window

 

A film is a portal to a dreamworld; a weightless window onto another place and time. A slippery compound of shadow and light.

 

Looking through the window of the screen to Selina Ershadi’s Hollywood Ave, we are voyeurs to a seemingly private sphere. To a gallery of domestic performance in which three women participate. Two of them on the screen, one behind the camera; glimpses caught in silhouette or audible in brief wry comment. A hyperrealist filter of lived and performed experience.

 

Hollywood Ave and its companion text Notes for 3 Women are two parts of an interweaving web, each casting shadows onto – pushing needles into – the other. Selina is the cornerstone of both. She’s triangulated between the artists Moyra Davey and Chantal Akerman, affectionately referred to by their first names, as though friends or sisters. Moyra and Chantal stand in beside Selina’s own mother and sister throughout both film and text, each circulating through the others. Who is standing in spotlight and who in shadow? The chorus of performers is consistent only in its instability.

 

Together, the two works lean towards an intuitive, fragmented mode of storytelling. The fractured dream-logic of memory and nostalgic ephemera are preferred to any expositional style of history. An organic unfolding occurs from the chance rediscovery of home videotapes and letters sent by the family of these three women in the years following their move from their unnamed Motherland to a distant island, neither of which are ever specifically named. A gentle pulling of threads, a tweezing out of splinters. An unearthing of treasure, but also of bones.

 

the hive

 

Notes for 3 Women begins with tribute to the 1977 Robert Altman film 3 Women – to its dreamlike logic and miraged visual quality. The three women… exist on a parallel plane of existence that’s submerged beneath water. In the world of the film the identities of women become blurred; they exchange words like organs, transfuse behaviours like blood. Selina’s friend dubs the film ‘a black hole’ – damning or devotional, who can say? A void. A burrow. A rabbit hole.

 

Altman’s 3 Women provides one entry point for an intoxicating exploration of the artist’s creative processes, family history and childhood. But like the sea, Notes for 3 Women has infinite access points. It welcomes non-linear engagement, structurally and texturally, and echoes on with a rich intertextuality. The selected fragments exhibited online at Window Gallery are but a brief sampling of the extensive text. Nonetheless, Selina’s curiosities are discernible – an embracing of ‘minor’ literatures, diaries, letters, notes that can be read in any order. The minor that is deterritorialized, off-centre, rhizomatic; vampiric – Deleuze & Guattari’s intricate, interminable spiderweb.1 I recall Selina’s early working title for the text with fondness. A Can of Worms.

 

It serves as a diaristic support for Hollywood Ave, for the visual manifestation of ideas explored, Attempting to motion (through image and sound) toward the black holes that words fail to adequately express. But the existence of both texts hinges on the other; a beehive and its colony. The hive expresses and supports what the bees individually cannot, it tells the larger, structural story. But it is the bees that build the hive – through a slow process of ingestion and excretion – and continue to sustain it.

 

 

love-arrows

 

Reading is yoked to writing, says Moyra. The making of Hollywood Ave depends on both – in the literal sense of the letters from Motherland, and in the gleaming, serpentine unfolding of Selina’s accompanying text. Each generates and feeds from the other; in much the same way my own archival response serves to simultaneously feed from and reincarnate the texts, extending their lifespan while omitting, erasing, editing; reframing that which does not find firm footing in its new site, post-show.

 

The challenge of responding to another’s work is to preserve the magic beyond its initial, temporary bed – to find expressive form that glistens and catches the eye, the iridescent trail of shimmer left in the wake of a lusty snail. Less after-party, more blurry Instagram story. Nothing so sweet or useful as the honey from a hive, more the trace elements of a crime scene; worms wriggling on a sidewalk after a storm.

 

It swells and recedes. Every allusion is spatial and cyclical – a semiotic leaning of language toward life with an off-balance torque. Over there is thing, at which the word is shooting amiable love-arrows, Lyn Hejinian muses. ‘[Our] center of gravity seems to be located in language… heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.’2

 

Les Goddesses (2011) sees Moyra shoot love-arrows at her family after the death of her sister’s daughter. Hemlock Forest (2016) sees Moyra shoot love-arrows at Chantal, in an extended subway shot captured in homage to Chantal’s News from Home (1977). Moyra learnt the next day that Chantal had taken her own life. I watch Hemlock Forest in a Berlin gallery. The people on the subway look unhappy. I shoot love-arrows toward Selina.

a separation

 

Notice how often stories begin in debt.

 

Writing is indelibly yoked to voice. Hollywood Ave sees excerpts of letters read out loud, in their original Farsi by Selina’s mother Azita. The material is quoted selectively, specifics are avoided in favour of affectionate displays of longing, nostalgia and mention of photographs – the ephemera of long-distance care.

 

The epistolary mode of communication is elevated and central to both works. We know from their content that these words are not from the recent present – handwritten letters signify not only absence, but in an era of digital communication, a sense of ana-khronos – backwards-time. Looming in the script is the bittersweet knowledge that this family had something to escape.

 

Everything will become a lot easier.

 

Letters imply distance. A gap, a departure, a separation. The mismatch of Azita’s voice to the body we see on screen (busily preparing a Sunday meal for her daughters) extends the sense of void, of lack – a throwing of the voice, a ventriloquist retelling stories from long ago. Scheherazade by the bedside. I can’t throw away words, she says.

 

 

the cave

 

In psychoanalytic terms (and consequently those relating to film genre), horror often refers to that which is repressed; that which we cannot or will not address. That which haunts. To address it summons a new horror altogether. I call the cave by its name, says Clarice Lispector. I then fear myself who knows how to paint the horror… I suffocate because I am word and also its echo.3 I am both vampire and victim.

 

The disembodied voice is yoked to horror, and to the uncanny. The house becomes a museum of the living; a gallery, a cave. The three women of Hollywood Ave are framed by windows, doorways; reflected in mirrors, and steaming glass. One of the first shots shows a young woman in a black and white portrait, smiling like film star. Hollywood. This is Azita as a younger woman; looking as she calls it, vacant. A zombie. Selina made me put it up, she protests laughingly to Maryam on the phone. Look at it!

 

I’m reminded of Chantal’s No Home Movie, which I saw with Selina in a dark cinema. Another cave. Circuitous, distanced storytelling unfolds in the space of Chantal’s mother’s apartment. The seeming claustrophobia of a space soon transmutates into an inversely rich and leading environment replete with memory, nostalgia, history and feeling.

 

The first shot of Hollywood Ave shows an archway leading between living spaces. This same threshold continues to haunt throughout, as the wall is invisibly demolished, shabbily reconstructed by Selina’s father (the only point at which he visually features, near wordlessly), then finally broken down again by Azita.

 

The wall’s patchwork reconstruction is significant for what it covers up – the invisible demolition of the wall occurs more violently for not having been seen. It’s a lapse in memory and narrative, a black-out, an amnesiac pocket in which Azita impulsively acted on her wish to be rid of the wall that made her feel so caged, so claustrophobic.

 

Selina dances around voids in both Hollywood Ave and Notes for 3 Women. Boldly and gracefully, summoning and willing something to emerge, like Jean Rhys’ completion of The Wide Sargasso Sea after an absence so notable some thought she’d died. Emerging from Cixous’ nourish-ed/ing ocean after a trip to the Dark Continent: that which is still unexplored only because we’ve been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable.4

 

She is braver than me. Me who skirts around issues of displacement and loss – because this winding story is not mine to tell. I will not address the specifics. All I can speak to is the surface. To this compound of shadow and light. The continent is dark.

 

A shard of the screen flies towards me and slits my throat.

 

 

snake

 

Chantal’s ouvre of work is a love letter to her mother; she shoots amiable love-arrows towards her silence. Born only a few years after her mother’s release from Auschwitz, much of Chantal’s work snakes around her quiet suffering, an endless ouroboros.

 

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) reenacts the body of trauma through a distanced, static lens. Four decades later, No Home Movie (2015) sees the traumatised body/voice of her mother materialise on screen after years of evasive treatment – just as it is on the precipice of physical erasure; death. A return to silence. I didn’t know I was going to make that film, Chantal said. Otherwise I would probably not dare to make it.5

 

Horror is yoked to trauma, like gravity. We avoidantly orbit our own ghosts, dumb to the knowledge that we will one day have to look them in the eye.

 

An other’s words trapped between two pairs of hovering eyes… the letters obediently lean; head bent, body off-balance, tilting both away and towards.

 

Selina’s trauma and that of her family is not named. But we know it by the tension in her mother’s jaw as she chops coriander; in the delicately guarded way her sister covers her own face with a scarf.

 

We know it by Azita’s possessed sense of a stranger’s blood coursing through her own veins.

 

By the way she pulls the nails from wood, with the hard hand of a woman who has seen worse. Of caring, of continuing.

 

We know it by the ominous absence of Selina’s baba from almost all family scenes, despite memories of his humour and good character loudly missed in letters from home.

 

By the way Azita doesn’t flinch as huge pieces of jib fall to the ground. The way she picks up the pieces and folds them, and sweeps up the debris. Preparing the way for the next violent wind.

 

One birthday I wished for carpet for the bare concrete floors of my bedroom.

 

We know it by the vivid and masochistic dreams that sporadically haunt Selina, as she envisions her own bloody disembowelment.

 

By the multiple violent births - the hideous mutant progeny birthed by Mary Shelley in the first sentence, her aunt’s C-section found documented on one of the old VHS tapes.

 

By the shards of glass that threaten throughout, the blood so real that it looks fake. A call to the hyperreal performativity expected of and expressed by women, the constraints and pressures on women of colour and migrant women amidst an obdurately colonial, Caucasian culture.

 

 We have all been injured, profoundly.6 Trauma is yoked to the body.

 

 

the point turned in

 

Women’s bodies have become such sites for violent self-loathing that the longing to engrave, invade; obliterate the body can bring liberation – echoing the very inhabiting methods of colonisation. Like Cixous says, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of.7

 

Zah reh mahr. Snake’s venom. The body as site of revolution. The point turned in against the breast.

 

And so, the body is yoked to writing. With blood. Women are body. More body, hence more writing.8 We move through and past a writing of the self towards a writing of and beyond the body, where pathologies are symptoms not of sickness but of birth and change, where hideous progeny may proliferate and thrive. Mutant regeneration from the void; Haraway’s monstrous, duplicated, potent regrown limb.9 Chimera.

 

How can I write from a body that I don’t feel free in? Selina asks, echoing Virginia Woolf: Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?10

 

No question is answered. The point is in the asking, in the turning in. To be tangled is not to be silent. Silence is a black hole. In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, on a remote island, Alma and Elisabet merge and hybridise on account of Elisabet’s silence. Must we also become one with the other in order to speak? In order to escape/liberate the body? How can we be without border?11 Is this island, our island, a respite from the abyss, or simply a void of a different kind? Must we thrust out, head offshore, into our own wide Sargasso Sea? Or is the blood that flows through our veins just the ink we need?

 

Entanglement need not mean capture, inhibition or impediment. Memory grows like a weed: it cannot be uprooted, combed or teased into any kind of sense. It is the incoherent language of all tongues.

 

 

shroud

 

The gauzed layers through/within which Selina’s women relate–speak–connect in Hollywood Ave are epistolary and obscure; mis-embodied throughout. As with Altman’s 3 Women, as with Clarice’s cave; as with Bergman’s Persona, as with Moyra’s subway and Chantal’s mother, they echo one another, then another, and another, ad infinitum. Their identities resound together in a fragile veneer of reflections and dark silhouettes through the twilit kitchen window. TV is made of light, like shame.12

 

But this silent chasm between voice/body – past/present – mother/daughter – is ardently embodied in the final scene, Azita and Sara on a joyful video call to/with a relative in the Motherland. As they speak, they pore over the letters spread on the dining table, Azita holding the phone high to expose it. Documenting the written voice, the written body. Revelling in its overgrowth.

 

Azita points her phone camera toward the now demolished wall, the chairs shrouded in white sheets, like lumpy bodies. Look at it, Maryam! She gestures towards the mess. Voice is connected to body. The monster is exposed. It will become more beautiful, Maryam says, encouragingly.

 

It doesn’t matter, Azita smiles, seemingly joyful at the state of disrepair. She is preparing the way. To be without border, in spite of the debris.

 

It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about that.

 

 

Notes

 

1.

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari. ​Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature​. (Minneapolis, Minnesota: The University of Minnestota Press, 1986)​, p.29.

 

2.

Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure" from The Language of Inquiry, Accessed 10 July 2018, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69401/the-rejection-of-closure.

 

3.

Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva (London: Penguin Classics, 2014), p.9.

 

4.

Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4. Summer, 1976, pp. 884-885.

 

5

Chantal Akerman, interview by Kasman, “Chantal Akerman discusses “No Home Movie,” interview by Daniel Kasman, Mubi, August 17 2015, https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/chantal-akerman-discusses-no-home-movie

 

6.

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), p.181.

 

7.

Cixous et al, p.887.

 

8.

Ibid, p.886.

 

9.

Haraway, p.181.

 

10.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p.44.

 

11.

Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” Powers of Horror, (NY: Columbia University Press,1982), p.4.

 

12.

Anne Carson, “TV Men”, in Glass, Irony & God (NY: New Directions Books, 1995), p.59.