InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 16

vibrating in front of the same images. There is a shared
sensibility that is extremely important in our work and
collaboration.
LCT: Even if I don’t vibrate as much as you.
You talked about how Benjamin’s metaphor of the Optical
Unconscious was a starting point, and you talked about how
you’ve never fully bought into it. I’m wondering how the
process of making the movie and thinking back on making it
have changed your understanding of Benjamin’s metaphor?
LCT: It’s complicated… it would take ten pages. Even in ten years
when [the movie] will be in the past, but especially now when it’s
been out for only a couple months in France or almost a year in
festivals. Though we haven’t been to many festivals because it’s
absurd post-COVID in the climate crisis to travel to all these
festivals. But it’s not as if now we’ve reached a certain particular
understanding of either Benjamin or the body. When we started
filming in Paris, not only did the seven-part structure go out the
window but so did the interrogation of that metaphor, partially.
Our understanding of the body and medicine was, and is, in
constant flux.
I still don’t think [Benjamin’s] metaphor holds that much water.
He’s a terribly authoritarian writer who’s completely à la mode in
American universities. To think there’s an optical unconscious
equivalent to the instinctive/psychic unconscious that Freud was
exploring… I don’t think that holds up. He thought painting could
only represent the world from the outside; it was destined or
doomed to have an exterior regard on the world, whereas film
would blow the world asunder in the dynamite of a 16 th of a
second, as he called it. Then, in the detritus of what it captured:
a new vision of the world. It was still very teleological and very
technofilic and romanticized the camera’s vision. The camera’s
vision is as flawed and partial as human vision. In many ways, it’s
not a superhuman vision as Vertov thought; it’s less than human
vision. It’s a constant struggle to work with these audio-visual
technologies, to give us a new perspective on reality and to
perceive the world in ways our own eyes don’t. Or to augment
that apprehension we have of the world. It’s not easy and it’s not
as if there’s one methodology or technology you can pursue that
would allow for that.
VP: Wow…
LCT: We should write on this at some point because, honestly,
it’s a super interesting question.
VP: As I was listening to you, I said, “This is exactly telepathic.
When you were talking I thought, ‘we always refuse to write, but
why?’”
LCT: Because we can’t write. That’s why we use images and
sound… You can write, but I can’t write.
VP: I cannot… you can.
LCT: I also think there’s a political imperative to look at the body,
especially now. With COVID, it’s terrifying how little humanity
seems to have learned from that pandemic. I was really
optimistic during it that there’d be a radically different
relationship to the environment, to the world, to the
extra-human. But I do think we have been fragilized about our
bodies, our mortality. Now is the time to contemplate our
relationship to other species and to the natural world through
the prism of our bodies. The hope is that people like Alice [Diop]
who watch this film, which is very violent in many ways, will
perceive an incredible kind of tenderness. Paradoxically,
perhaps, they’re able to reconcile — as you were — with their
bodies.
It’s not disgusting, it’s not gory. People often compare it with
Cronenberg’s film [Crimes of the Future]. It’s the opposite of
Cronenberg’s film. But I still think there’s this prohibition about
looking at one’s body that has to be interrogated. And if we’re
going to have a healthy relationship to the rest of the world,
other species (animal, plant, and mineral), that has to start
with a capacity for reinterrogating our own relationship to our
bodies.
VP: I was talking about the hospital as a microcosm of society,
but the body itself is. It’s a place of multiple cohabitation
between viruses and bacteria. It’s also a place that cannot be
sustainable if you want to push the metaphor of being alive.
There’s no body that can survive without the care of other
bodies. — INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY RYAN AKLER-BISHOP
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