our classroom
screens can be to accept that this film or tape is the one we have, and to deal
with its own peculiarities, the way it lays a map of the indignities it has suffered
over the represented image. With disappearance, the work accumulates aura.
Mechanically reproduced images supposedly lack aura, but as images decay
they become unique again: an unhappy film is unhappy after its own fashion.
The scratches and unintentional jump cuts on our print of X film are ours alone,
and even video decays individually, in response to temperature, humidity, and
the idiosyncrasies of playback machines. Of course, independent,
experimental, and rare films and videos are already auratic, as anyone knows
who has tried to replace their lost home movies. Works that are not widely
distributed are more like bodies that we protect assiduously than like
simulacra.
Many film- and videomakers intentionally work this process of
dissolution into their productions, incorporating the halo-like colors of
deteriorating nitrate, the blurring of multigenerational analog images, or the
cruel lines of static on erased video. Examples include Barbara Hammer’s
Nitrate Kisses (1992) which searches eroding footage for traces of lesbian and
gay histories; Atom Egoyan’s films, many of which play with erased or barely-
visible video as an analogue for memory; and many art videos that use the
decay of the image to refer to memory loss. All these works borrow the aura of
the disappearing images upon which they meditate. A very poignant example is
Ming-Yuen S. Ma’s short video Sniff (1996), where a man crawls on his bed,

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inhaling for the smell trace of his departed lovers - perhaps gone forever. “M
came over last night. He had two scoops of ice cream, and some chocolate.”
As the abandoned man moves with increasing desperation, the image breaks
down, losing its identity the way smell particles disperse, taking memory away
with them.
These works play upon an antagonism between the figurative image
and the medium that supports it. Some suggest that if we love the figure, we
must hate the medium, because in its mortality it will betray the figure. Peter
Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1990) works this antagonism by seducing the viewer
with fragments of ever lovelier movies in the volatile medium of nitrate film. We
become enchanted by the longago stories of abandoned miners, shipwrecked
lovers, and a cavorting Adam and Eve, cliffhangers all; then the film forces us to
witness them being swallowed up by bubbling, crystallizing emulsion. Lyrical
Nitrate is beautiful, but I find it sadistic.
The life of the emulsion itself, and its embodiment of memory, is the
beginning point for much of Phil Solomon’s work, including The Exquisite Hour
(1994) and The Snowman (1995). To make the stunning Twilight Psalm II:
Walking Distance (1999), Solomon chemically treated fragments of film to
make the mortal body of the support visible through the figurative bodies in the
image. Solomon accelerates film’s process of decay, in the manner of marking
one’s forehead with ashes to focus the act of mourning (or standing in the
shower to make the tears come). Human figures, when they are discernible at
all, appear to be stumbling through tar, or snowstorms or sandstorms.
Sometimes we can make out a soldier, a horse and carriage, the oval of a face
in close-up; other times our only hope of a figure is the merest line of light. Low
sounds of howling wind and crashing ocean emphasize the thickness of the
space they traverse. At a screening of the film, a friend recognized a shot of
Harry Houdini struggling to extricate himself from chains while underwater, a
more than adequate metaphor for the feeling that images are suffocating in the
emulsion.
As in Lyrical Nitrate, the people whose presence is marked on the
emulsion seem to be struggling not only through viscous space but also
through time — the time that has passed between their recording and our
viewing of them. Yet watching Walking Distance I sense that, through its
grieving process, some sort of peace has been made between figure and
surface — the figurative image and the surface that has now become its own
figure. A transformation has taken place, where one kind of life, the human life
that lends itself to stories, metamorphoses into an uncanny, mineral life. And
the emulsion seems to be alive, the way a sand dune carved by wind is alive.
Solomon told me that he was seriously ill when he made the film. “I was
thinking of the emulsion having a consciousness welling up like memory,” he
said.5 The emulsion itself remembers the passage of time, when the image
attempts to live in an eternal present. Loving a disappearing image means
finding a way to allow the figure to pass while embracing the tracks of its
presence, in the physical fragility of the medium.

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 To love a disappearing image one must trust that the image is real in the
first place; that is, that it establishes an indexical link between the long-ago and
objects recorded by a camera and the present-day spectator. We mourn the
passing of the young lovers/actors because we are sure that they existed: the
photograph is a sort of umbilical cord between the thing photographed then
and our gaze now (Barthes 1980, 127). The real mourning occurs when that
umbilical cord is severed. Film historian Tom Waugh encountered
insurmountable problems when he attempted to reproduce archival gay
pornography.3 After the manuscript went through the hands of several editors
who refused to publish the explicit images, Columbia University Press finally
agreed - on the condition that, in addition to the removal of some images, the
faces in nine of the old photographs be altered to avoid potential lawsuits.
Bitterly, Waugh describes how he had to hire a computer “whiz kid” to digitally
graft new faces onto the archival porn images, and the travesties that resulted.
What was lovable about these old pornographic images was their indexical
witness of particular individuals, which is destroyed by alteration. In effect,
perceiving the images to be insufficiently dead, Waugh’s lawyers devised a way
to murder them.

Disappearance and identification

How does one identify with dying images? Recall that cinematic
identification was first defined by Christian Metz as identification with a
character (secondary), or with the look of the apparatus itself (primary);6 more
recently, secondary identification came to be redefined as an oscillation among
many subject positions. Secondary identification remains understood as
identification with a person, or a personified being. In contrast, I suggest that
secondary identification may be with an inanimate thing or things; and that
primary identification itself may be an identification with dispersion, with loss of
unified selfhood.
I believe I gained this view of primary identification by attending many
screenings in artist-run centers, dank and ill-heated, with projectors rented
from the public library. In these circumstances identification with the apparatus
is decidedly not a position of power. The miserable viewing conditions at many
institutes of higher learning also instill this weakened identificatory position.
Primary identification can be an identification across differences, as we
have come to understand secondary identification to be. As such it need not
attempt to make good the viewer’s partial position; instead it invites the viewer
to take part in a dispersed subjectivity. Identifying with dispersion might seem
to resemble the self-destructive process of heteropathic identification; that is,
identifying with one who is different even though it may threaten the self.7
However, where my position fundamentally diverges from the Lacanian
psychoanalytic basis of heteropathic identification is that I question whether
identification with difference necessarily annihilates the self. Lacanian

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psychoanalysis posits that identity is built on the dread of alterity. I assert,
however, that the confrontation with the other need not destroy the self.
Frank’s Cock by Mike Hoolboom is one work that invites the viewer to
relate to an image precisely in its dissolution. The film does this both by having
a structure in which each part loses its separate coherence by being
justaposed with the others, and by using images that are themselves hard to
see. The screen is divided into four parts: first, in the upper right quadrant, a
man comes on (Callum Rennie), telling the story of Frank, his lover, who is
dying; then, in the upper left quadrant, shots of wiggling micro-organisms
appear (they connote viruses, but to me they also look like the Brownian motion
of people moving around in a nightclub); then, in the lower right, Madonna’s
Sex video comes on; and in the lower left emerges a grainy dub of gay
pornography.
Although the story of Frank’s lover commands the space of the film, it
shifts from being a confessional AIDS movie where we identify, perhaps
condescendingly, with the speaker, to one that divides our attention across four
interior movies, each of which disperses the others. Divided this way, the
image refuses a single narrative that would comprehend the loss. The film
also asks us to celebrate fucking, and the mingling of mocroorganisms, as we
listen to the lover’s unapologetic tale. It provides a variety of images of sex: the
swimming one-celled creatures compete for attention with the choreographed
forms of Madonna and her lovers, begging the question, with which do you
identify more? Critics celebrated the film because it made the figure of a gay
man with AIDS “universal,” but I would suggest that this means not simply open
to universal identification. Instead (or as well), the film moves beyond
identification to an acknowledgement of dispersion.
In Letters from Home, Hoolboom comes out as a person with AIDS, but
this concretization is only partial, for his first-person testimony is spoken by
many other people. Hoolboom becomes one actor among others speaking the
words of a person with AIDS, at the same time that all the people in the film
become people with AIDS. I believe this is a more appropriate way to deal with
AIDS than the heroic narrative centering on an individual’s suffering.5 The lack
of closure in the “fight against AIDS” becomes a lack of closure for the viewer.
In Letters from Home, not only is the identity of person with AIDS
dispersed across many subjects with whom one might identify. Also, meaning
is dispersed throughout the film onto a great variety of archival images and
sounds: Hoolboom as a teenager, wiping his face with his shirt as he walks
toward the camera; a 1920s film of people trying in vain to unstick a car from
the mud; the spectacular crash of a biplane from the period, accompanied by
Billie Holiday’s “You’ve Changed”... And finally, the look itself becomes
dispersed, in the way many of the images themselves break down or lose
legibility. The battered, sepia-toned film of a stumbling bride suggests an
unrecoverable past time; the face of the last speaker (Callum Rennie again,

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reading Mike’s words) is half-obscured by a flash of light; the faded clips of old
home movies seem to have been watched one too many times.
Old pornograpic images are a logical place to look for lost love.
Filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Ken Jacobs turn their cherishing techniques
on these profane images, using optical printing and frame-by-frame projection
to draw out their nuances, searching for real gestures of intimacy in between
the choreographed performances. I discuss Jacobs’s film/performance
XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX in detail elsewhere in this volume. Here let me note
Jacobs’s technique of projecting the reprinted images through an apparatus
called the Nervous System one frame at a time, manipulating the projector to
create a sense of movement and changing light within each single frame. The
film in question is a ninety-second hard-core porno from the 1920s, called
Cherries. In Jacobs’s projection, the images of two women and a man
cavorting and fucking in an orchard are in part rendered abstract, a
Sternbergian play of pattern and light. But the time Jacobs creates for
contemplation also allows the viewer to reflect upon this long-ago
performance, and to imaginatively create new narratives, sexual or not, from the
pornographic set piece. In this Jacobs shifts the viewer’s engagement with the
images from a prescriptive, “action” mode to a contemplative one.
The Color of Love began when experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh
found a Super-8 amateur porn film in the trash. In it two women straddle the
disturbingly passive and bloodstained body of a man, tease his flaccid penis
with a knife, and then make love to each other in straight-porn “lesbian” style,
the camera moving in on their genitals. The film had deteriorated badly, its
emulsion bubbling around the remains of the image, rendered by the artist’s
hand-processing in garden-party hues of rose, turquoise and green. Ahwesh
tenderly exploited the effects of this deterioration, slowing and stopping the film
at points and accompanying it with a lubugrious tango. In slow motion we may
watch as one of the women lifts her head in real or simulated pleasure while
the other woman kisses her breasts, while the deteriorated emulsion curtains
and reveals them. Given the mechanical quality of the performance, the man’s
flaccid penis, and the disengorged labia of the women, it seems that the real
erotic activity in The Color of Love is not between the actors but in the game
with death taking place on the surface of the film. Choreographed by the tango,
the film’s emulsion flowers and evaporates, giving itself up to bliss and to
death.
Lawrence Brose, like Solomon, Hoolboom and Ahwesh, has for years
used hand-processing to eke out what is precious in the image. His recent
work, De Profundis (1997), uses Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms and his searing
letter from prison, emphatically performed by Agnes de Garron, as a basis to
explore the figure of the homosexual outlaw. These texts are laid over a vast
array of imagery, including vintage gay pornography and contemporary Radical
Faerie gatherings. Step-printed, the archival porn films are presented a couple
of frames at a time, so that a contemporary viewer can contemplate the
gestures and expressions of, for example, a man in a sailor cap who teasingly

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lowers his pants and then, grinning, pulls them up again as he walks toward
the camera. A man swimming naked in one recurring image appears, when
printed in negative, to be running in quicksand - a counterpart to the despair of
Wilde’s letter to the lover who betrayed him. Brose’s hand- and chemical
processing mimics and exploits the effects of the vintage films’ deterioration,
and like Ahwesh’s film the result is sublime. Explosive colors and texture glorify
the long-ago illicit love scenes, with a defiance that matches Wilde’s words.
Indeed Wilde’s advocacy of perversion as an ethics and an aesthetics seems
to influence the film’s ethos of contamination: figures bleed into the surface
patina as a final voice-over whispers, “It is so easy to convert others - that is
why they find us dangerous.” De Profundis is about coming through unbearable
anguish and surviving, and the gloriously wounded images metaphorize
Wilde’s descent into and return from despair: “While for the first year of my
imprisonment I did nothing else ... but wring my hands in despair and say,
‘What an ending - what an appalling ending.’ Now I try to say to myself, and
sometimes, when I am not torturing myself, do really say, ‘What a beginning -
what a marvelous beginning.’“

Melancholia
In revaluing melancholia, I would like to argue that the mourning subject
need not rediscover his/her coherence at the cost of ceasing to love the lost
loved one, which is how Freud describes “successful” mourning. Rather, I
suggest, mourning can involve the loss of self and its reconfiguration and
redistribution. Freud wrote in “Mourning and Melancholia,”

Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which

demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the
verdict of reality that the object no longer exists; and the ego, confronted
as it were with the question whether it shall share this fate, is persuaded
by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it derives from being alive to
sever its attachment to the object that has been abolished.8

With some ruefulness, Freud argued that this process of separation from the
loved one, indeed killing the loved one again in memory, is necessary for the
survival of the ego. The alternative to mourning, according to Freud, is
melancholia, in which the subject never gives up its investment in the lost loved
one, and thus becomes incapable of transferring its love to a new object.
Unlike mourning, in melancholia the lost object is hidden from consciousness:
“even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia,
but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost
in him.”9 Perhaps this describes the melancholia that one feels when viewing
an image of an unknown person. We cannot know who this person was, but we

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mourn his or her passing and feel a generalized sense of loss in the wake of
history’s rough treatment of the forgettable.
As William James noted, the melancholic diminution of the ego comes
close to being an acknowledgement of the actual human condition, against
which a healthier person has ample defenses. James wrote that melancholia
has a quality of realism, for if one conceives of the world “as it is, purely in
itself,” stripped of one’s emotional investment, “it will be almost impossible ...
to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness.”10 James quotes
Tolstoy: “One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but
when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat.”11
Lacanian theory amply supports the theory that the ego is a sturdy bulwark
against our fundamental self-less-ness.
Roland Barthes’s meditation on the “Winter Garden” photograph of his
mother in Camera Lucida suggested that photography itself is a melancholic
medium. “Nothing in [the photograph] can transform grief into mourning.”12
Photography, he suggests, blocks the act of memory. It fixes the past and
substitutes the signs of the image for the creative engagement of memory. To
view a photograph of a lost loved one, then, is a melancholic act in which the
viewer “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”13

The only way I can transform the Photograph is into refuse: either the
drawer of the wastebasket. Not only does it commonly have the fate of
paper (perishable), but even if it is attached to more lasting supports, it
is still mortal: like a living organism, it is born on the level of the
sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages. . . . Attacked
by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to
do but throw it away.14

Barthes finds that the mortality of his photographs, their blurriness, fading, and
decay, render them unbearably abject. When not only the “what” being mourned
but the “whom” becomes illegible, the photograph must be rejected, lest its
mortality contaminate the life of the viewer. In what seems an understandable
and “healthy” conclusion to mourning, Barthes throws the old photograph
away.7
I would like to suggest that the very blurriness and illegibility of the
photograph that Barthes finds abject may aid the process of memory. As I
argue in “Video Haptics and Erotics,” in this volume, an image that is grainy,
indistinct, or dispersed over the surface of the screen invites a haptic look, or a
look that uses the eye like an organ of touch. This is how love works into this
sort of identification. A tactile look does not rely on a separation between looker
and object as a more optical or cognitive look does. Because it does not rely on
the recognition of figures, haptic looking permits identification with (among
other things) loss, in the decay and partialness of the image. This sort of look,

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then, is not just about death, but about loving a living but non-coherent subject,
an image that contains the memory of a more complete self. This look is a kind
of reverse mirror stage: we identify not (“jubilantly”) with a self that is more
unified than we are, but with a self that is aging and disappearing. Perhaps a
fading photograph of one’s own lost loved ones is too violent to contemplate:
the image that robbed one of memory itself being drained of life. But I do
believe the melancholia evoked by a dying image may produce not dread but a
loving regard.
Many of Steve Reinke’s short works included in “The Hundred Videos”
(1992-96) are devoted to found footage of anonymous or fictional boys and
young men, on whom the artist lavishes the perverse affection of a habitual
seducer. In Artifact, clips of a 1970s CBC documentary called The Children of
Sri Lanka are re-presented in “the edited version that desire has consigned to
my memory.” Reinke eroticize the brown-skinned boys of the documentary as
they ride water buffalo or rebuff the phallic attentions of an elephant’s trunk that
reaches in window. The handsome young bowling champion of Corey is
rescued from cable-television oblivion by the videomaker’s voiced-over
amorous fan letter. But what Reinke returns to most insistently is the damaged
young men to whom he would be doctor and lover. Wish examines an archive
of medical photographs of skin diseases, supposedly from the collection of a
Philadelphia doctor in the 1930s. Each photograph is fetishistically divided into
parts which are matted into the black screen: the rosaceous ears of one young
sufferer, the skin rash covering the chest of another. “Be my leper,” the artist
pleads in voice-over; “Be my love.” These diseased skins attract the artist’s
sympathy in the same way that decaying images do in other tapes: they are
signs of passing beauty that must be revived in the memory of the viewer, for
the people and images themselves are now dust.
In Everybody Loves Nothing Reinke again turns his possessive gaze to
various klind of found footage: medical films, home movies, an Air Force
training film. Reinke edits these, or pairs them with text or voice-over, to make
explicit their sense of mourning a passing. He pays special attention to a
1950s medical film documenting treatments for hypogonadism in male
adolescents. The officious voice-over of the found film narrates one chubby,
effeminate boy’s emergence into “a normal man” thanks to testosterone
injections: new body hair, deeper voice, increased musculature, and enlarged
genitals. Reinke edits the footage to construct an uncomfortably long close-up
of the youth’s tiny “before” penis, tucked like a rose in the folds of his flesh. This
might seem prurient, except that the original voice-over is so certain in its
condemnation of the boy’s “abnormal” state that we get a sense that Reinke is
on the side of the image against the voice-over. He cherishes the young man in
his insufficiently male state, caressing the image of a youth who will disappear
into the ranks of the heathily (heterosexually) male. This exchange shares with
the other sequences of Everybody Loves Nothing an ardent desire to revive the
lost past from a disappearing image. In a later sequence, we see a tourist
video of a Punch and Judy-type puppet show, so faded that one can barely

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decipher its bouncing and grinning, vaguely terrifying figures. Reinke’s gentle
voice explains, “If I were to offer a synopsis of the play, it would be, ‘Do not
come for me, Death, for I am just a tourist.’ But really, it is probably, ‘Do not
come for me, Death, for I am just a child.’”

Devotional melancholy
In the accounts of Freud, James, and even Barthes, melancholia is seen
as morbid and suspect in that it eats away at the ego. The melancholic cannot
love, Freud argues; s/he cannot have healthy religious experience, James
argues; and her/his condition is exacerbated by the decaying images of the
beloved, Barthes adds. Is there any way to imagine an act of perpetual
mourning that is at the same time an act of love? The works I discuss here
turn their attention to images that were not precious but merely efficacious: the
porno, the medical film. Loving a disappearing image can be a way of rescuing
something that was not loved in its own time.
Freud’s understanding of melancholy, and Barthes’s as well, seem
symptompatic of the Western conviction that the world revolves around the ego.
The Freudian definition of love is also tied up with the ego’s coherence. Yet if
we can imagine a subjective state in which the self manages to exist without
investing in the illusion of its own completeness (a big “if” for Freudian and
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory), then we can imagine that mourning might
persist without morbidity. We can imagine that melancholy does not preclude
love but merely maintains love in the face of knowledge that the object of love is
(always being) lost.
Here I would like to call upon another definition of melancholy, which
James attributes to the “sick soul” in his Varieties of Religious Experience, but
which in other religious traditions is a sort of divine ecstacy. Devotional poetry
addresses the deity in the melancholic tone of a lover addressing the
unhearing beloved. As one example, consider the bhakti movement, or way of
devotion, begun in South India around the sixth century CE. I could also
mention the writings of Christian mystics, in which the union with and
separation from the deity are as passionately anticipated and regretted as
earthly meetings and partings with a lover. Bhakti, or “self-less devotion to
God,”15 would seem to run against the cultivation of a healthy ego. Indeed, as
with other Eastern and mystical faiths, its goal is the dissolution of the ego,
which is considered an illusion preventing the devotee from becoming one with
the infinite.

Where do I go from here?

I can’t stand the soft bells, the gentle breeze,

the dark water-lily, the darkness that conquers day,

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 the dulcet notes, the jasmines, the refreshing air.

The Lord, my beguiling one,

who creates, bores through,
swallows, and spews this earth,
who measures here and beyond,
does not come.

Why should I live?16

The devotional poets’ pleas for divine grace despite the unworthiness of the
petitioner17 are comparable to the self-abnegation of the melancholic. Indeed
the abject longing of the mystical lover for the Beloved is its own reward. The
Sufi poet Rumi (1207-1273) told of a man who stopped praising Allah when a
cynic asked if he’d ever heard anything back:

He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamend he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,

in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing
you express is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.18

Can this form of religious devotion be a model of the melancholic

subjectivity of the mere filmgoer? I suggest it can. In recent years the ego has
lost its position of supremacy both in psychoanalytic theory and in film theory
(with its emphasis on masochism, fluid identification, etc.), as well as in
postmodern theories of the subject. In light of this revision, one may review
Freud’s rueful claim that the ego chooses survival over love. It seems to be
easier, in the age of AIDS, to give up a unified subjectivity that we are less
convinced we had in the first place. Melancholia, the refusal to discard the dead

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loved one from our selves, makes sense if our selves are composites anyway.
Devotional poetry offers a model of love of the absent beloved in which the ego
is, indeed, dispersed. This dispersion is claimed as a joyful reunion with the
beloved rather than a fearful annihilation.
Let me push my argument that it is possible to identify with a dispersed
subjetivity without dread, by pointing to the recent hype of protease inhibitor
drugs, released in 1996, that “cure” AIDS, supposedly rendering it just another
chronic disease like diabetes. The flare of media excitement around these
drugs — and the media silence re AIDS that followed — clearly reflects a desire
to get AIDS off the screen and back into the lives of those other people who
have it. The rush to celebrate the “cure” is an act to contain AIDS and to
separate the infected bodies from the clean ones, to make AIDS a minority
issue again.8 The works I have discussed, which still love the disappearing
bodies to which they are devoted, argue the opposite: that we all have AIDS.
Clearly one appropriate response of mourning is fetishism: in the case
of AIDS, the Names Quilt, the many loving documents and documentaries of
individuals who have died, permit a hyper-cathexis and then detachment from
the beloved one. In this paper, however, I am suggesting another response of
mourning that is anti-fetishistic: it does not concretize the loss in an object but
expresses the loss through the dissolution of objects. If this is melancholia,
then I suggest that melancholia can a subject-dispersing, loving response to
loss.
Mourning the death of an image is far less traumatic, of course, than
mourning a loved one. Yet I argue that engaging with a disappearing image
has some results for the formation of subjectivity, or precisely, a subjectivity that
acknowledges its own dispersion. These works of disappearing images
encourage the viewer to buld an emotional connection with the medium itself.
We are not asked to reject the images on its surface, themselves precious
indexes of longago events, but to understand them to be inextricable from
another body whose evanescence we witness now, the body of the medium. An
idea of the self emerges from this exploration of love and loss that is not the
anxiously insulated subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis, but a self that is
deeply interconnected with others. Engaging with a disappearing image invites
a kind of compassion and open-ended love that can also be a way to engage
with people and with death. The respose to death in these works is not one of
fear but an embracing; not the morbid embrace of death, but an embracing of
the self’s relations with others and with all matter — which is, after all, in a state
of constant dissolution. Loving a disappearing image draws us into a deep
connection with all things, absent and present. “The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.”9

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1
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: Phenomenology and Film

Experience (Princeton University Press, 1992).

2
I include single-channel video in the category of cinema.
2
Seth Feldman, “What Was Cinema?” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 5:1

(Spring 1996), 1-22. Feldman suggests that the “assaultive” style of

contemporary cinema makes it more oriented toward spectacle, or toward a

“cinema of attractions.” This is an interesting assertion, because the

“attraction” of early cinema was not the attraction of secondary identification

with characters in a movie but a relationship with the screen image itself. In this

essay I argue that identification with the screen, and with a screen image that is

dissolving and incomplete, permits a look that acknowledges death.

3
“L’histoire du cinéma naît d’une absence. Puisque, si toutes les images en

mouvement étaient présents en leur état initial, il n’y aura pas d’histoire du

cinéma, celle-ci ne peut qu’expliquer pourquoi ces images ont disparu, et leur

valeur hypothéthetique dans la mémoire culturelle d’une époche; c’est leur type

de disparition qui induit une périodisation.” Paolo Cherchi Usai, “Une image

modèle,” Hors Cadre 6 (Spring 1988), 230; my translation. This argument has

since been expanded in English in the remarkable The Death of Cinema:

History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film

Institute, 2001).
4
Ibid., 235.
5
Phil Solomon, conversation with the author, March 29, 2001.

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3
Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: A History of Gay Erotica from Its Origins to

Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Waugh describes the

process of legal and digital censorship his precious images underwent in “The

Archaeology of Censorship,” in Lorraine Johnson, ed., Suggestive Poses:

Artists and Critics Respond to Censorship (Toronto: Toronto Photographer’s

Workshop and Riverbank Press, 1997). He also tells the story in John

Greyson’s Uncut (1997), a film that, in Greyson’s lateral fashion, compares

image censorship to circumcision.

6
Christian Metz, “Identification/Mirror” and “The Passion for Perceiving,” in

Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1975]), 730-45.

7
Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World. New York and London:

Routledge, 1996), 23-24.

5
As Kobena Mercer (1993), and before him Third Cinema theorists such as

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino (1969), argue, narrative closure is often

inappropriate in films made within minority communities, because the struggle

will still be going on when the film is over. See Kobena Mercer, “Recoding

Narratives of Race and Nation,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in

Black Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 69-95;

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” trans.

Julianne Burton and Michael Chanan, in Michael Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five

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Years of New Latin American Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1983

[1969]).
8
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in James Strachey, ed. and

trans., The Standard Edition of the Collected Psychological Works, vol. XIV

(London: Hogarth, 1957 [1917], 255.

9
Ibid., 245.
10
William James, “The Sick Soul,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985 [1902]), 147; James’s

emphasis.
11
Ibid., 151.
12
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard

Howard (New York: Hill, 1981), 90.

13
Freud 1957 [1917], 245.
14
Barthes, 145-46.
7
Timothy Murray offers an interesting discussion of Barthes’s photographic

melancholia in Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and

Canvas (London and New York: Routledge, 19930.

15
Sandilya, One Hundred Aphorisms of Sandilya, ed. and trans.

Manmathamnath Paul. Sacred Books of the Hindus, vol. 7, pt. 2 (New York: AMS

Press), i.
16
Tiruvaymoli 9.9.2; quoted in Vasudha Narayanan, The Way and the Goal:

Expressions of Devotion in the Early Sri Vaisnava Tradition (Washington, D.C.:

Institute for Vaishnava Studies, 1987), 42.

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17
Narayanan, 66; 97-99.
18
Rumi (Jalal al-Din Rumi, Maulana), The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman

Barks (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 155.

8
The practice of safe sex certainly is a pointed example of the cultural desire to

preserve individual boundaries: never getting to taste one’s lover and touch

one’s lover on the inside, because of fear of contracting HIV. On “how to have

promiscuity in an epidemic,” see Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” in

Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, eds., Out

There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (New York: New Museum of

Contemporary Art, 1990), 233-45.

9
Warmest thanks to Shauna Beharry for her support and suggestions during

this writing. I also thank Robin Curtis and Phil Solomon for inspiring

conversations.

Frank’s Cock and Letters from Home are distributed by CFMDC,

www.cfmdc.org.

“The Hundred Videos” and Everybody Loves Nothing are distributed by V Tape,

www.vtape.org.

Walking Distance, De Profundis and The Color of Love are distributed by

Canyon Cinema, www.canyoncinema.com.

Sniff is distributed by Video Out, www.videoinstudios.com.

Nitrate Kisses is distributed by Frameline, www.frameline.org.

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