Brief Comments on “Existing is Exhausting”
The Human Surge 3, Eduardo Williams.
The words realise and realised appear over a dozen times in George MacBeth’s interview with the filmmaker of The Human Surge 3 (THS3), Eduardo Williams. There is certainly a sense of something emergent—something uncertain—in how Williams speaks about his film, the title of which itself enacts a cut in our collective sense of cinematic continuity by producing a sequel that does not exist (making THS3 a somewhat uncanny double to an undead sibling).
In the word realise I read realisation, which also becomes revealed and revelation. Revelation for Jacques-Alain Miller “designates a hidden truth that is unveiled.” The truth of any work is not predetermined, despite what fantasy might have us believe, but is revealed through process. In fact, process is without meaning, it is itself senseless—a matter of the body enjoying itself—and it is only retroactively that meaning is produced. THS3 was shot across three continents, which Williams says “brought limits,” forcing him to “adapt to different ways of working.” From each location emerges a new and singular way. The artist goes step by step, forward and backward, as the work is revealed, meaning is made and broken, and, as noted by MacBeth, we find ourselves “in the presence of something emerging with a wholly different visual sensibility.”
Having only seen the locations online before travelling, Williams found that his “previous ideas before going there were changed by being there.” Things change by being there with our bodies. Williams alludes to the a posteriori nature of meaning when he states that it is not “until I start showing [the film] and I speak a little bit with some people and understand what they saw, what they didn’t see, or what they thought until a moment I really cannot close very well the film in my head.” The act of speaking ties things together; speaking makes meaning out of process.
MacBeth senses a “restlessness” in the film, which Williams suggests “communicates that maybe we want to change some things in our lives, but we don’t know very well how, but let’s at least try to get together—and go for it. Even if we don’t have the answers.” There is a desire for movement, then, “even if we don’t know exactly where we should go or what exactly we should do.” There is always a path, even if we are still—stable, static—in the moment. This way, that way. We walk and talk and go here and there. We wait, which is, after all, an active verb. This film captures the desire for movement, a movement of the body, the movements of desire; desire as movement itself.
What causes this movement? In the case of THS3, MacBeth identifies the Hitchcockian MacGuffin—“an empty pretext which just serves to set in motion the story, but has no value in itself”—which appears in the film as “slightly arbitrary quests.” MacBeth compares these quests to those that appear in role-playing video games. Even the way characters speak, MacBeth notes, feels like an RPG: “People say things as you approach them, and then you can kind of drift away from them, and then other characters will say things and then you drift away from them.” This reminds me of the now-fading NPC meme, which highlights the strange experience of alienation felt by us all. That we are alienated in our singularity from the other. This is not alienation as an effect of technology, for we are alienated from the get-go by the fact of our being-in-language. And so although technology does not alienate us, the lodging of the digital device between ourselves and the other serves to amplify the anxiety of alienation, an anxiety that reemerges in culture, aggressively or creatively. THS3 draws on this experience, not least in the strange way its characters speak:
Williams relates this speech to “the rhythm of coming and going conversations” that we experience in “the chat”—our prolific text-based communications (we now ‘text’ more than we use our voices). “But in any case, it is related to digitality,” Williams says, noting that the “rhythm of speaking through the internet is very different from the rhythm of speaking life.” Speech is differentiated from writing, for truth may emerge from speech, but not from the written, which may touch on the real, but not the true. What is the effect of the dominance of what Williams calls “the chat” on the voice? Does it entail a certain dis-embodiment of speech? The body—present, displaced, filtered—plays, meanwhile, a key role in the production of THS3:
The use of a 360° spherical camera to shoot the film offers Williams—and filmmakers en masse—a new process. Williams describes how he didn’t have to think about how to frame the shot, because the entire 360-degree view is taken. The choice of framing, then, is made after the fact, in post-production. I initially had my reservations about this, and thought about the proliferation of digital cinema as an excuse not to make a choice in the act of shooting. This reminds me of certain comments from Werner Herzog in which he said it is “appalling” that “young filmmakers are shooting five hundred and fifty hours of footage. My heart sinks. I don’t know what they’re doing… The crux, which is also a benefit, are these digital recording systems. Yes, the cameras are very good, and they just keep the camera rolling, rolling, rolling… And it’s all mediocre, and you cannot find any gems in an ocean of mediocrity. So they are doomed… Be selective.”
While I don’t buy the idea that the filmmaker must know what they want—process must be oriented by contingency—I am, however, partial to the notion that the dominance of digital filmmaking may bring to practice a certain element of cowardice—that is, a procrastination of the act in order to keep options open (which is itself exemplary of our contemporary sufferings). The way we wield our technology bears some of the blame for the general malaise in the current cinematic landscape. Williams, meanwhile, appears to be using technology to facilitate the act, to make creative decisions, in new ways. His VR headset works to liquefy the barrier (screen) between artist and image, and allows Williams to place his body in the scene. Not only is he placed there, in fact, but he uses his body directly—his head, specifically—as the tool with which he acts.
In Williams’ case, then, the technology becomes the way through which the artist puts their body in the process, instead of ab-using such technology as a defence against contingency, against that which is uncertain, as a way to remain noncommittal under the guise of flexibility.
These questions of the body in its relation to technology, of course, carry not just implications for filmmaking or the collaborative arts generally, but for psychoanalysis itself, when the embodied voice is becoming increasingly filtered by the apparatus of consumer technology, and the efficacy of the cut of the analyst is (perhaps) increasingly threatened by, for example, a failing internet connection.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that, with THS3, Williams takes up a new and singular process that allows room for, if not driven by, the contingent elements of the creative process, an orientation we might all utilise.
by George Bartlett, Editor
