FORMAL FEELING Director’s Statement: It has always been extraordinarily difficult for me to hear myself. I come from a culture that does not pride emotionality nor engender sharing — Russian people, my people, make warm hosts but tend to be spectacularly closed off from themselves. 

This is partially a blunted response to trauma. The 20th century for us meant almost 50 million excess Soviet dead, many of them lost in the forests around Stalingrad, starved to death on rural farms, or forever disappeared into the gulag. But the volume of the missing isn’t the only factor that shaped this wound: Masha Gessen has written eloquently about the lasting effects of the expulsion of all social scientists and psychoanalysts from the Soviet Union under Stalin, positing that Russians in particular are primed to accept totalitarian rule due to this imposed inability to examine their individual self and collective whole. And in my own experience, in my immediate family, we never spoke about our feelings and shunned almost all discussion of the past. Living is a process of forgetting, but many Russians never remembered in the first place. The alternative would be too unbelievable, too painful, too hard.

And so I have felt lightly feral at times, arriving to adulthood having learned very few emotional skills from my parents or their history. This film was created out of a desire to use the lens as an inquiry into my emotional experience and a tool for self-knowledge.

Dziga Vertov posited that the Kino-Eye was vastly superior to the human one, preferable due to its technological prowess and ability to capture and reorder time and space. I think that Vertov was also invested in the idea that the Kino-Eye could see beyond our perfunctory vision: something that surpassed “human unwieldiness and clumsiness,” further out from the familiar, the tangible, the known. Out there, among the “comets and meteors”— “that which cannot be realized in life.” That specter of the unknowable, the Real. 

Susan Sontag could see Leni Riefenstahl’s nefarious allegiances clearly by examining what she chose to point her camera at and the way she looked at it. I had no real manifesto in making this film: I just thought that I might record anything that engrossed me, without constraint and without agenda. Any time I was looking at something that piqued my interest, I taped it. I did this because I thought if I could eventually see what I was looking at through the Kino-Eye, it might tell me something about myself beyond whatever it is I believe I already know. I did not want to select a theme and then try to fit my gaze into it because more than anything, I was curious — why do I look at the things I do, why am I like this, why…. this? I did not conduct an interview with myself or add a voice-over because the exercise was intended to share some truth through the very things I wanted to look at.

The resulting film is unusual. I was inspired by the idea of Jonas Mekas’s sketchbook approach to filmmaking in Lost, Lost, Lost and Chick Strand’s exercises in self-representation and self-inscription in Soft Fiction. The level of anxiety in the film did surprise me. But why? It was there, and extreme. The pockets of pus that developed on my fingers from excessive handwashing during lockdown are visible proof of a world on edge. But the elegiac caliber of the footage is less surprising — there was so much death in 2020, so I was interested in small expressions of that loss. The lizard was just one of many that I buried in the rocks that summer.

Cinema has an inherent quality of mourning as it necessarily suspends time and reanimates the past. The profilmic dead body reminds us that the things we see on film will die, or maybe have already died, because the point in time at which they have been shown to us is both palpable and over — the moment itself is dead — all at once. And death is fundamentally unknowable. This primary loss opens up Michael Renov’s unbearable “hole in the Real” that mourning is tasked with filling in order to relieve the pain. 

But death is too blunt of an instrument to cause the creeping existential dread that fills this film and others like it; when I watch them I am struck that time is imprinted here for my use but I fundamentally cannot get it back, I cannot ever live it again. It is a point that I can never go back to, even as I can hold it right here in front of me. The cinema is a physical embodiment of the consciousness of that loss. And to be conscious, then, means to experience some grief nearly all the time.  Because the hole in the Real is not made by death; it is made by the awareness of it. And our job then, as makers and as people defies an easy prescription. It is not to fill that hole, because that would be impossible as the rupture is too vast; but instead to hold it gently, try to make it visible, and ultimately fail in our task. And then we get up and try again tomorrow.

If I had to say what I learned about myself in making this, that, too, defies explanation. I can sense our contemporary moment’s anxiousness, and the constraints we are all living with under “the new normal.” But just as the Real lies beyond all discourse, so too does any interpretation of it: there is no easy one-to-one semiotic linkage between my feelings and these images. We are left here with a slow breeze in a tree as the light leaves it, the sight of the watchful hawk sitting in its tallest branches. Here, too, the loyal cat that follows behind silently, a bloody current down my back. A palm full of ants on a hot summer’s day. — P.O.