Vision
"Why are you closing your eyes?" he asks me at the cinema during the film. "Why are you closing your eyes?" he asks me as we lie side-by-side on the bed.
Closed curtains
I like taking the train home at night as it means I don't have to see the same view that I saw out the window during the morning's in-bound journey. It's just a blackened view instead, as though my eyes are closed. The fluorescent lighting of the train carriage is an extended flash through the dark.
Rejection
Here's a still image from Charlotte, a 16mm film by Steve McQueen. I first saw it projected in a little room at the 'Biography of Daphne' exhibition at ACCA last year. In a direct homage to Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, the red-filtered camera focuses on a close-up of Charlotte Rampling's eye as someone else's finger continually probes it, forcing her to close her eye. I recall it being a moving experience to have such an intimate encounter with another's eye projected as a small red square against the gallery wall. The delicacy of it all made me stay in the room with the work for multiple durations.
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Steve McQueen, Charlotte, 16mm, 2004 |