By Murray Smith

PUBLISHED IN MARCH 2010 - Answer Print Vol. 19 #1

Vibrating between two types of subjects and perspectives alike, Scott Stark’s latest work, 2008’s Speechless, is one that not only creates a lot of visual buzz, it’s one that un-mutes conversation about the very nature of cinematic illusion. Throughout its 13-minute duration, the film alternates stereoscopic images of human vulvae with surfaces and textures found in nature, overlaying and animating the associations between each of these images. The relationships are further foregrounded by the fact that every picture is captured by a pair of cameras, so that the film explicitly highlights the contrasts and conflicts amidst a host of different topics, not the least of which include: mode of address, that is to say, medical sterility vs. voyeuristic eroticization; creation (and adoption) of a new cinematic grammar and vocabulary; treatment of audience in the approach to perceptual experience; and finally, difficulty in distinguishing between reality and illusion considering how such markedly denotative content becomes so wholly abstracted. Ultimately, it is the combination of these factors that elevates Stark’s work to the heights of other experimental cinema luminaries such as Stan Brakhage.

Not surprisingly, the foremost aspect that needs addressing is also the film’s most forthright characteristic: the fact that it displays—unflinchingly—a succession of extreme close-ups of female vulvas. Stark obtained these images from a 1976 textbook entitled “The Clitoris,” which medically catalogued and documented the female reproductive organ. The book was accompanied by “a set of four Viewmaster reels, containing 28 stereoscopic photographs depicting variations of human clitorides, all of which, according to the authors, were considered ‘within the range of normal’” (Scott Stark, Background of Speechless). It’s interesting to note how simultaneously intimate yet impersonal these images are. On one hand, the stills infringe—quite literally—upon the personal space of the subjects being photographed; so these are extremely private in nature. At the same time, though, any other hint of the subjects (beyond the occasional labia-parting fingers) is entirely removed; so the visuals are also sharply detached from their original contexts. What’s more, these sights are intended to be presented through a Viewmaster—a binocular, depth-perception mimicking plastic device that, since the 1960s, has increasingly become known as a children’s toy. Indeed, all of the above information is either directly referenced or alluded to in the film’s succinct synopsis, so even before the film has been projected, audience members are already pondering this potentially lewd, controversial-sounding movie. Indeed, once the film begins projecting, one gets the sense that the majority of the audience is immediately drawn to the vivid sexual possibilities offered on-screen. But what actually follows is a complex process whereby the film’s form—comprised of the constant jittering, alternating, and juxtaposing of these vulvas with intricate, visceral textures—serves to disconnect this erotic appeal from the content being displayed. Interestingly, by interweaving natural formations such as grass, cracked earth, bushes, and stems, with the close-ups of pubic hair, skin folds, and colour patterns, the vulvae actually become neither eroticized icons of female sexuality (for they are far too… natural), nor strictly clinical/informational biological representations (for they are constantly moving, flipping, and drawing attention to themselves). Rather, they seem to take on an entirely new set of meanings, ones that beckon the questions: “What am I really looking at?” and “What is my defamiliarization with these images telling me?”

Stark is indeed aware of these notions; he presupposes the audience’s inevitable grappling with the material when he states: “I see each film/video project as a ‘first film’ with its own cinematic language, one that the viewer learns and engages with as the piece unfolds (Scott Stark, Scott Stark).” Like Stan Brakhage, he realizes the subjective power of cinema, but seeks to exploit it not so much through metaphors about the phenomenon of vision, but through the epistemological process of creating a new cinematic syntax within each of his films. This, I feel, very accurately describes the experience of viewing Speechless. What begins as a craps-shoot of connotative imagery quickly transcends this surface appeal/repulsion, thereby moving towards an active, self-reflexively new way of interpreting what the eyes are perceiving. Put more simply, the sheer weight of the existing meaning behind the images causes the spectator to fundamentally re-evaluate how they are consuming them. For instance, we are made to consider not just what parallels are being drawn between, say, pubic hair and a patch of grass—we are being asked to question why we would even do so in the first place. The most intriguing part—not to mention most elusive—is that the ‘solutions’ to these juxtapositions are never made outright, nor are they intended to be. Stark is leaving the audience to fill in the blanks using their own vocabulary since the film’s shapes, symbols, and syntax are so entirely novel; thus, each of these traits remains speechless until its otherwise indeterminate language has been learned, which, in this context, means created. Bringing it back to Brakhage, it’s interesting to note how, though his “Prelude” to Dog Star Man (Brakhage, 1962), invites viewers to read it as a ‘through-Stan’s-eyelids’ type of subjective experience (P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000), Stark’s work evokes an entirely different kind of subjectivity—one that has the participant stepping back from the material in order to experience it personally, rather than willingly diving into the film as a way of reconciling difference between the artist’s ‘signifier,’ and the ‘signified’ intent. In other words, Stark’s consciousness of the ambiguous nature of his project allows—indeed, forces—the viewer to experience the film from a critical distance, yet all the while remaining complicit in the subjective construction of its very core structure. Hence, Stan Brakhage revolutionized how subjectivity is envisioned on celluloid (P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000); Scott Stark is revolutionizing how subjectivity is learned from it.

But how, then, does one generate expectations for such a presence-dependent work of art? Or, in contradistinction, how does a film so dependent on active participation go about approaching its audience? Once again rivaling Brakhage, Stark seems to treat the creation of his film with an intensely personal mindset, one that has him exploring his interest in ‘politically incorrect’ points of view, uncomfortable, unfamiliar terrain, and even “raising questions without having the answers,” ultimately resulting in “a celebration of a raw, mysterious, sometimes fearful beauty (Scott Stark, Background of Speechless).” I think the key to beginning to understand his attitude toward his audience, then, is rooted in this paradoxically challenging yet beautiful manifestation of the issue: he recognizes that flickering vulvas might well be registered uncomfortably, even hostilely, but feels that the intellectual concerns, dilemmas, and questions that come from doing so will justify this alleged transgression. Hence, the awkwardness in predicting how the film is going to treat you, as a spectator, is a major part of the experience as a phenomenological game of expectation and fulfillment. Even so, the real point at issue here is a bit more opaque—though certainly no less noteworthy.
The thesis of Speechless is one of dialectic between illusion and reality in film; the short interrogates the physicality of film by literally contrasting the concrete, physiological depiction of nature with the magical, subjective, ambiguity-championing mode of address that is experimental cinema. In fact, the film’s central-most concern is, at once, a synthesis of all of its underlying elements, and a fundamental groundwork from which these elements arise in the first place. Every part of the work foregrounds an incongruity between two (or more) opposing perspectives, thereby encompassing the issue that film theorists and phenomenologists alike have been debating for decades. Only, rather than answering this question, Stark invents a framework that allows it to be reworked independently by every mind in the theatre. Speechless started as a reappropriation of found materials, then morphed them into an abstract/conceptual form to be disseminated, only to be re-solidified as distinct, tangible, discussable new thoughts. And this is exactly the process of reality perception—just, paradoxically, transposed on to the illusionary medium of film. Needless to say, Stark has managed to illustrate his take on one of phenomenology’s greatest questions in only 13 minutes …and with flickering images of female genitalia, no less!

That, I think, is enough to propel Scott Stark—whose entire body of work is similarly nuanced—up to the ranks of greats like Stan Brakhage. Speechless delivers a unique experience that both titillates and enlightens its audience, engendering in them fresh perspectives on both the clitoris and, more significantly, cinematic reality. The film shades the space between scientific observation and erotic voyeurism, toys with the audience’s experience of doing so, and builds up a spontaneous new filmic language along the way. All in all, the methods by which it creatively generates new ideas and reinvigorates existing thoughts are a testament to the vast intellectual depth of the film. As such, it hardly seems appropriate to go on promoting it as simply a must-see peep show of vibrating Viewmaster vulvas.