movie talk/love talk
Masha Tupitsyn - Love Sounds from Penny-Ante on Vimeo.
Have you seen it? Heard it, I should say?
In All Ears, an essay for Entropy about her project Love Sounds, Masha writes,
Paying attention is mostly about listening, more precisely, re-hearing, and one should listen precisely because one can get away and has gotten away with just seeing. This is easier said than done, however, as movies are so easy on the eyes. We see and hear them through the famed faces and bodies of stars, forgetting that a voice’s resonance and alterity cannot be reduced to the star struck sighting of bodies alone. By extracting the tonal history of love in all its renditions from the thick visual casing of cinema, Nancy’s “What, in the saying, is other than what is said” is reformulated in Love Sounds as: what, in the seeing, have we failed to hear? Which translates to: what do we still not understand about love?
In so many ways, appearance can prevent us from really hearing. In writing about Under the Skin, I said:
People look at me and think I’m not real, even though I am. I don’t stand up to scrutiny, don’t blend in like she does. I’m scared to use public restrooms because I don’t want to make other women uncomfortable. So because I worry about making others uncomfortable, I’m not as comfortable in my skin as I could be. I am a somewhat different person from the person I feel like I am (“I am not what I am”) because I am aware that, to other people, I don’t always look like what I am. That awareness changes me. If I looked more like me, I could be more me. But, then, isn’t that actually not me, since that’s not who I am, and this is? And so I wonder to what extent our faces reflect us and to what extent they shape us.
I sometimes wish, not with you in particular but with everyone, that I could separate what I think and feel and say from how I look, because how I look changes everyone’s perception (including mine) of what I think and feel and say. I love that in Love Sounds, all that is left are the words, the sounds. I was thinking, after I saw you the other night, that yes, you light up a room for me like no one else ever has, but it’s because of the things we’ve said, the way we talk, the words we’ve shared, more than anything else. It’s not that I feel articulate with you and inarticulate with everyone else, but that I feel like, with you, because of the way that you talk and because of the way that we talk together, it doesn’t matter so much if I sometimes feel inarticulate. There’s nothing like talking to you for me.
There are no safe topics for us, and that’s OK. I told you beforehand that it would be complicated for me, and it was, and that’s fine, and anyway my life’s been too safe for too long. To talk of movies was to remind me that these days I go to movies alone and that I sometimes wish I could be going to them with you. I can talk of movies with you in a way I can’t talk of them with anyone else. Or at least it feels that way. To talk of movies with you that cut to the core of who I am and what I want–movies like Under the Skin and Only Lovers Left Alive. I feel like you get it. All the ways that we’re the same and all the ways that we’re not the same. That our experiences are different. That we’ve been a bit banged up in different ways (“Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”) but still have so much life left in us.
Masha includes a clip from Greenberg in All Ears, in which the words “Hurt people hurt people” are said, and Masha writes:
“The question is: can life, at this late stage of capitalism, be more than simply an economy, exchange, barrage, testimony, chronicle, compulsion of damage-making?”
and the line I remember most from Greenberg is something like “Normal things are hard for him” and it’s true that things that seem normal and effortless for some people are hard for others and sometimes I feel like I struggle with those kinds of things but I feel like you understand that, too, and also it’s true that when I’m with you the answer to the question above is clear and it’s yes, and I know that I can take good care of someone, that just because I’ve been hurt (Who hasn’t?) doesn’t mean that I need to keep on hurting or that I need to hurt others. And I guess I just want to thank you for that.
Notes
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