The rough cut

Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Stefano were sitting in a screening room viewing a cut of their recently edited together film, Psycho. They made it through and Stefano was thoroughly displeased. He thought that it was awful - trash - and wondered how Hitchcock would make this film work. He turned to Hitch, who was smiling. Hitch turned to him, saw Stefano's face, and immediately reacted, "It's just a rough cut, Joseph."

The screenname as face

Increasingly with the Internet, we find power dynamics toppling. In my own life, I find certain social tactics that are not observed online. The reason for this is obvious but must be stated: online, you do not have a face. Or, rather, you have a different face: your screen name.

Online, none of the associations of your 'real' face are found. Online, your screen name carries the different associations of itself and only that. Online, you have a fresh start. Online, we all have a fresh start.

In the 'real' world, changing your face is difficult. Plastic surgery - the good kind of plastic surgery - the Nip/Tuck kind of plastic surgery - costs tens of thousands of dollars. The pain of plastic surgery - the physical pain of the alterations ... the emotional pain of the difference in the mirror [the structural sign of I-ness is dissolved, changed, begun anew] - lingers over many months. The pain of the plastic surgery outweighs any social hindrances - screw changing my face to save my image, the other pains are too great.

But online. Online, online, online. Online, changing your face is easy. There was a time when a friend and I created a fake screen name and entered a sex chat room. We played the part of the submissive woman, we said things, we were different. We were different from ourselves. We played the part of another. And, then, we went back to our lives [we became bored with this otherness]. Thus, we were able to, like Tom Cruise's character in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, don a mask and enter a different world. But unlike Cruise's character, we did not have to leave our house - we did not have to go to a specialty shop - we did not have to remember a special password. No one caught us, there was no woman there to save us, we never fled. We created the screen name, the mask - the new face - a surface, and we went into the chat room for fun.

Here, we find an interesting aspect of cyberseduction: the absolute ability to ambivalently change the most personal of signs - the sign of the subject. If one tires of one's screen name, one simply has to return to AOL and create a new screen name. At AOL, faces are free. Thus, the teenagers have their fun in chat rooms, associations are wiped clean, the stalker keeps on stalking.

Script: "In the Shadow of Sans Soleil"

This is the script from my recently completed video, "In the Shadow of Sans Soleil."


***

0.

For Man Ray

For Fluxus

For Michael Snow

For Chris Marker

Normally, I saw him everyday.

1.

In the past couple of months, I had seen him very little. He contacted me early in December via a cryptic text message.

He wrote: I have become lost in the media and media of all kinds but specifically electronic media. I have become hypnotized by LCD screens and online blogs, CNN anchors and reality television.

10.

Over coffee and cigarettes in South Spain he told me that he wanted to escape into nature - into a forest via horse or perhaps onto the ocean via sailboat - but that the media was by this time everywhere: even when he left it behind, it was copied in his mind.

He told me all this media was reprogramming him, replacing his body with a matrix of mere ones and zeros. He wrote: it seems that all our bodies are being reconstituted.

11.

One evening in a dance club in Monte Carlo, he asked me: do you remember Baudrillard's In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities?

He read from Baudrillard: "... at this point of generalization, of saturation, where it is no more than the zero degree of the political, at this point of absolute reference, of omnipresence and diffraction in all the interstices of physical and mental space, what becomes of the social itself? It is the sign of its end: the energy of the social is reversed, its specificity is lost, its historical quality and its ideality vanish in favor of a configuration where not only the political becomes volatilized, but where the social itself no longer has any name.

"Anonymous. THE MASS. THE MASSES."

He explained: we constitute bodies through the seemingly voluntary consumption of products. We are all placed into categories, more and more specific - age categories, races, sexualities – simultaneously lumped together and sectioned, marketed to and against, exploded and imploded. We are no longer individuals, although we are given that illusion. Instead, we are a single, consuming mass.

100.

He wrote in an e-mail: I'm just back from New York. On the E train, I saw a homeless man, a teenaged boy listening to his iPod, a business man with an open laptop gazing at an abbreviated version of the New York Times.

He said: It seemed wrong that those people should sit there - alone together. These people - these bodies - seemed politically reconstituted and highly individual. In fact, looking, I saw no politic there, no discussion, no collaboration, no consensus. Everything was controlled, diagrammed, sectioned, safe. The homeless man, the teenaged boy, the businessman, took any number of products to create any body of their choosing.

101.

All of these products - personal computers, iPods, personal DVD players - miniature, portable, affordable machines, in general:

He likened them all to knives.

All of these tiny machines seemed violent to him, seemed forceful, seemed penetrating. As though all of us, with headphones on, were being sectioned, divided apart from one another - but not just that, not just divided apart, but also exposed, cut apart, examined, and put back together. It was not so much a sectioning as a quartering, a dismembering, a decapitating.

He asked: how can I cope with this sectional compartmentalization of media, body, machine?

And he said: There seems no way to resist, no point for resistance. I might begin to buy things to fit in and find ways to assimilate. It seems that the best way to fit in is to divide myself off completely.

110.

He told me he was going to attempt to secure a new and completely different body for himself.

He told me that he had just viewed Chris Marker's cine-essay Sans Soleil for the first time.

Therein, he had constituted himself a whole and radically unique biology.

He said: the prospect of emulating Marker's film is attractive to me for a combination of two reasons. The first is the disembodied woman's voice, constantly in observant monologue. The second facet, equally important to me, is the floating camera shots edited into steady montage. If God had had me choose any body for myself, I would have requested this combination for my bodily apparatus, the camera for its pervasive, observant stare, the woman's drone for its seductiveness. I would have been for myself a machine, an unfeeling, constantly seeing machine - with the voice of a woman. I would have been Sans Soleil.

111.

He was in the shadow of Sans Soleil, following, deciphering, reconstituting.

He said finally: I resisted and searched and researched because I believed there was an escape from this closed system, our closed system, consumerism. Instead, I find that one must choose any products he wants to create a body for himself. He must commit himself to product, to capital, to object. For me, my body will be this film - and I will see it to its constitution.

Somehow, I will become Sans Soleil.

***

Many thanks to those who helped me create this video. I now consider the project completed.

I will place screenshots of "In the Shadow of Sans Soleil" in a later post.