Thomas Bauer

“How to place […]
the ear at the outskirt of the eye
the retina right on the eardrum
to clinch 'in there' between our teeth
and move 'out there,' inside?" (1)

Cinema stands at the edge of time, nestled in an unsteady present, overwhelmed by the massiveness of the past. Like photography, it bears witness, if not to the truth of an event, then at least to the medium's relationship to its subject. No matter how far back in time it strives to go, it remains inescapably contemporary to its subject matter. But cinema has found a way around all that, by resorting to childish, yet proven, tricks. On the one hand we have narrative films, reenactments with elaborate costumes which continually search for a greater realism. No more Robin Hood in plain stockings, make way for rough and dirty leather pants. From historiography and anthropology, cinema wishes to dig out means to be less in the present and better at the past. On the other hand we have the gathering of interviews and their frequent interspersion with photo and video archives, in other words, the conventions of the documentary form. Memories well up in the survivor’s mind and archival footage attempts to give his/her words a visual form. The most important thing is never to give up: one must have captivating footage to play over the subject's sober testimony, and the imagination fills in the rest. One of cinema's inherent obsessions is also an outstanding paradox: it aims at portraying the past by cloaking it in the present. And then occurs “this collusion between present and past, the blockbuster at its ugliest.”(2) How many films actually show the past for what it is? That is, how many films actually attempt to convey the inexpressible without resorting to using the camera as a magic wand to bring back to life some age-old ghost? Can the exposed film really render the silent bond tying things together and give them flesh, making tangible this past of which they are but mere traces? In sum, how many films actually show the deep ramifications of the present without mashing them up and spoon-feeding them to the audience?

Besides being an inconspicuous means of storytelling, cinema is, first and foremost, the painstaking blending of sound and image. Besides being the context for cinema, the world is, first and foremost, an endless, plentiful and multidirectional textual passage. Just as the present is but the tip of the past, a movie character is but the top of a polyhedron made of a million faces. Thus a movie is the laying out of a series of continuity shots extracted from this polyhedron, the organization of which can be smooth and straight (linear narration), or uneven (fragmented narration that exploits the intervals between the shots). To tell a ten-year-old story, Hear mud in your eye opts for the latter method.

Thus, the introductory sequence can be seen as a declaration of intention: Thomas Bauer will boldly substitute multiplication for simplification. Rather than distorting his story to make it artificially linear and fitting it to the mold of straightforward realism – instead of abiding by the rules of cinema (beginning, middle, end, obvious cause-and-effect relationships), he chooses to level everything.

First of all, his characters are isolated from one another. The mise en scène changes from character to character. Each one has his own setting, his own vocabulary. Each plays a particular role in the story: lady killer, victim, middle man.. But instead of justifying this distribution of roles with a long-winded psychological analysis, Thomas Bauer cleverly decides to allot each one of them a different position in the narrative scheme. The story of their encounters is thus repeated – though not verbatim – thanks to a mixture of heterogeneous narrative principles.

Bob and Dave’s interviews are filmed using a very simple technique, a three-quarter view static shot, accentuating the well-mastered and clearly audible speech. Therefore, it is Bob and Dave’s responsibility to handle the most classically narrative part of the movie, which they manage pretty well thanks to their skills in elocution and analysis. Tania’s role is similar, though it brings forth a few discrepancies. She also contributes to the smooth running of the diegesis. But this time the image blends confusingly with the reflection of the street in the restaurant window and the words are not lip-synched. We are thus witnessing the shot being riffled, as if the distance imposed by the window between the camera and its subject were keeping the film from reaching the transparency (no pun intended) of Bob and Dave's scenes.

This distancing process and desynchronisation are made even more obvious with the character of Pam, Bob’s ex-wife, heard, but never seen, her voice playing against seemingly unrelated images or, occasionally, a black screen. However, this voice echoes another female character, seen but never heard, whose identity remains a mystery throughout the film – for all we know, she may be Pam. The character of Nancy is also handled very simply. The only difference between the treatment of her and Pam's characters is that she is not interviewed, but instead has a short conversation with Dave.

Bob is a smooth-talker and withering playboy: all perfectly-mastered speech and rhetorical ease. But in the end, chatty Bob will be speechless. Indeed, his two last appearances are mute. The interview gives way to a segment that is more observational of Bob's behavior, most notably when he is lying on his bed. From one segment to the next, there is a considerable difference. Instead of listening to Bob, we are now watching him talk; he turns into a case study. Dave undergoes the same process. The last shot of the movie shows him swallowing something: the prosaic body becomes the only instance of enunciation. On the spectrum from speech to silence, the characters move in a syntagmatic mode relative to the way the story unfolds, but also in a paradigmatic mode, since, from the beginning, it helps define speech and silence. In this regard, Tania has a primary position. She is blessed with the same loquaciousness as Bob, though hers is already weakened by a discrepancy between sound and image. She draws a dividing line between, on the one hand, Bob and Dave, and on the other, the already divided Pam (and Nancy, for other reasons, which we'll discover later). Thus we have both ends of the spectrum; at one end, a clearly enounced speech shot in a simple way, and, at the other, asynchrony.

We can't place Bob’s daughter – the teenage girl at the opening of the film – on this spectrum, because she remains on the outskirts. Her character does not seem to take part in the same process as the others. In fact, she seems more a part of the film's backstory. Thomas Bauer has been handed over this peculiar and brutal story and tries to treat it fairly. But he has also been handed over the rules gradually enacted by cinema over the course of its development. Remembrance of the cinema next-door, of the cinema of yesteryear.

What is this cinema like? Classical, linear, commercial… Perhaps, but defining it precisely with those terms would prove tedious – and there's no guarantee we'd even be able to do it. According to Hear mud in your eye, this cinema is extremely concerned with spatial homogeneity. In fact, among the scenes featuring Bob’s daughter we find the only scene in which interviewer and subject are linked together by a camera movement. In this instance, the protagonists share the same space, (a transgression to the main principle of the film, which tends not to offer any continuity between spaces). This cinema devotes itself to reducing or erasing the intervals between the shots so that they can follow each other in a linear fashion and coalesce more logically. Hence temporality is used to easily identify eras and durations, which allows them to inscribe themselves directly into the chronological chain. We are then faced with the failings described above, that is, the inability to penetrate the thick lining of the present.

Hear mud in your eye strives to maintain proper distances in order to express the differences in spatial and temporal levels. The reality that Bauer wants to transcribe develops through either embedding, or through accumulation. These two concepts oppose one another. According to one, from a mere thread a film spins an increasingly complex yarn and ends up producing a particular version of reality acting as the asymptote to the narrative arc; like using a series of approximations to eventually achieve our goal. According to the other, the world is to be seen as a glass-maker’s crucible from which one should draw inspiration. Like a glass blower creating an unlikely shape out of so much fusing silica, the filmmaker must bring forth the strong lines of a structure that have been drowning within a heap of undifferentiated elements. The founding principle is differenciation.

Fiction vs documentary? Or rather anecdotal cinema vs memory-oriented cinema. “History is essentially longitudinal, while memory is essentially vertical. History consists of passing alongside an event, while memory consists of being within an event, never leaving its confines, but traveling back in time from within them.” (3) Therefore speech becomes insufficient. Volatile and unsteady, it lasts only as long as it is being uttered. Hence Bob and Dave’s sudden aphonia. Both of them are shown as mere transmitters. Image becomes bland; nothing but a backdrop for speech. Tania, Nancy and the supposed Pam, at first mute, take shape before becoming mere voices. Their bodies are purveyors of meaning. They give us a story written through shapes, volumes, ways of being seated, smoking, watching the camera. The silent image of these women dives directly into the meanderings of memory, giving us an indication of its enormous weight. The love affair takes on an added layer of importance as it reveals a male and female archetype determined not by some sexist precept, but out of narrative necessity. The female archetype is visceral and vertical, while the male is based on the horizontal shape of the sentence. One simply bears witness to the fugacity of the image. Meanwhile, the other enhances it with an implicit power, fleshes it out, leafs through it and multiplies it.

By conjugating the two of them, Hear mud in your eye sends a sonic probe into the thick matter of memory. On the surface is analytic and linear speech. The past made present in Bob and Dave’s words. There is also the fight scene between Tania and Nancy, a pure reenactment of a previous event, in which body and voice, image and sound neutralize one another. Penetrating deeper, in the space created by asynchrony, we find the objectified bodies of “Pam”, Tania, Nancy, and towards the end, those of Bob and Dave. Mysterious bodies burdened by the weight of a memory that no rhetoric could bear. Eventually, as we penetrate to the deepest layer, the past is revealed to us, spread across a series of undifferentiated shots alternating between cityscapes and mineral landscapes – fair yet partial representations of a peculiar and rough reality.

”The mouth is the easiest-and most banal- way of communicating. But, after all, the voice is also of interest to the whole body: the heart, the lungs, parts that we don’t see.” (4) In cinema it is possible for sound design to compliment the images, or for images to merely accompany the soundscape. This is easier said than done. It’s an exact science, determining the correct amount of reverb, knowing when to let the image be louder than the sound, and tweak accordingly. Watching people speak, hearing people move. Hear mud in your eye is the story of this continual adjusting process. And only after going through all this can we find the place where cinematic memory lies.

Near the end of the movie, Pam recalls a Yom Kippur celebration. On that occasion, she had had a revelation and knew that her marriage was over. Bob, suffering from diarrhea, had soiled her sheets with shit. Thus giving evidence that sometimes, in this story, it’s the belly that speaks.

Despite the clarity of this structure, one figure persists in her act of defiance. I am referring to this silent woman who seems to act as the physical manifestation of Pam’s voice (the only way to solve this mystery is to penetrate the film’s machinery). She becomes more and more autonomous the more we see her. She emancipates herself from the structure and begins to flutter around it. At times she seems barely above city murmurs, still caught within mineral life. Nevertheless, she seems to have the upper hand throughout the film. Bearing witness is this parabolic story, which brings an end to the word exchanges. Can we find in it the ultimate explanation and distinguish the cowardly ostrich burying its head in the sand from the near-blind bat living in a cave? At the end of the story, having disentangled all the threads, one becomes aware of what remains to be unraveled. A Sisyphean epilogue demonstrates, in negative form, all that reality, as it progresses forward, takes away from true understanding. But shouldn’t a film’s constant investigation of shadowy and unexplored areas be seen as a sign of merit? At its best, cinema is not didactic, but rather heuristic.

–––––––––––––––
1. Ghérasim Luca, “D’audiant à voyant”, Paralipomènes, in Héros-limite, Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Poésie”, 2001, p. 223.
2. Marguerite Duras, La Couleur des mots. Entretiens avec Dominique Noguez., Ed. Benoit Jacob, 2001, p. 81.
3. Charles Péguy, Clio, quoted by Gilles Deleuze in L’Image-temps, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985, note 2 p. 132.
4. Serge Daney, “L’orgue et l’aspirateur”, La Rampe, Cahiers du cinema, Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Petite bibliothèque des cahiers du cinema”, 1996, pp. 168-169.