Staging a cycling accident
An essay by: Hannaleena Hauru
Translation: Aino Havu
Originally written for Finnish Culture Release “Mustekala”, 28.3.2019.
Photo from “Fucking with Nobody”. DOP Lasse Poser
The situation in the early hours of a May night in Helsinki had progressed to a point where we had staged some kind of a cycling accident. Our bikes were lying in the middle of Kurvi, a couple of drunken passers-by had stopped to help because you were still wriggling comedically under your bike. I told them that there was no emergency here. They left. I was amused. I stood by my own fallen bike and waited for the scene to be over so that you would come to me.
I will return to this moment later on. Now, a bit over a year from that accident it’s an autumn and I’m giving a lecture to university students in the cinema Orion. The lecture - or more specifically this essay - centers on a filmmaker’s perspective on a term defined by Laura U. Marks: ”haptic visuality”.
At the beginning of the lecture I’ve left my bag at the front row, where the stink of a warming, half-eaten baguette emerges as the lecture goes onwards.
Right now I am a screenwriter-director who has worked in the film industry for ten years. I studied in different film schools altogether for eight years. The themes of my filmmakership have been leaning towards depicting sexuality and falling in love. My most internationally successful films are seen as contributing to the art house tradition, as feministic, poetic, ”original”. The challenge I’ve faced throughout my working is how, especially in the writing phase, to bring forward this ”original” experience that I want to convey through the piece.
”What is this truly about”, asks the teacher/dramaturg/financer/distributor, when the script is closest to its theme, and I find it difficult to answer. The developing phase is nearly always finding the right tools of communication, in order to point the direction I’m heading to. Most are satisfied with the film once it’s ready, but there’s always an energy-consuming phase before that, during which I’ve tried to communicate what I’m actually aiming at to different partaker groups of the film.
Lately I’ve found a theoretical help to my plight: talking about haptic visuality. That is to say utilizing what happens, when instead of vision and hearing, the focus of a film is in the other senses; touch, smell and taste.
The lecture moves onward, the baguette stinks, I’m clicking on the slideshow I’ve prepared - and meanwhile in another time, in the staged cycling accident, we’re at the last moment of the night. Both of us know that to the other direction from the scene of the event is your home, and to the other is mine.
Haptic visuality
It may be quickest to explain haptic visuality with the apposition optic/haptic:
Optic = based on the sense of sight
Haptic = based on the sense of touch
While talking about the haptic visuality of Laura U. Marks, we shall let the term extend also to the senses of taste and smell.
It’s worth bringing to the forefront the argument that touch, smell and taste are the senses most powerfully connected to one’s personal experience history, and memory. And following this assumption: when used well, haptic visuality in film can create intense sensations that resonate with the viewer’s own world of experience.
For example, if the film successfully depicts a person smelling the early morning in springtime that mixes with the warmth, smell and taste of the person they want, it can be a very identifiable moment for the viewer. On the other hand, for purposes of haptic visuality, the viewer must surrender their own world of experience to the use of the film in order to be able to have that identifiable moment. Simulating touch, smell and taste in a film does not work without the viewer’s active participation. When operating with vision and hearing, we can always stay in the position of an observer. In haptic visuality - especially in regards to touch - the viewer may even put themselves in a vulnerable position when they surrender to the ”touch of the camera”.
And at the same time we’re at the core of haptic visuality. In haptic visuality the image is often ”incomplete” when compared to an image that operates with the sense of sight in the lead. Hapticity requires the viewer to actively participate, it requires the viewer’s own field of sensations to complete the content of the image it offers.
(As a side note and elaboration: because I didn’t want to make any footnotes to this essay, the ”active viewing” that relates to haptic visuality is not the same as Brecht’s ”critical wonder”.)
Laura U. Marks’ haptic visuality is presented in her book The Skin on the Film – Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000). In the book, Marks’ material is film production by people living in diaspora. Marks uses nearly 200 films as examples to analyze how filmmakers living apart from their native cultures use elements especially related to touch, smell and taste in their films.
Marks herself has stated that the basis of the ”haptic visuality” that emerges from her book are the thoughts of Henri Bergson, the interpretations on Alois Riegl by Deleuze and Guattari, and Islamic aesthetics.
Memory and carrying of memories become central in Marks’ examples. Marks analyzes how the narratives and experiences of cultures in a subordinate position have not been allowed to be visible, but the memories have been forced to be hidden into another language instead of vocal, written or pictorial - traditionally, for example, in textile art. Memories, stories and experiences have been preserved with the language of touch, smell and taste, passed on from one generation to the next and transported from one country to another.
I can easily grasp this notion of textile art through handcrafts. My grandmother, who taught me to weave with a loom, taught the art of handcrafts like no one else. Already as a child I felt that a lot of emotional expression went into the weaving of a rug. I learned from her that handcrafts isn’t just about producing a piece of material, but creating meaning and transferring that meaning into a material. The few rugs I weaved under my grandmother’s guidance, and later by myself in my early teens, hold very strong memories and emotional bonds. As I’m writing this I realize that I’ve never really talked about this out loud, even though it’s always appeared to me as quite significant.
But let’s go back to film. What is haptic visuality in a moving image? Marks offers the following examples:
depicting people experiencing sensations: smelling, tasting, touching
dollies along surfaces of objects or close to skin
varying the focus point of the camera
scratching the film
unclear images
over- and underexposure
use of grain
mixing image formats (film/video)
The physicality of hapticity therefore does not only concern using the camera as a nose, mouth or fingertips, but the film material can be made physical as well. The film and the image themselves are handled as organic elements, the film as an instrument is made physical.
While comparing Marks’ list to the screenwriting tools that I have studied, it’s noteworthy that Western cinema categorizes the means of haptic cinema as experimental filmmaking. Mainstream cinema and the teaching of screenwriting in film schools rely most of all on visuality - on the viewer being an observer. Show, don’t tell, insists the American screenwriting doctrine. But if film is only the art of that which is seen and spoken, many voices in film will be left unheard and/or unrealized.
If I started to utilize the tools of haptic visuality in my scripts more actively, would the communication of my works to others get easier?
The challenges of haptic narration
Let’s go back to the night of the staged cycling accident. If I utilized haptic visuality, would it be possible to recount and discuss all of the emotions that occurred during that night that still keeps coming back to me, and make a film?
How, suddenly, in the embrace of the early hours by the fallen bikes, do I find you?
That I suddenly realize how abysmally lonely I’ve been?
That suddenly everything is somehow related to how you smell and taste and feel?
That slowly, when we start to kiss, everything ((everything!(everything!!!)) is good.
I believe that this - and a couple of observations that followed the moment in question - is possible to convey through the means of film. In the way that the means of the narration in the film is something more than the look in my amorous eyes and a kiss that are transmitted to the viewer from the silver screen.
First I would have to find a cinematic way that would clarify that in this film everything has to do with touch. Because if the viewer cannot read the meaning of the touch and all the things it unveils in the early morning, the transmission of observation and experience has failed.
About 18 night buses drive past in Kurvi, I’m safe here, and that has to do, to a large extent, with the warmth of your body.
Okay. There could be ”dollies close to skin”, according to Laura Marks, or me ”smelling and tasting” you or vice versa (we both taste like beer). But the film camera acting as hands in your hair just wouldn’t be enough. I mean, sure I could make an endless film study where I would fetishizingly worship your body with a camera. But that would be a film of some other genre, and it would tell about something else than what I want to say this time.
About the 19th bus drives past. The kissing needs a lightening break. We hold each other during an air pocket, I joke by saying ”platonically cool”, because this night has been preceded by a friendly atmosphere, like all the friendly nights before this one. You laugh shortly but confirm it out loud: ”There’s nothing platonic about this!”. And we continue. Yeah, friendliness is pretty far from the scene, because I’m getting really aroused, and you’re also a very good kisser. At some point I notice that you’re not hard. I can’t figure out how I could use haptic visuality to depict this observation of erectionless-ness. Probably with some metaphor - or maybe it could be a completely self-standing comedic short film, that would depict how a woman feels everything but an erection against her thigh. Or it could be an interview documentary about how an erection experienced through clothing feels like, or a game show called Erection or not, where contestants try to guess whether they’re dealing with a wallet or an erection.
But I’m still searching for a way to tell about this night, while at the same time we’re approaching the core. Cinematically, I would most probably use something more than descriptive realistic material, where there would be a reconstruction of you, me and Kurvi. Symbolism and metaphors. Maybe the end result would be that the film would only have different abstract material surfaces touching and not-touching each other, or liquids, wallets (after all), angels and lava, lions wrestling, an attempt to tell why it’s wonderful to bite your ear a bit.
And in that film I would probably have to break the main character -centeredness. To also tell your side. Because while I’m embracing you and kissing you and falling in love, I know that something is not right. There’s something restless in the way you hold me, you want to embrace me closer than is possible. And this is the touch I would want to explain. I feel that everything you could find is already in this encounter, but you keep on searching.
And because of that - which would be in the core of the film, in this touch I simultaneously know that you and I will not work out. That I can come up with any kind of self-deceiving excuses, but you’re looking for something in me that I’m not. And even though I’m assured of this quite a lot later, really everything has been told in that one embrace. And that is why I would want to make a film that operates on the language of touch. From haptic visuality I would likely use making film material physical - underexposure and overexposure when depicting the disparity between the touches and the bodies, sharp and unsharp. Observations on the restlessness of your body. Or how I might be just a ghost to you, something you couldn’t find by touching, while to me everything was right here.
For some reason I’m also thinking about the tale of King Midas (which was by the way one of my favourite stories as a kid). Midas is granted a wish that everything he touches will turn to gold. An alternate: a film where two King Midases spend an evening together, eventually stage a cycling accident and in the aftermath of it, start kissing. Except that while I turn you into gold, you touch things and they turn to shit - or to nothing. (And in the film there would also be the sequence - naturally in hindsight - where I realize that it was a really bad idea to turn you into gold to begin with.)
”OH COME ON!” cries out a drunkard passing by, commenting on our kissing scene by the fallen bikes. For a brief moment I see us from the outside. Actually, we’re just a horny couple immersed with one another in a spring night. ”I’LL FUCKEN STEAL YOUR BIKES!” the drunkard continues without any intent to actually steal our bikes.
You hold my face in your hands. You say some lightening silly thing in turn.
After the drunkard, the night of the staged cycling accident, like my lecture to the university students, is starting to be over. I’m not sure if Marks’ haptic visuality spoke to the audience. I also talked about Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and penetration, but those are things I have to leave for the next essay.
We come loose from the embrace. Too soon, but at the right time considering that I’m leaving to another direction.
The night ended
I’m eating my warmed up baguette while walking on Aleksanterinkatu after the lecture. I’m thinking that haptic visuality could be taught in film schools. Haptic visuality could be talked about in a wider sense to the whole of the film industry. Someone could give me money, and I could give lectures.
I think about the film I would finally make of the night of the cycling accident with these sentiments. I think about the potential disappointment of making a really good film, but only approximately seven people would be able to get their hands on what I truly wanted to say with the work. That those viewers would be rare, those to whom the narrative means of haptic visuality would unfold, those who would care to participate in the world that the film offers. Because eventually I would choose the most experimental and abstract means (not even the wrestling lions), the ones that would require quite a lot of understanding and thinking about cinematic language.
While choosing the way of covering the film, if I wanted a larger audience for it, should I just choose the erection game show?
I recognise myself as a viewer, or rather I recognise myself in relation to ”I just want to watch something easy and nice on Netflix” -phenomenon. I want to see something stupid regularly and when I’m tired. But then again, I go gloomy if I don’t go at least to ubu.com every once in a while to watch a random experimental film. It’s like knowing that eating only baguettes makes you numb.
That’s why I probably would nevertheless make that haptically operating film instead of the TV game show. Because I want to believe that cinema will diversify, and that will be precisely for the needs of the audiences. That’s really why I wanted to write this essay, too. So that we would have more tools to use for reading films, and talking about films. So that film would be for all the senses. Or at least so that there would be something more to put in your baguette instead of the same old stuffings.
It’s starting to get bright. I’m walking my bike home after the staged cycling accident. The bike feels cold, hard, metallic in my hands. I’m still horny.
You smiled before you turned towards your home.
I was never in your embrace again after that night. I never got to know what you were searching for.
This essay was originally written for Finnish Culture Release “Mustekala”, published 28.3.2019.
