Acts of Shadow
Light, in itself, as electromagnetic radiation, is invisible. It can only be seen through a medium, dispersed by the atmosphere, objects or the visual organ. In a movie theater, the source of energy remains hidden; the ray of light that crosses the space is a secret that is kept through inattention. Only the light that is spread over the screen is worthy of the eye.
And if the gaze hazards a glimpse within this radiant cone? A burst of starry night: the universe of dust and particles, infinitesimal screens, allowing us to see the light.
In this magic cone, every intrusion becomes a star; even the clumsy spectator that crosses its path takes attention hostage.
A shaft of light is also a duct carrying the history of the world. According to the astronomer Cammille Flammarion, it contains a universal archive. All past, present and future events persist in this ray, a cosmic witness to human activity, yet irreverent at the same time. To see a star is to see something that happened at a long-gone moment. To see the light is to challenge time.
And to turn to see the sun directly, or the lens of the projector, is that not “seeing the light”? A flash that implies another type of blindness.
Lamparear
Lam-pa-re-ar
1.tr. Mex. Hunting or fishing with the help of a lamp.
To be lampareado is to transport the luminous image to another body, to convert the world into a screen.
The projector eye replicates suns wherever you turn.
Only an eclipse allows one to look calmly at the sun. But not without usurping the sensibility of the eye: the indiscrete gaze always leaves a mark.
Mara Fortes Acosta[1]
Virginia Roy (VR): These words by Mara Fortes, fruit of a conversation you had on your work, explore the analogy between the projector and the gaze, an analogy based around light as a constructive, propulsive beam. In fact, in Acts of Illusion, light is also presented as a duality of whites and black backgrounds that explore this game of concealing/revealing. More than a mere overexposure, light negates the image.
Fabiola Torres-Alzaga (FTA): After watching a 16mm film together, a filmmaker told me that we spent half the time in complete darkness without even realizing it. This fact struck me as a great metaphor for vision. Each photogram that we see projected in light precedes an identical one in complete darkness. This is the dance of film, the combination of the mechanics of the flickering of the projector in combination with our retinal persistence. Therein lies its continuous movement. A pacted blindness that uproots the spectator from their passivity, making us coparticipants in the projection of images onscreen. There we were, she and I, before a light that was able to make the present darkness disappear and, at the same time, made cinematic movement possible. The critic and curator Amos Vogel describes it as a marriage in which the essence of film isn’t light as we tend to think of it, but a secret pact between light and darkness. Flashes of past moments that we perceive as present create layers of vision on a single temporality. Curtains incorporated in our vision that are raised and lowered, that open and close, placing that which is present in a place of magical disappearance. This is the same principle that magicians use when they direct the light toward the audience and take up that screen of light created by the eye that receives it, hiding or making disappear that which is before us.
VR: Magic as a space of possibility has been another recurring theme in your production. In this case, you directly presented the act of a magician who makes a coin appear and disappear. But the coin also serves as a luminous screen.
FTA: The dance of the coin in the hands of the magician is a back-and-forth that plays with the blind spots of perception, making disappear that which was never present. On the other hand, I liked the duality of the coin as a reflective surface that, in movement, had light on one side, as well as a darkened shadow.
The magic of how film has explored the possibilities of the real, creating spaces and actions where there is only a wall, where nothing seems to be happening. Where illusion plays a role of resistance to the immovable and we see not what it is, but its possibility.
VR: This game of resisting illusion that you mention makes me think of the resistance of the frame itself. Acts of Illusion begins with the phrase “To illuminate an area is to focus on it. To frame it, as well.” Framing is the key device of film, delimiting the field of vision and capturing the image. I believe that, in Acts of Illusion, the framing is tautological. There’s the general framing of the image, of the hand itself, but there are also the acts in the secondary plane of attention (another frame?): the object in the hands, the coin, the cards...
FTA: Yes, to frame is to fragment the vast, infinite chaos of the 360 degrees of human vision. And to fragment is to free up forms toward new possibilities of organization and relationships among themselves, permitting other geographies of the same place. The framing of film and magic have been a base for hosting other ways of understanding the real and making it flexible.
In illusionism, the mid-19th Century French magician Robert-Houdin entered the theater with the help of stage machinery to perform tricks and create a mise-en-scène. One of the most important was the lighting, which served to focus the audience’s attention within a spacious stage, to mark points of tension. And to visually edit the action veiled by the secret places of the shadow. The filmmaker Robert Bresson said that what could be seen was just as important as what couldn’t be seen, and he accentuated this in his films through the use of sound as an invisible thread between what was inside and outside the frame. In Russian avant-garde cinema, Sergei Eisenstein defined this with his equation 1 + 1 = 3. That which is hidden between the images nevertheless remains present. I believe that, in many ways, film has learned to play with multiple framings of narrative through visual composition; even, when forced, to play with a censorship that sought to sterilize the image onscreen.
In Hollywood, for example, between the 1930s and 1960s, the Hays Code forced directors, cinematographers and screenwriters to develop narratives that were written and constructed at the margins of the visual. Forms and dialogues had to be reconstituted in a Byzantine fashion so as to evoke what could not be named and thus not fall victim to the scissors of the reigning morality. And so they created montages out of fragments to take advantage of the duality of what was shown, to make silence active and the non-visible part of a language that revealed the unrepresentable, turning a film into something else in the eyes of the detective watching it. Spaces within spaces that, in turn, emerge in others, until, in the end, it is the gaze of the spectator that decides the size of the final frame. We cannot forget, of course, the possible worlds outside the limits of our vision. And that there is a world that has found a place in its absence, and it is there, behind the curtain, that other ways of existing are whispering. Feeling their presence, perhaps, also teaches us new forms of vision, inclusion and framing.
[1] Published in Fabiola Torres-Alzaga and Mara Fortes Acosta, Historias de la noche, Mexico, ESPAC, 2019.
