The sounds were recorded afterwards when the images had been edited. I searched with the sound designer for hours for the sounds that would feel and sound right to the images of hands touching the metal rope. The illusion was found; there is hardly any audible sound but the eff ect hits the bones, it resonates deep under the skin while one is watching the fi lm.
Images can be dangerous left like that. The solo with the metal rope has raised many questions from those who have seen the fi lm. The fi lm will be part of the doctoral thesis and the need for some written guidelines for watching the fi lm became obvious. The rope near the dancer’s neck easily brings along with images of death. The scene becomes dramatic and scary according to some spectators.
I was sinking into the unknown powers in my dance there; my intuition led me somewhere. The cultural meanings of death are easily read in the images; the hanging rope is a clear image of that kind.
After I realised that the scene easily evoked images of death for the spectator, I was stunned. The image there is easy to grasp, but I was also looking for something else. I sensed it through it; something stopped there. Discussion about death is rare. I encourage spectators to leave the images concerning death unnamed, to let them be powerful as such. The images ask one to think beyond the obvious cultural readings. If the spectator thinks of his/her own life and the otherness in himself/
herself, much is gained. Death is the big mystery, available to all, and eventually no information is transportable to the living. To respect something, we have to stop
completely and to acknowledge the limit of knowledge. One cannot control or possess death. There is a similar border between writing and dancing:
something from another reality cannot be transported as such to another one; interpretations happen and something escapes in between. Death is the ultimate border; it cannot be named as knowledge; it is beyond that.
To leave something unnamed means to acknowledge and
respect its particular nature – it is an ethical act.
According to Levinas, the approach of death indicates that we are in a relationship with something that is absolutely other; we are no longer able to be able, the subject loses its very mastery as a subject. Death means something absolutely unknowable that appears. It is ungraspable; it marks the end of the subject’s virility and heroism.
(Levinas 1987(1947), 74, 71–72) Death comes to us as the other, mysterious. The subject is no longer master of itself. The image of death, of the hanging rope in the fi lm, presents the not-knowing; it brings otherness into a discussion that is totally beyond knowing, controlling or grasping. My journey in research has led to a place where control fades away; my outlines are suddenly being changed; all the certainties disappear. There exists a thread of mystery that blinks every now and then; the subjectivity has become blurred. The things I have discovered are in motion in me; words, sentences, dances and fi lms are important as they are to question, to discuss. They are not solely of me, of my will or power; there is always something that I do not know. I need not control – unexpected things may happen in writing and in dancing. Allowing the element of mystery to exist in everyday life has brought wind; it has taken me to the whirls of dark waters. It is joyful, scary, fascinating. To give up the former certainties has pushed me off the ground.
Dancing and writing have brought me to a state of wonder; there are discoveries to be made by attuning myself to the realities around. Eventually, there is the one that is beyond all knowing and grasping: death, the ultimate otherness.
Routes from here to here (2007), director choreography and dance Kirsi Heimonen, fi lm director and photo Raimo Uunila
Endnotes:
1 Laurel Richardson has thoroughly introduced writing as a method of knowing in her article (Richardson 2000).
2 Helene Cixous has also written about the physicality of writing. For her the initial position in writing is to leave oneself at the bottom of the now. There is an unconscious belief in something, a force, a materiality that will come and manifest itself, an ocean, a current. (Cixous & Calle–Gruber 1997, 41)
3 I have been working as a dance artist at the Helsinki Deaconess Institute; there are many languages and practises behind the words and theology is one of them; I am infl uenced by that vocabulary. I am also using fl esh in the phenomenological sense, fl esh of the body intertwined with that of the world. Flesh has several echoes, several layers in the body.
4 Raimo Uunila worked as the cinematographer and editor of the fi lm. We have collaborated previously.
Therefore, our communication already had a shared basis; a mutual acknowledgement and a respect of our work in its state of becoming. Jorma Tapio composed the music, Jari Ravaska recorded the sounds, Jouni Lähteenaho lit the scenes, Marko Kataja acted as a sound designer, Mari Bisi designed and made the costumes, and Michaela Bränn produced the fi lm as a production of The Theatre Academy of Finland.
I choreographed, danced and directed the fi lm.
References:
Cixous, Hélène & Calle-Gruber, Mireille 1997. Hélène Cixous. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London, Great Britain: Routledge.
Crichley, Simon 1992. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford, Great Britain:
Blackwell Publishers.
Levinas, Emmanuel 1996. Etiikka ja äärettömyys. Keskusteluja Philippe Nemon kanssa (Ethics and Infi nity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo). Tampere: Gaudeamus.
Levinas, Emmanuel 2006 (1974). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Pennsylvania, United States of America: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel 1987 (1947). Time and the Other (and additional essays). Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press.
Richardson, Laurel 2000. Writing. A Method of Inquiry. In Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S.
Lincoln (Eds.) Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. California, United States of America: Sage Publications, Inc. 923–948.
Routes from here to here (2007) (Reittejä tästä tähän).Directed by Kirsi Heimonen.Produced by the Theatre Academy of Finland. DVD.
Seremetakis, Nadia, C 1996. Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory. &
Memory of the Senses, Part II: Still Acts. In Nadia C. Seremetakis (Ed.) The Senses Still. Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago, United States of America: University of Chicago Press. 1–18, 23–43.
Vaden, Tere 2000. Ajo ja jälki. Filosofi sia esseitä kielestä ja ajattelusta (Chase and Trace.
Philosophical essays on language and thinking). Jyväskylä: Atena Kustannus Oy.