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2004-01-07 - 6:03 a.m. The Image 1) First of all let us describe the mise-en-scene. The setting is in a hotel room. The lighting is soft, mainly appearing from screen left; shadows are diffuse. A boy is sitting on a bed with a pillow on his lap. In his left hand is a rabbit soft toy, in his right is a glass tumbler of wine. He is looking down, performing some sort of puppetry with the objects in his hands, animating them, with tenderness, with melancholy. It is silent, and because the image is in black and white, even more silent than that. 2) But we review the footage and realise that it is not as quiet as we had assumed. There is some giggling in the background, beyond the frame. The boy is unaware that he is being watched. He is completely absorbed in his little game, his enactment of whatever narrative taking place on the landscape of the pillow. And thus the silence we perceived is not one that is acoustic, but what we can perhaps term a visual silence. 3) If silence is the absence of noise, then this visual silence is defined as the gradual absence, the vanishing, of what surrounds it, where we burrow from the visible surface to the invisible core. Our focus on the image involves a diminution of the optic field: we gaze at the boy, then closer, at his hands, the rabbit, the tumbler, and finally the imperceptible space marked by the journey of the rabbit towards the tumbler. 4) A man who stands in the middle of a club finds himself suddenly not hearing the music; this is the moment when a certain silence manifests itself: he becomes self-possessed, impenetrable, tranquil, but without being guarded. It is not that the music is deflected from his body; rather, he has absorbed it to the point where the music becomes a kind of nothingness. 5) In the case of visual silence, what is being absorbed are not sounds but gazes. In addition to the camera’s gaze, we are aware that there are other onlookers, barely suppressing their mirth, their laughter betraying their presence beyond the enclosure. The scenario is one of voyeurism, the exposed subject sitting in the centre, and yet despite the circus of gazes, strangely remote, virginal, numinous. 6) In this sense visual silence is like a poem, its power arising from its sheer vulnerability. The image cannot be penetrated even by the most powerful of gazes because it is already open, in full bloom. 7) And yet the image that is transparent, that does not attempt to hide anything, is still capable of mystery. The viewer has no access to what story is being told by the boy’s hands. Is the rabbit pet or beast? Is the tumbler still a tumbler? Could it be a skyscraper, a rustic well? Visual silence arrests us because it is the interface between two realms of partial knowledge: between he who does not know he is being watched and those who do not know what they are watching. 8) However, this interface does not result in a union towards a more complete knowledge. There is something omniscient about the camera’s gaze, especially since the footage is in black and white, suggestive of a surveillance closed-circuit camera, those apparatus perched aerially and which record human movement from a divine angle. But ultimately the camera is merely an extension of a human eye, it only sees and cannot wholly know what it is seeing. 9) The boy’s obliviousness to the camera is one aspect of his innocence. Another aspect is conjured by his gestures—that of self-absorbed play. Thus the image escapes our gazes because it does not inhabit the present; not the here and now, but of the universe of childhood, of God-knows-where-and-when. 10) We have mentioned God. The image is disrupted, the visual silence shattered, when the boy looks up and realises that he has been filmed, and the first words he utters are ‘Oh my God!’ This exclamation is not entirely inappropriate, and the image can stand as metaphor for omniscient vision. One conclusion: God’s eye finds us when we are most lost in ourselves. A second one: We appear to Him as a child, immersed in our activities. And finally: What He sees is what I have called a visual silence and which others will call a soul, that which displays its nakedness in all its invisibility.
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