Vertigo Voudoun Verite
“
'The vertigo of spacing': that void which is no longer a motor-part of
the image, and which the image would cross in order to continue, but is
the radical calling into question of the image (just as there is a
silence which is no longer the motor-part or the breathing-space of
discourse but its radical calling into question)."
-Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Motivated by the current crisis in visual and ritual anthropology
that necessitates a rethinking and re-image-ining of available
conceptual and practical frameworks, the film Vertigo, Vodoun, Verite
hopes to propose through filmic experimentation ways in which the acts
of filming, of montage, and of "watching" film play a critical role in
the reinvestigation of traditional notions of ritual in light of the
possibilities inherent in new technology and video art. The film
attempts to propose conceptual and practical frameworks to encourage a
reflection of film as ritual on a technical, aesthetic, and
anthropological level. Through conscious technical, aesthetic, and
anthropological choices, Vertigo, Vodoun, Verite hopes to:-Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
• Propose a new way of filmically “looking at,” “feeling into/around” and representing an old anthropological interest (possession);
• Reinvestigate the role of new technology in “reframing” ritual scopes;
• Propose an anthropology of ecstasy, where the process of montage is seen as a laborious sacrifice in itself linked to ritual and as a ritual;
• Propose a framework for “virtual ritual;’
• Propose, in a highly technical way, montage as a tool for conveying trance-states and the precursor to these trance-states that challenges the notion that vision is always located where our eyes are;
• Propose a filmic way of citing ghosts/spirits as informants.
Anthopologically, through the experimental film work in Vertigo, Vodoun, Verite, an ontology of "filming/filmed ritual" is suggested to show how video work can be used to articulate the simultaneity of multiple worlds and notions of the invisible, the liminal, and the virtual. Parallels are drawn poetically between Deleuze's time-image/movement-image and altered consciousness as lived in states of possession and the ways in which these states can be communicated filmically while suggesting how the non-visible and other sensual dimensions of ritual practice can be made visible through filmically articulated absence.
Seeds
Before delving into the motivating force behind Vertigo, Vodoun, Verite I would like to contextualize its production and my own move away as an artist and anthropologist from documentary and ethnographic film as understood as linear explanatory narrative. In 2008 and in my capacity as co-director of an interdisciplinary dance company working at the intersections of ritual, dance, and film based in between Paris, Benin, and Bahia I traveled to Ouidah, Benin to co-direct a weeklong festival of Vodoun in partnership with a Beninois counterpart, Adjos Andoche Adjovi. The festival’s focus was on looking at the role of Vodoun in contemporary artistic production in Africa and the African Diaspora and the mutations of the ritual form due to cultural interactions and globalization. The objective of the festival was to encourage artistic, aesthetic, and anthropological dialogue between Beninois vodoun communities and artists and the diaspora on vodoun as a form in mutation and, often, in disguise. Having completed my master’s degree at the time in visual anthropology with a particular focus on the role of experimental film in negotiating postcolonial identity in West Africa, I remained interested in the camera as a tool for the management of memory and projection of possible futures through the re-exploration of traditional forms.
Sprouts
Throughout the festival, I filmed the rituals in order to create two films. One film would be a documentary that could be used to further promote future editions of the festival. The second film would be used as part of a multimedia dance piece to be created by our international dance company. This second film would be separated into two parts; the first part leading up to possession, and the second part a representation of the experience as the possessed. Rituals at night were filmed lit by motorcycle lights. When I was asked to dance, I would dance with my camera held by my hip, filming.
Shortly after my return from Benin, I became paralyzed and could no longer walk; I could choreograph, but could no longer dance. This paralysis lasted on and off for periods of more than a year. Trained as an anthropologist, but also as a dancer and musician, my mode of listening is firstly choreographic. My mode of perception, therefore, is largely rhythmic. I do not, first and foremost, see with the eyes. Sight is a pulsing pattern of rhythmic movement; to see is to choreograph, and to choreograph is to try to understand. To choreograph, above all, is to spatially, rhythmically, and temporally enter into the space of the other through a deep listening that is closer to a letting and softening of the boundaries of the self that allows for a different kind of knowing.
In the face of this physical limitation, the film screen transformed itself into the site of offering; no longer could I dance to partake in vodoun ritual; I had to project, and ask that the screen move me rhythmically and rock my body otherwise still. Continually inspired by the work of Julian Bleecker (2001) on the link between science, technology, culture, and design anthropology, my paralysis became a platform for experimentation.
Structure
Vertigo, Vodoun, Verite utilizes technical and aesthetic structures to further play with the aforementioned notion of seeing rhythmically. Specifically, the film – split into two parts with which this article concerns the first part, attempts to propose a rhythmic seeing so that the film is a ritual in and of itself.
On a technical level, Vertigo, Vodoun, Verite is first and foremost an exercise of translation. This translation occurs on two levels. Anthropologically, the structure of the film follows a traditional ritual “map” of the Dan vodoun ceremony. The film begins with a sacrifice to Elegwa (represented by the sacrifice of the white chicken that opens the ceremony), and continues afterwards with a sacrifice to Ogun (represented by the black chicken and the Iron fetish). Sacrifices to the Dan are then made (two goats) and the Dan spirits (represented by a white bird resembling a dove) are then petitioned prior to possession.
On a secondary and more subtle level, and the central experimentation of the film, Vertigo, Vodoun, Verite is an exercise in translation of sound to print to video clip. If translation can be understood as being under the spell of another, the act of translating is, in fact, erotic in a similar way in which the act of becoming possessed is; an exercise in deep listening and a union of sorts that at once maintains a much needed separateness in order for union to secretly be possible. In the best of translations, there are at least two rhythms - that of the writer and that of the translator, and perhaps even three - that which made the writer write. All expression, ultimately, is about syncopation. Like all meeting.
On the level of montage, the film is a mathematical exercise of reproduction where the screen simulates/translates the underlying rhythmic map of the Dan ceremony. This translation occurs through the translation of a “song” comprised of a pattern of inhalation and exhalation and drums accompanying the invitation to possession into a graphical map and then into a reproduction of this graphical map on the level of montage cuts on the final cut pro editing screen.
The patterns in the film reproduced approximately on the level of montage are two-fold:
1) Juxtaposition of images to reproduce the patterns and sequencing of inhalations and exhalations in a repetitive and geometric sequence.
Robert Farris-Thompson describes several African textiles and patterns as a visualization of “the famed off-beat phrasing of melodic accents in African music” (1983: 207). His description reinforces the thesis that sound can be translated to print, and that from print a reproduction can be made at the level of montage to encourage rhythmic sight.
In his work on cinema, Deleuze stresses that “we have seen how on the broader trajectories, perception and recollection, the real and the imaginary, the physical and the mental, or rather their images, continually followed each other, running behind each other and referring back to each other around a point of indiscernibility. But this point of indiscernibility is precisely constituted by the smallest circle, that is, the coalescence of the actual image and the virtual image, the image with two sides, actual and virtual at the same time. “ (1989: 69)
The montage practices utilized in the film hope to make apparent the dialogue between musician, dancer, adept, anthropologist, and, most importantly, spirits through repetition and absence.
2) Mirroring of the sequences of inhalations and exhalations meant to represent transitions in the song used also to represent filmically moments of transition from one mapped moment of the ceremony (ie, the sacrifice for Elegwa) to the next (ie, the sacrifice to Ogun).
Lisa Aronson's work on Ijebu Yoruba textile is described as the pattern of movement made by a drum when it is struck (1992: 56). Interestingly, Deleuze’s notion that “the mirror-image is virtual in relation to the actual character that the mirror catches, but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with only a virtuality and pushes him back out-of-field” (1989: 70) is the aesthetic affect that I hope to achieve through this reproduction on the level of montage. In editing the transitions between moments in the ritual, images in a sequence were reproduced in the opposite sequence after completion with the central image leading the viewer back to “out-of –the-field” being an image that evokes the absence of the spirit to be invoked.
Conclusion
Besides the bits of images sacrificed on the cutting room floor
There is also blood (whose?)
This video is my sacrifice…
References:
Aronson, Lisa. "Ijebu Yoruba Aso Olona: a contextual and historical overview." African Arts, vol XXV #3, pp. 52-57, July 1992.
Bleecker, Julian and Eglash, Ron. The Race for Cyberspace: Information Technology in the Black Diaspora. September 2001, Science as Culture, Volume 10, Number 3, September 1, 2001, pp. 353-374.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (trans.). Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press [originally published as Cinéma 2, L’Image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985)].
Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the spirit : African and Afro-American art and philosophy. New York: Random House, 1983.
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