WHY ARE YOU CRYING
Language and the senses/The sensuous language
What words do you want to hear? Are they the ones that make you cry or put you to sleep? Language easily fails in communicating. Language is a function of understanding, employing the rational and reasonable in you. It is built up by semiotics; it represents what we already know in our physical exterior world. An ideal language would speak our hearts, the void of our loneliness. How do we communicate what is inside of us when language fails us?
I am looking at the sensuous language and how it is used in film and theatre, working with a set that is dramatically concentrated both in time and space. To touch an audience, how would one build a successful set? What will be communicated and what would be left out?
Film and theatre, for which I would like to find an adequate name, already use modalities of language we use in real life, although it is generally concentrated to images/text and sound. It therefore employs the senses of vision, considered the most important sense in a historical aspect, and hearing. A touch is always represented in front of you, and deals with the complexity and difficulty of reproducing a highly intimate and personal experience. Did the reproduction in front of your eyes of him leaving you make you cry, or the very event, which happened to you? What is the history of the senses and do they have a good reputation? Mark M. Smith explores the history of the senses in Sensuous History.
Film, contrary to theatre, works along linear lines. It is not able to show different layers to the viewer simultaneously, as it would be possible on a stage. In order to ensure the viewer, as she will always look for meaning, you need to present an image before another one to which she later remembers and can refer to. Text, linear as well, and together with images, creates an expectation and therefore a build-up with excitement, wishes and fears. It fully participates the senses. Julia Kristeva talks about neo-realism aiming at the real, often presented in montages of representations in Sensuoury history. But how do the blind see and how do the deaf hear? Is text better percepted in sound as voice? Writer and poet Tan Lin explores this matter of linearity of truth and its expectations in his texts and art works.
This type of touch has been examined by a few of the greatest philosophers of our time. Deleuze and Guattari speak about affect. As does Michel Serres in The Five Senses: a philosophy of mingled bodies, JJ. Gibson in The senses considered as perceptual systems and furthermore D. W. Hamlyn in Sensation and Perception. A history of the philosophy of perception. And you will always find inspiration in George Bataille's Visions of excess and My mother among others.
Someone’s work that has been very helpful and inspirational is Robert Wilson, beautifully put together in The theatre of Robert Wilson by Arthur Holmberg, although there are more books to read on him. His collaborations with Hans-Peter Kuhn regarding performance and sound I find very intriguing. The fact that they are working with theatre is a good way of analyzing what I will have to add or leave behind in film. Wilson creates confusion; I want to create reassurance, safety. But of course, one factor is in need of its opposite. This problematic I hope to find solutions to in Repressed spaces: The poetics of agoraphobia by Paul Carter.
What I hope to find a solution to create is change, by all these means of modalities. This, according to me and van Gennep, Victor Turner and Kristeva (who talks about Chora) among others, is a function of the liminal. The only place you are able to cry.
