Like the sky after it rains — Mercedes Gaviria: The utopian and miscellaneous image.
“The first time we only retained the bucolic aspects of the image, now what we perceive best are its threatening elements”
Rául Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema.
Is what is left behind in a timeline seen as a fiction, a utopian image; or the back in inaccurate projections, perhaps a platonic blindness? In the evocation of what is dead we could always be invoking something to be conceived and born again. We know in the exercise of memory to intuition that we are always veiled by the inaccurate appreciation of distances, of gestures, of some sign. In this abyss, the proximity to that hermetic that is manifested in familiar archive images (the transmitting concept of the photographic age) even if it is imaginary, only becomes possible in the acceptance of looking underwater, with the distortion and turbidity that it is own Mercedes assures when seeing her mother in her home videos something like: “ She is no longer the same woman, now it’s just silence.”
Rául Ruiz would say in his work Poetics of Cinema (Compilations of his conferences and writings) that some of his greatest cinematographic and vital concerns revolved around what seems to spring from the images in Gaviria’s documentary feature film: the jungle of involuntary signs or not controlled. Audiovisual family archive documents are that primitive image that “was the frame of a film whose subject we ignored” Ruiz would say while we starred in it, until we really looked.
Ruiz proposes in Poetics of Cinema a revealing exercise in amplifying any photograph down to the detail of, for example, a bucolic and elegiac square with people passing by and one or another event happening inside it; in an extreme and radical approach we discover his “enigmatic corpus” always demure and secondary to the obvious. In the case of the previous photograph, in some of the terms or corners underestimated or quickly overflown by the gaze: a pool of blood in the background has been disguising itself as a shadow, the birds that in their trifling supplanted an airplane on its way to the war, the contemplative gazes of passers-by fixed on the sky, now allow themselves to be terrified to death. (Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, p. 72–73)
Mercedes seems to find in her archive images a balancing power between the evocation of the in situ image of her childhood, the illusion of a continuum of her life and that of her family that lies dead in their symbol in the now, and the invocation of a new question to the enigmatic and hermetic in those images. At some point, the operation of a “disbelief” in what is being seen is installed, in order to afford the dispersion towards another world, to pay the entrance to the universe of the gods and the dead that are our fables about the possible pasts and the figures that on them they walk with a skepticism about the known.
Mercedes takes the image and how Ruiz in her exercise enlarges it a thousand times and opens there a dimension of strangeness or suspicion by adding a threatening and foreign tone to her images and at the same instant becoming a victim of having to incarnate or transfer those photographic particles to a habitable order today.
The terrain of the familiar, the communicable and the remote in that order constantly slides between pantomimic and mise-en-scène images of her curious parents filming and the intrusion of her young eye like a knife into the birthday cake. Her agency becomes uncertain by force of contradictions, we constantly move from the rhetorical and histrionic games of his father to a crude evocation that calls into question everything previously seen.
In the images that Mercedes sees, the veil always falls to reveal the breach between thousands and different imaginary organizations in the world. The innocent mise-en-scène, the currents of consciousness, the filmed interference and the utopian image seem to fall on the miscellaneous as an organization of discourse. Looking in different directions, the selective principle: passer du coq-à-l’âne, a run from here to there, a constant jumping of gaze and discourse.
From that miscellaneous notion (in the Spanish notion of the 16th century) a thought extends to Aby Warburg and the device in which he embarks five years before his death after a long stay in a psychiatric clinic: Atlas Mnemosyne, a “museum of reproductions, a museum without original work” would say Rául Ruiz, in which he highlights historical, aesthetic, perhaps poetic connections and encounters; more than two thousand images faced or embraced in a support. The exercise of looking away and then remaining silent to notice the persistence or transfiguration of symbols.
“Like the sky after it rains” how rhetorical drift is a constant in the film until its end (brutally oral in which Mercedes ends up vertiginously turning on herself, while standing up capturing sound in a clear landscape) maintains a formal quality: the heterogeneous, an ebb and flow of superimposing the whole on the whole and then keeping silent.