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| Stages of Mourning still, 2004 |
Stages of Mourning is a film about the death of the filmmaker Sandra Lahire, or more precisely, about the sense of loss that was left with her partner in life and art, Sarah Pucill, the author of the film. The film depicts Sarah trying to come to terms with her lover’s passing, her absence, and the feeling of emptiness that remains, the grief and pain she has to face, and face alone.
It is, for a filmmaker, a hard challenge to try to portray these feelings. How anyway does one show feelings on film? Can in fact any image picture the life shattering grief of loosing a life companion? or can it only try ? Sarah Pucill has taken a huge gamble here, but it is clear that this film is one that had to be: Stages of Mourning is not only a self-portrait as a mourner, it is quite literally a stage of the filmmaker's life, a film born out of necessity, a piece of redemption in the face of torment, a ritual of survival.
Having been a close friend of Sandra Lahire, it was with a mix of excitement and apprehension that I came to watch Stages of Mourning. Inevitably seeing my friend moving, talking and laughing on the screen left me shocked and disturbed. The fact is, Stages of Mourning taps right into the illusion of cinema. It also pushes filmmaking further, into a rite of passage for the filmmaker/actor. It is a beautiful film which is not only a deep meditation on life and death, survival and memory, and love, but also on the very essence of the image itself, whether still or moving.
The film moves along at what seems to be a slow, intuitive pace, yet it depicts quite clearly different moments of mourning. As I see it, it starts with a fusion and ends with a separation and I distinguish four stages, whereby the mourner, Sarah, learns to gradually detach herself from the figure of Sandra, a figure which exists, we understand, in both her mind and heart. The film is about the relationship, or rather the link between them - not about anecdotes as lovers and partners, but about the intricate relation between an I and an Other; the Other being both a real person and an entity of the psyche. The subject of the film is about detaching these two entities: how I must become without the Other.
STAGE 1: FUSING IN THE MIRROR / PHOTOGRAPH
Me is you is you is me.... the faces of Sandra and Sarah close to each
other, separated/united by mirrors, reflecting each other, infinitely.
One woman sees the other who sees her through a multiplication of reflections.
Where is the starting point? I, the spectator, see this black & white
still picture and... no, actually, it is not still, not entirely: one
face slowly moves away from the others; there I understand: it belongs
to film (the film I am watching) and the others belongs to a photograph
in the film. Another image, another trompe-l'oeil. This time, the face
in the film is in colour, the others belong to the black & white
of a still portrait, which is readily seen in its paper materiality,
a large photograph set aside by Sarah in the space of a bedroom. But
where are we when layers of identities, times and realities are so
intertwined ? The photographic mises-en-scene of Sarah and Sandra for
the sake of the still camera are entangled with the staging of Sarah
for the sake of the filmic camera: the first one is an artistic dual
exploration of identity and otherness; the second a nostalgic and painful
viewing of photographs as traces of memory. The first belongs to the
then-and-there (the 'has been' to phrase Barthes) of photography and
the second to the (illusionistic) 'here-and-now' of film.
Again and again, we see Sarah's and Sandra's bodies and faces in endless reflections and we don't know anymore whether they are still or moving, alive or not. This very clever mise-en scene says an awful lot about all the ambiguities and contradictions of the mourner's state of mind: it depicts how it is a moment when the sense of self has been so shattered and scattered that the mourner feels lost in a far away space, unable to see one person from the other. In the very illusionary space of the photograph, the two women are united, and one cannot help but feel that the gaze of Sarah overlooking those past pictures is one of a longing desire to be inside this miraculous space. And so, mourning can be a maddening desire of fusion into death, into stillness, out of time - which is, somehow, the time and space of photography. At one point, the images of the two women are so fused that they form a single double-headed body. At other times, Sarah the mourner is able to detach herself and to come back to the reality and physicality of the here-and-now - and so the photograph recovers the time of has been.
Indeed, fusion is impossible, and there is no other way/work but slow separation. In the second stage, the mourner faces the reality of loss: emptiness of space, dilution of time. Now we are in the time of film: the present.
STAGE 2: SPACE/TIME LOST
We see Sarah dressed in a white gown, wandering through rooms
and corridors. Her mind seems lost to the outside world, her
body somewhat ethereal.
The space is Sarah’s own flat, her private place where she and
Sandra lived. It is darkened, silent, empty; the familiar setting seems
to have turned into a dark labyrinth of narrow corridors with no direction
and no escape. And in there, the mourner experiences the horror of objects:
the most ordinary things have taken a disturbing and uncanny habit of
recalling the dead: the mirror (where Sandra looked at herself), the
bed (where she lay and slept) , the table (where she ate), the corridor
(where she passed)… everything, every corner, is haunted. And so,
strangely enough, we see double: like the mourner, through her mind's
eye in fact, we see what is here and what is not here; things and their
opposite: where there used to be light there is now darkness, where there
used to be motion and noise, there is now stillness and silence, where
there used to be Sandra, there is now nothing. A weird thing, really,
to see the past in the present of an image - or is this, in fact, the
game of memory ? In darkness, we remember light, in silence we remember
the sound of cries and laughter.
Space, the space of the house, is both a physical and a psychical landscape. 'Reality' is dislocated: the space here is not a fictitious one, but neither is it entirely 'objective' nor metaphorical; it is somewhere between all these. It is an objective space inhabited, transfigured even by the mental landscape of mourning. In this space, as in the bereaved mind, there can be no light and no physical grounding; it is somewhat inside out, and time is lost, between now and then. In all this uncertainty, there is one thing that becomes certain: the Absence. The invisible is the very object of vision, just as madness and pain are the reality of the moment. The film is located in this gap – a gap called grief.
And so, the mourner has to make her journey back to the 'real' world, the world of physicality, the world of here-and-now. Sited at a table, Sarah slowly pours milk out of a bottle into a bowl, and then swallows it spoon by spoon. Milk, the primary substance of nourishment, the liquid of infancy and purity, is taken inside the body as a rite of passage. Then she covers her face with her hands - as if this moment of connection with her own body was the one of an extremely violent return.
STAGE 3:
FILM AS LIVING MEMORY
We see Sarah projecting a film: she holds a piece of celluloid, set it
in the projector whose familiar ticking reflects back to our present
and gives us a comforting sense of reality, and she turns the ‘on’ button.
The moving image is projected onto the wall: black & white pictures
of Sandra, ethereal apparition of light into the realm of the visible,
just like a Nosferatu out of his box... Sarah passes in front of the
projected image, caresses it, becomes part of it, and the image becomes
her body, yet her physicality resists.
Another set of images: pixilated, on the screen on a computer; the arrow clicks one of them into full screen and suddenly the computer screen becomes the film screen. And there she is: Sandra, seated on a bed, talking to the camera, smiling, laughing, rolling her eyes, and suddenly she jumps up, shouting... and this cry finds in me an echo of dread. A sense of horror shakes my understanding: I thought Sandra was dead and buried, and yet here she is, suddenly, all waving and laughing in front of my very eyes! In this moment my own sense of time is lost as I am taken in with the trick that film plays with the mind – the joy and anger at being fooled!
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes says that photography is a process of mortification, of embalmment. It takes only the mask, not the ‘identity’. As such, it gives an inevitable sense of unease, a malaise: when I look at a photograph, I look at the mask of death and I am inevitably facing the return of the dead. If we extrapolate about the moving mage, it means that film is facing us with the living dead (as F.W. Murnau clearly stated in 1922 with Nosferatu). For if “cameras are clocks for seeing” (Barthes), then the projector is the machine that reverses time. In Stages of mourning, the photographs represent fictions of the past and are, as such, tolerable, but the moving image is truly intolerable: it brings then now. Roland Barthes adds that our civilisation (a society that consumes images like pop corn) “represse[s] the profound madness of photography”. In this respect, Sarah Pucill’s film goes back to the “inherent pathos“ of film and to its fundamental obscenity of bringing back 'alive' what is past and gone, and pushes them to the limit.
STAGE 4 :
THE RECOVERY OF THE SELF
At the end of the Stages of Mourning, the figure of Sandra becomes very
strange indeed. Dressed in a long yellow skirt and a old fashioned white
blouse, she stands on the beach, her hair blown by the wind, her face
is weirdly made-up, with a thick white foundation and high black eyebrows
- she looks somewhat like a grotesque clown, and I cannot help but wonder
whether it already is the horrible mask of death taking over her features.
Over there.... So over there she is, beyond this strange mirror that
the digital camera has become, smiling and laughing, talking to the camera,
peeping at the sunlight and wondering at it, saying that the camera is
not at the right angle for the light... but no matter how lively she
behaves, this pantomime mask tells me that she is already in a place
that I cannot define, and that what I am seeing is the return of a ghost....
a lonely body swirling around and around on the beach, pathetic dervish
performing her last dance, swirling away, further and further away from
us.... These images are terribly poignant. They tell, in their miraculous
existence and the highly unsettling feeling that we have to see them
retrospectively, more than many discourses about the fragility and vanity
of our lives. They are profoundly disturbing too : how come that the
last recorded image of Sandra should be one of a performance linking
sea and land, heaven and earth, life and death?
Yet, equally and paradoxically, there is something elating about this and almost unbearably cheerful: it is the miracle of film as testimony, as living memory. The film ends with Sarah opening the curtains and letting a crack of light tear the darkness. As she stands by the window, the projected image of Sandra swirling becomes smaller and smaller between her shoulder blades and seem to fuse inside her body. Images are the materiality of memories. And so at times, with sorrow, they bring joy.
In that sense, Stages of mourning is a deep tribute to the presence of film in our lives : the celluloid image, the computer image are metaphors of living memory - and since memory is (in) us, rather than being kept in the backroom as an unknown mechanism of trickery, it is better contemplated in full consciousness as a projection onto the screen of ours minds.
And there is another reason why the film leaves me happy: ultimately, it is a film about life and love. It is, in no doubt, about the extraordinary and beautiful relationship between these two women, who not only shared love and art with great passion, but were also fully creators of their own lives.
Copyright © Cécile Chich 2004
Sarah Pucill’s Stages of Mourning is distributed on 16mm film by LUX
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