PROGRAM 

Sirensong, Jan Peacock, 1987, 8 min 35 s

Corps d’oeuvres, Chantal duPont, 1988, 16 min 40 s

Boomerang, Nayla Dabaji, 2019, 7 min 07 s

La Déroute, Rodrigue Jean, 1990, 27 min 54 s

Chant en 14 temps, Alisi Telengut, Lamia Yared, 2017, 3 min

DESCRIPTION

Can we clear our minds? I’d like to put this question to a hypnotist in a kitsch 1990s film. The camera would pan out, revealing a Hollywood studio on the brink of bankruptcy. Faces would fall, hit by an existential crisis brought on by my somewhat anodyne intervention. Finally, I would break the silence: ‘we are the merchants of emptiness’. Later, a meditation podcast would whisper to me: ‘Close your eyes, lay back and let your muscles relax. Clear your mind and imagine yourself in the desert.’ But the desert is far from empty as it possesses this troubling aspect of not having a perceptible end. This is the central tension of the notion of emptiness, since the absence of all that that implies constitutes a sort of invitation to fill it, to fill us up. Rather than fear this state, why not enjoy its liberating energy, the eternal recommencing that the films in this programme attempt to reflect? ‘Inhale, exhale, feel the fullness.’

It’s less about learning to clear your mind than knowing what to do with it. There is no use in thinking about the political implications of an issue that leaves you feeling powerless, precipitated by the escalation of violence on the international scene in the last year. The images in the programme After the desert appear when the world has already ended. Nothing remains, and it is in light of this nothingness that they should be considered. At the end of the journey, perhaps the possibility of reinhabiting the desert will emerge, and its initial virgin state will offer possibilities limited only by the bodies that reside there.

This introduction is somewhat hazy – it attempts to establish a point of departure while respecting the idea of drift inherent in the image of the desert. Perhaps another reason is because to look at the desert is to turn your back on the sea and the mountains and so fully embrace Belmondo’s invitation to get lost.

1. Towards the desert

Hands plunge into soapy water to wash cups one by one. Always in the same order: grab, scrub, rinse, set down. Always the same sensations: ceramic, foam, gushing water, towel. The repetition introduces the escape, as the everyday banality of this first scene in Sirensong (Jan Peacock, 1987) is followed by waves that signal a stream of consciousness. The repetitive nature of the task opens the possibility of an interior voice retracing a path between the intimate and the political. ‘Maybe it was twelve or maybe I was twelve,’ she says, by way of introducing the memory of Neil Armstrong’s imperialist stumbling shown on the school’s only television. To quote Duras’ thoughts on memory, beautifully articulated in L’amant: ‘the history of my life doesn’t exist, [there are only] vast areas in which we make believe there was someone’. Talking about the minutes preceding the moon landing, Peacock adds a nuance to the idea of memory as matter emerging from the emptiness left by the past: ‘Someone says “A man is going to walk on the moon. A man is going to walk on the moon” and you don’t wait to see it, you see it right away in your head. Like an image projected on the lens, like the figures on the tv screen with only the sound of their own alluring breath, Siren Voiced’. The event is accompanied by a twofold absence: that which we imagined and that which we remember.

A phantom ride takes us to Monument Valley with the unsettling smoothness of a technique caught between the embodiment of gaze-movement and the ghostly wavering caused by the vehicle’s overly regular motion. Visually and conceptually, we approach the desert through a hallucinatory experience indissociable from the surreal character of this landscape and its omnipresence in the collective imagination. ‘Like the vacation landscapes you’ve seen a hundred times, in postcards, in mainstream movies, in National Geographic, in tv commercials’. In her text (IN)SCRIPT[1], Jan Peacock explains that she experienced difficulties in recording her vision due to the desert’s resistance to being filmed. Her first video images reduce the great expanse of the Grand Canyon to a bidimensional plane, leading her to conclude that: ‘though one could still recognize the Grand Canyon, one could not see it.’. The challenge posed by the incommunicability of the desert experience resides in the paradox of a space defined by its capacity to make us confront emptiness sensorially and the importance of not subordinating a physical reality to our perception of it. Even more so as the desert is undetachable from colonial issues, from Arizona to the Sahara.

To respond to this complex network – collective imagination and individual experience, emptiness and sensorial overload, memory and anticipation – the programme considers the desert as the experience of a transfigured body: ‘You are lured into seeing the place, except it’s no longer a place. It’s a scene, a point of interest. You are in it and apart from it. Inside every image of it. Imagine your presence here. It’s a landscape of association and you map yourself into that.’.

2. Body of sand

Another paradox is evident: my clumsy attempt to discuss corporality in a text whose discursive logic verges dangerously on conceptual obscurantism. Let’s break it frankly, at the risk of losing all coherence, by naively and factually addressing the second film in the programme; after all, that is what interests me in the desert as well as in the act of programming: it brings together and divides, confronts a series of visions and attempts to establish an equilibrium between resemblance and difference. The images of Corps d’œuvre (1988) can be divided into three categories.

The first presents a woman, Lynda Gaudreau, oscillating between movement and inertia in an arid landscape. She rubs against the side of a rockface, her muscles responding to the shape of the rock. She jumps up and down on the spot, as if to confirm her presence through percussion, the slow motion of the video accentuating her body’s movement. In a sort of ode to her own animality, her figure enters a game of domestication, acceptance and rejection: she crawls, walks on all fours, rolls, stands up and falls down. She inscribes herself in the desert.

Next, the image is frozen and her body becomes a surface onto which images of paintings and rocky textures are projected. The desert inscribes itself in the body and superimposes onto it the trauma of fracturing: the human being in its own natural state. It’s less a citation of Della Francesca or other great masters who produce this effect than a reminder of the candour with which their works spoke to the world. We see, on Lynda Gaudreau’s body, an uneasy look in cracked painting, a wounded figure held by his brother and a sexual act between a wolf and a woman.

Lastly, childlike drawings, in a style vaguely inspired by Douanier Rousseau, are added to still shots, lending a certain frivolity to the environment in the somewhat disturbing remainder of the film. The corporeal experience in Chantal duPont’s film is reciprocally inscribed (each one in the other) taking us back to a question previously touched upon: what do we inscribe in the void?

3. Conjugating with nothing

I fear images that connect the environment to a body. Though essential, they present the risk of appropriating space. It is impossible for me to think of the desert without remembering friends’ stories, along with hundreds of others, for whom this space is above all an escape towards and away from a border. My personal fears concern the representation of a landscape for which the imagination is at once the greatest strength and the most fundamental threat. In May 2024, ‘the first viral image generated by AI’ invaded social media. It depicted a desert stretching to a horizon of snowcapped mountains. Tents laid out at right-angles brought to life a fantasized vision of a refugee camp. In the centre, larger white tents formed letters to spell the slogan All eyes on Rafah. In choosing the desert as a ‘theme’ for this programme, I walk on the edge of a precipice, aware that the first two works shown are aestheticized through a white gaze, and could be criticized for neglecting the tensions of these territories whose grains of sand have covered litres of blood in a history of genocide. It’s the double edge of the question of nothing: to consider the desert as an empty space is to negate the historicity of its political implications, but to constantly return to this would be to refuse the freedom of dreams permitted by a canvas that we assume to be blank. Our final digression takes the form of a dialogue between two films: Boomerang (2019) by Nayla Dabaji and La Déroute (1990) by Rodrigue Jean.

The device in Boomerang has three interacting elements: the seashore that we assume is Lebanese (whether it is, or we are led to believe it is), archive images of the same place (television, home movies, etc) and written commentary. The latter is directed at an old friend and tells of moments they have spent together that, as in Sirensong, are caught between imagination and memory. The short film takes its title from an eponymous performance by Nancy Holt and Richard Serra dating back to 1974. Holt reads a text that is fed back to her through headphones with a slight delay. Her narration is therefore disrupted by the immediate past which she has to resist to maintain the rate of her speech. ‘I have the feeling that I’m not where I am, I feel that this place is removed from reality’, she says, engaging in a relationship with the defined territory in the Lebanese stories that interest Nayla Dabaji. The most symbolic example is certainly Il était une fois Beyrouth (1994) by Jocelyne Saab, in which two young women discover the history of their town through old film reels that a projectionist invites them to watch in his cinema. By anchoring the considerations expressed up to now in a politically charged space, Boomerang shakes our definition of the desert as an unmoving space and agglomeration of imaginings. What becomes of space when our experience and our corporality are entirely constructed in a mediatized relationship, when individual memory is confounded with digital traces? Nayla Dabaji digitally embeds the archive images within the image of the seashore. The two images are therefore superimposed in such a way as to problematize the hierarchy between them. On one hand, the archive image acts as an obstruction and dictates a direction; on the other hand, the landscape becomes the dominant environment that encompasses the archive image. Because of this, each is dependent on the other, but it is the status of this setting that allows its countershot to be invoked.

The wind and the crackling of the media produce an overpowering soundtrack, and the words describe a space trapped in a story that has already taken place with its actors unable to change anything. We read: ‘There is no time, the clock hands don’t turn and it’s a waste of time’ and ‘Do you remember that evening when we anticipated the sound of fireworks while watching them on the screen?’. In one of the final sequences, edited in an indiscernible loop, a figure in the distance is trapped on a perpetual walk. The words, the desert and Lebanon freeze by the sea and the body gets caught there. La Déroute by Rodrigue Jean is a sequence of variations of falling. Made when the filmmaker was director of a dance company at the end of the 1980s, the film projects us onto a beach in New Brunswick. Words have disappeared, as if all this happened the day after language, in a country that strangely resembles the one described by Nayla Dabaji: ‘My home is not a nation / In my home there is no war / My home is anarchy’.

Three dancers stand in a line so that they are as one from the camera’s angle, but as soon as one of them bends over, the others must follow suit, balancing out each other’s movement so that their combined amplitude maintains an equilibrium. This group, whom we might call the last survivors of this world in black and white, move with an unexpected gentleness. In the anarchic melancholy of these puppets imitating the Atlantic ocean’s backwash, a new relationship has come into the game. A childish circle in which each individual stops themselves from falling but the conjunction of their collapsing transforms them in an almost light-hearted farandole.

This charming first short film also plays with melodramatic tropes. The group discovers a place before disappearing into the night to form couples caught between love and separation until dawn. The appearance of three skinny trees or a series of mirrors reinvigorates their bodies, which were caught in despair in the previous scene. Although the proposition is more emotional than symbolic, it invites interpretation like creations made in the spirit of a certain time knew how to do, according to chance and desire. A contemplative void appears through a playful gaze whose interaction with the environment oscillates between the inevitable decline that the violence of a world imposes and the carefreeness at the source of any kind of hope. While a woman walks along the shore, the ghosts of friends that accompanied her just before persist as if they were originally born of her desire to fill the void. It is towards this gush, this primary relationship to desire and play, that Jan Peacock leads us: ‘What you want to conjure for your friend is the thing as you first apprehended it, the sensation remembered from childhood, that moment before words’, before adding ‘only the desire to desire’.

4. An incantation

Birds flying across the sky is a recurring element in all the films in the programme discussed here. This eternal countershot to emptiness suggests that the latter is less about making things disappear than granting oneself the right to desire others; a power that we often give to incantations. In Chant en 14 temps, the hand-painted animation by Alisi Telengut plunges closer to the rock, where its granular texture becomes open sky again. Added to this is the voice of Lamia Yared singing Omar El Batch. Her voice plays the role of the incantation, bringing together the contradictory representations of the desert under the bird’s wing and inviting us to consider the figure of the beloved. I see this less as a lover than a mirror, a sort of alter ego with whom we cross deserts and whose presence allows us to serenely accept the void.

A nightingale in the garden sang a song (in the maqam) in Nawa

He sang through the bars of a birdcage singing (in the maqam) Yegah

Oh dear close to my heart, bring me to meet love

My heart has burned

Oh separators of love go away and leave me alone since there is no more union with the kindred spirit.

The sun glistens on the wine glass

When the pourer of the wine puts the glass down the wine will turn on itself

And on this glass I will see pale traces of lips left by the beloved.

Omar El Batch, translated to English from the French translation by Lamia Yared.