The grainy figure of a woman oscillates and I think about the power of an image.
A single static shot.
How the meaning of that image mutates when it becomes a sequence. The woman on the screen pulls at her face. She looks on. I think about how a film is nothing more than a series of sequences. How this transformation from the singular to a myriad reveals new meaning, establishes it, in the transition between one and the other.
I consider the structure of a sequence; the woman’s distraught face, the nameless figure, a building caving in on itself. How can you create meaning — which is to say; this is what I am telling you because …. — without following the established rules? How can you make it feel unlike anything you’ve already witnessed, while
retaining the peculiar quality that makes it feel as though you’ve always known it.
Typically, a narrative arch is formed to tell you how you should feel, or what you should focus in on, but what do we gain when we just revel in the moment itself. The minute can be grandiose at times and
everything has already been done anyways.
So how do you create something new with what is pre-existing? What kind of images would you need to use in order to hold onto the crux of meaning while accepting new challenges and limitations? The face of a woman, distraught. She tears at herself. The figure of a man in the distance, facial features hidden from view. A building, crumbling.
If meaning can be found in a photograph
on a page, I don’t see why it couldn’t be just as tangible from a loop. The duplication of images creates an emblem that connects them to one another. A stitch. But what is it they are trying to tell us? The woman still looks on. The man remains in the distance. The building is once again reduced to rubble.
Artists don’t always spell it out for us and yet we feel a sense of understanding despite the lack of clarity. It is a familiar muddiness.
This is a feeling I’m hypnotized by.
I asked myself these questions while watching N’s Dream Sequence screening of two Martine Rousset’s films, ‘Chants’ (1995) and ‘Mansfield K’ (1988). Both films dealt with the preoccupation of memory, its predilection for popping-up out of nowhere, for refracting from a single image into an endless web of befores and its insistence on repetition.
It’s in this loop that we grasp at that hypnotic sensation of familiar muddiness.
Still from the film ‘Chants’ by Martine Rousset
Recently I have been researching the effects of dementia on the brain. My grandfather died of it and the thing is, when someone dies of dementia they’re really just dying of loneliness. They become stranded in an ocean of memories, of a moment in time that is not now, unable to find the path to shore, to today. Their brains lose the ability to create new memories, and so they become anchored against the memories they have already made. A place
where no one else can meet them.
In Martine Rousset’s film ‘Chants’ we see three sequences; a woman’s face disturbed by some unknown accordance, the silhouette of a man in the distance and a building falling to the ground. These images are insistent, they repeat back and forth oscillating between, and at times, over themselves and one another. They are stuck in this perpetual loop, enhanced by the physicality of the film whose shadows, marked around the boarders, mimic the almond shape of our eyelids.
The camera blinks and with it the loop recommences.
Still from the film ‘Chants’ by Martine Rousset
When researching, I learnt that the memories that remain unaffected by early-onset dementia are those that were formed either by routine or through great emotional impact. Examples of these include the route from home to work, the memory of falling in love with someone, or a tragedy so horrific it could induce PTSD. Although I’ve found that these, too,
eventually recede into the background.
When watching ‘Chants’ I wondered what made Martine choose these images out of all possible images. Were they routines she went through? Or were they attached to a deeply emotional occurrence that seared them into this spiral. Or perhaps both? The subject matter here is deeply personal, we experience time through the imprints it makes within our bodies. This is where we can access them. Sometimes though, the image-objects of memory are forced upon us through the power of association.
A type of language that engenders meaning from its unseen connections. ‘Chant’ feels like a personal film for this reason, even if much is left unsaid.
The woman, who appears to be an actress on a screen, pulls at her face, the film jumps. The purposeful damage made to the film gives her face an abraded disposition, something about this texture and the gestures she holds feels compatible. She touches her forehead. A double exposure of a bronze bust peaks from behind her as if she were a ghost. One is unsure which is when first, and which is second. The other moving image that takes prominence is of a silhouette in the distance, this is double exposed against the crumbling columns of a Romanesque building.
The destruction occurs and yet the man stands still, completely unaffected.
Still from the film ‘Chants’ by Martine Rousset
A circle, like the clasp of a necklace, is joined by its starting and end points. ‘Chants’ acts in much the same way. Producing more questions with each pass, it leaves us searching within in us and our associations for the meaning underlying these images. Their insistence inflates their importance and so we want to know, we must know.
Films like these remind me that there are still new ways to tell a story.
That stories don’t have to have a beginning, a middle, or an end, and that they can instead mirror our relationship with our own bodies. Messy, incalculable and repetitive.
Even if our brains forget to remember why we seek it out, that familiar muddiness--that I could hear in my grandfather’s voice whenever he said my name, never quite sure why he recognized it--can be reproduced in the work of a stranger. Films like this tether us to previous versions of ourselves, of others, and like a circle, a spiral or a loop
we come back to our initial question.
Dream Sequence is a recurring experimental film screening event in London run by Nick Silvey. The screening of two films by Martine Rousset, discussed above, took place on the 15th Feb, 2025 at SET Social in Peckham. For future event details, check out their IG: @dream_sequence_london