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The Audio-Visual Contract and the Production of Fragmentary Narrative in Sarah Miles' 'Damsel Jam'

A complete and longer version of this text was first published in The Visual-Narrative Matrix: Interdisciplinary Collisions and Collusions, (ed) Graham Coulter-Smith, Southampton: Fine Art Research Centre, Southampton Institute, 2000, pp 117-121, www.solent.ac.uk/fmas/farc.

Sarah Miles, Damsel Jam, 1992

When I first saw Sarah Miles' films I wondered how to make sense of them. Perversely hybrid, her films reference Hollywood and other mainstream film genres; their fast editing techniques are reminiscent of MTV and TV commercials; they also deploy the kind of formal ellipses seen in fine art film.

On one level, the imagery used in the films clearly stems from myth, fairy tale and popular culture and their stories are familiar, e.g. girl meets boy, familial relationships and, in `Damsel Jam', 1992, the film I will focus on in this paper, female rites of passage. However, on another level, and this is the level I'm concerned with here, Miles' dispersal of these stories makes them strange. Instead of being given the satisfaction of narrative closure, `Damsel Jam's' viewer is subjected to the continual onslaught of rapid, fragmentary, film sequences.

Because Miles' work straddles both Hollywood and avant-garde cinema, yet belongs to neither, it seems conducive to an analysis that points beyond these seemingly mutually exclusive paradigms. Does the fictional world of narrative really preclude critical awareness? Does engagement with fictional narrative remove us from real experience? In an attempt to pursue these questions here, I will look at Miles' `Damsel Jam' in relation to two texts which discuss the sound/image relation in cinema, Mary Ann Doane's psychoanalytically informed essay, `The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space' and Gilles Deleuze's ideas in Cinema 2: The Time-Image.

Let's begin with a brief description of how `Damsel Jam's story proceeds. Needless to say, this account does not give a sense of the multi-layered distributions of sound and image tracks in the film. Basically, the film opens with an Alice character walking down a wooded lane while a voice-off says: "She returned to the place of her childhood to find the truth of her memories". Alice is then led by a woman dressed in a hare costume into a cave where she watches video clips of a documentary featuring adolescent girls. Simultaneously, a voice-off other than the initial one, recounts a memory of what it was like to be twelve. That gets things started. Although the camera initially focuses on Alice while the memory is being recounted, it is never a given that she is the owner of the voice. This is the case for all the following reminiscences of being twelve that are recounted on the sound track by the other women in the film. The camera focuses on a particular on-screen character while different memories are being recounted, but no one ever speaks on-screen.

The main body of the film features the hare girl driving a white Talbot Avenger in the country, the back seat filled with four women, three in black dress, one separated by wearing a paper bag over her head. This is the menstrual hearse. Sequences of the hare girl driving the hearse are continually intercut with sequences of Alice driving it with a bunch of twelve year olds in the back seat, although Alice is only seen leaving the cave at the end of the film. In the final sequence, the girls abandon the Talbot, dancing hypnotically to Nirvana's music, while the hare girl vanishes into the sea.

Even this brief plot synopsis hints at the temporal distensions of the film's narration, particularly the exchange of places that intermittently and sharply occur between the hare girl and Alice. Miles herself speaks about the film in terms of a "going forwards towards the past" (1). However, it is in the relation of the sound track and the image track that this "going forwards towards the past" takes on a quality that seems particularly distended or to use the language of film theory, disjunctive. One of the most dense examples of this disjunctive effect is the scene in the Talbot when the hare girl puts up the volume on the radio as a David Cassidy song comes on the air. The romantic lyrics, lyrics that produced hysteria in adolescent girls in the seventies, contrast with the raucous samples from Madonna's Erotica that intermittently disturb the journey. Over Cassidy's song, another voice-off begins to recount a memory of what it was like to be twelve. The camera focuses on one of the girls in the back seat of the car, a factor which makes us assume that the memory is hers. However, what is particularly disjunctive about this scene is that, as well as the split between the voice recounting the memory and the body presumed to own it, that body is also silently mouthing Cassidy's lyrics out of synch to the music. It is as if she is hearing, inside her head, her own version from another time rather than following it on the radio, which is where we the viewers hear it. The viewer has no access to the woman's on-screen voice and the voice-off, which we assume to be hers, comes from a place the viewer cannot identify with. The voice-off does not comment on the scene but reports in the present of a time gone by. In this sense, the voice-off seems ever more distant from the on-screen body almost as if it belonged to no one in particular. These aural layerings, the voice-off, diegetic sound of the radio, the soundless and out of synch mouthing of the radio music, are potentially disjunctive but do they wake us from the spell of the diegesis?

Formally at least, the non-synchronous sound effects in this scene reminded me of Mary Ann Doane's analysis in her essay `The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space' (2).. There Doane takes issue with the way that synchronous sound works to sustain the narcissistic pleasure derived from the image and conform to and confirm an identity grounded in the viewer's fantasmatic relation to her own body. This fantasmatic unity is mainly anchored by synchronous voices matched to authentic bodies. This stabilization holds at bay the potential trauma of dispersal and dismemberment that non-synchrony could engender for the viewer. It represses the potential aggressivity of the voice, of sound. Obviously that relation is broken in the sequence just outlined and one could say that the potential aggressivity of the voice is unleashed in the apparent disjunction between the voice-off and the silent voice-in, neither of which the viewer can fully access by means of the body on-screen. However, the claim that disjunction would provide the detachment necessary to break the fantasmatic thrall in which narrative synchrony supposedly keeps the viewer, is not carried through here. In `Damsel Jam', disjunctive moments can be singled out, but they work to extend one of the theme's of the film, i.e. the temporal non-coincidence of memory and experience. Let's explore this further using Deleuze's notion that narration flows from images rather than images serving narration. The ramification of this is that a film's sequence of image can be read on its own terms, rather than being subservient to preexisting narrative structures. As Raymond Bellour puts it in The Film Stilled, `Deleuze is opposed to anything that tends to immobilize the film" (3).. Bellour reads Deleuze as being interested in `an autonomous movement and time where discontinuities and ruptures are integrated into a continuous expansion...which excludes any interruption, any overly privileged instant and any instance that might risk being fixed on transcendent properties’ (4).. Bellour's reading of Deleuze is suggestive of a mode of approaching the erratic montage sequences in Damsel Jam and the increasing separation of the sound and image tracks in the film in terms of how they produce narrative continuity rather than disjunctive moments that undermine narrative.

Before going on to explore this possibility, let me briefly summarize Deleuze's interpretation of cinema. Deleuze elaborates two categories of cinematic images, movement-images and time-images, which he rather generally aligns to prewar and postwar cinema. The movement-image has less to lose by being read in terms of preexisting narrative structures as it tends to have defined goals and responses. In the cinema of the movement-image, actions are linked in time by means of the logical relations of cause and effect. Even temporally distended sequences, such as dreams or flashbacks, get chronologically reordered by the narrative logic of the story. What Deleuze poses for the direct-time image however is of interest with regard to `Damsel Jam's' non-chronological, fragmentary narrative. In the cinema of the direct time- image, the coordinates of the sensory motor schema of the movement image are abandoned. Instead of characters being able to extend their perceptions into action, their internal mental states pervade the image, often immobilizing it or causing images to succeed one another by means of false continuity shots and thereby creating what Deleuze calls aberrant movement.

Certainly, the erratic and fragmented sequences of Damsel Jam can be related to the internal psychological states of the characters, but that would be too simple an analogy. It would also mean that the viewer was simply relating to the characters. In fact when I first saw the film, I sought refuge in the deceptively coherent nature of the recounting of memory to help me tolerate the chaotic flow of images and other sound elements. `Damsel Jam's' viewing effect, while related to these tales of memory, lies equally in the onslaught of erratic montage. The combination of this technique and these tales seem to bring a registering of the past as a bodily experience into the viewer's present. Deleuze's conception of the past can help to understand this.

Deleuze, referring to Henri Bergson's ideas, maintains that while the past can be actualized in a memory image we have of it, that image is always haunted by the virtual existence of the pure past, i.e. the present that it once was which is irredeemably lost. And any attempt to actualize the past is always accompanied by a whole series of other possibilities that could equally actualize that past but remain virtual to it. Memories of the past are always being constructed, or actualized in the present. In fact, to actually remember shields us from the chaotic force of past experience. For example, in `Damsel Jam' one of the women recounts a horrific tale of attending to her brother's funeral arrangements when she was twelve. The memory is recounted in the measured voice of acceptance and there is no doubt that in everyday life the acceptance of such traumas is absolutely essential. However, a film can allow for a different kind of remembering, one that is perhaps more akin to the force of the initial experience. This is also necessary because although we gain acceptance of traumatic past experiences, their force remains with us perhaps buried in the body. `Damsel Jam' does not resurrect these experiences in any essential sense but, by means of combining erratic montage and the increasing separation of sound and visual images, the film testifies to the force of the past that exceeds the recounting of memory (5).. This is not to say that the various voices that recount their memories do not also contribute to this testimony. They do, but on a level that goes beyond content.

Deleuze talks about the permanent crisis of memory that is evoked once the leap into the past is taken. "Memory is voice which speaks, talks to itself, or whispers, and recounts what happened...what the voice as memory reports are more voices' (6). In one form of narration related to the direct time-image, Deleuze describes how the story-teller's voice, the voice-off is decentralized, either, he says, because it enters into relationships of dissonance with the visual image or because it is divided or multiplied. In `Damsel Jam' both of these things occur. In the litany of different voices that take up the "I" as if in relay, the identity of the she who returned to the site of her past is splintered into many "I" 's. This is partly why the film creates such a to-ing and fro-ing effect for the viewer, to-ing and fro-ing between visual images and sound images and between sound images and other sound images. The concept of free indirect discourse, which Deleuze' borrows from Pier Paolo Pasolini can be used to analyze this to-ing and fro-ing (7).

For Pasolini, free indirect discourse has to do with the filmmaker assimilating herself to her character and using her as a pretext to speak indirectly in the first person to tell a story. Deleuze calls these character pre-texts, intercessors, and he describes the process of free indirect discourse as follows: the author takes real not fictional characters and puts those characters in the condition of `making up fiction', of `making legends', of `storytelling'. In this process, the author takes a step towards her characters, their story-telling replacing her fictions, and the characters take a step towards the author - they are themselves in structures that are not their own (8). This is just one aspect of the process of free indirect discourse. The other aspect has to do with a double articulation going on between, on the one hand, the subjective vision of the character and, on the other hand, the technico-stylistic elements of the film itself, its obsessive framings and montage rhythms. This procedure liberates the expressive possibilities stifled by traditional narrative conventions `by a sort of return to their origins which extends to rediscovering in the technical means of cinema their original oneiric, barbaric, irregular, aggressive, visionary qualities' (9). Bypassing the archetypal nature of Pasolini's use of the concept, the value of this form of story telling for Deleuze is that it frees fiction from the model of truth which haunts it. So, while it is impossible to actualize the truth of her memories, it is possible to fabricate not-necessarily-true pasts that give voice or testimony to the continued, destabilizing force of the past in the present. `Damsel Jam' discovers this storytelling function. Its viewer follows and is affected by this narrative logic.

The final image sequence is the only place where the film seems to rest. The continuous chaos and layering seems momentarily resolved by this image of the sea, which contrasts, with the contained spaces of the rest of the film, i.e. the cave and the menstrual hearse. However, the melodic tune that accompanies the hare girl's disappearance into the sea is the same music that accompanies Alice walking down the wooded lane in the beginning of the film. It would seem as if the quest for the truth of her memories ends with a burial that is returned to when remembrance runs out of things to say, but its infinite depth is also the ground from which the series of "going forwards towards the past" will begin again. "She returned to the place of her childhood to find the truth of her memories..........."

© Maria Walsh 2003

Damsel Jam by Sarah Miles is available from LUX on 35mm and video.

FOOTNOTES
1.Unpublished filmmaker's notes.
2. Doane, Yale French Studies, vol. 60, 1980, pp. 33-50.
3. Bellour, `The Film Stilled', Camera Obscura, vol.24, Sep 1990, p.102.
4. Ibid., p 102.
5. For Deleuze, in this increasing separation between sound and image tracks, sound is also considered as an image.
6. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Athlone Press, London, 1989 , p. 51.
7. A reprint of the Pasolini essay, `The Cinema of Poetry', which deals with the concept of free indirect discourse can be found in `Movies and Methods: an anthology, vol. 11', edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1985, pp.530-558.
8. Ibid., p.150.
9. Pasolini, The Cinema of Poetry, op cit, p.552.