The Red Shadow: Bearing Witness and the Burden of Existence in Rashin Fahandej’s Sahyeh Sorkh
Rashin Fahandej, Sahyeh Sorkh, film still
Watch the film at the bottom of the page, here: http://www.rashinfahandej.com/sahyehsork-1
Rashin Fahandej’s short film Sahyeh Sorkh presents the experience of bearing witness as a trauma – as a failure to experience and impotence to respond that provokes a hallucinatory breakdown, through which the film’s central character comes to over-identify with the suffering she witnesses, and in the process finds a voice, albeit faint and indirect, for her grief. In what follows, I examine the trauma of bearing witness in the film, as a form of existence – of standing outside of oneself – in which one finds oneself fixated by the impossible, constitutively excessive, demand of an Other. To do so, however, I will reverse the terms of the equation and clarify what I understand to be at stake in the question of existence through a survey of the phenomenological, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic theories of existence as different aspects of the film call for them. In this way, while unpacking Rashin’s film, I will simultaneously draw upon it to make an ultimately theoretical argument: namely, that existence is best understood, not in terms of the anticipation of the future that provides the ultimate horizon for our projects and lives as individuals, nor in terms of the uncertainty that riddles our self-understanding and renders other individuals radically other, but rather in terms of the trauma of bearing witness as suffered by the central character in Sayeh Sorkh.
I.
As the film opens, the camera pans across a desk covered with personal effects. A woman’s hands pour tea from a pot into the cup and then return to typing on a computer. The windows open on the computer screen include the image of a traditional Persian painting, modern photographs of a crowd, and scrolls of text. She’s “chatting.” The text is difficult to read, but not illegible. “How young? Girl or Boy?”
“A girl, 20 yrs old. But doesn’t matter…”
…
“Is it the Internet or your computer? I wish I could hear your voice.”
“… Youtube filtered. Facebook filtered. Only Skype. They may shut down Internet any minute.”
“Do you hear gunshots?”
“What about your wounds?”
“I’m O.K.”
“Is it true? They cut over the old incisions.”
“Exactly over old incisions. But I’m O.K.”
“How about the baby?”
“She is asleep. This one grows fast. They say she looks a lot like you.”
“Oh… I want to kiss her so much. Try the camera one more time. I want to see her… Alo? Alo? Alo?”
The screen goes black.
When the film begins again, scattered family photographs blow across the floor of the apartment as if a window has been left open. The woman kneels down and collects them, moving across the carpet as if following a trail. Finally, she slides the stack of photos into a heavy book and stands, with her hands pressed against the glass of a large window, looking out onto San Francisco. When she peers down to the street, however, the texture of the image changes: its pixilated, Internet video first of people running through the streets in a panic, then crowds being dispersed by men on motorcycles with clubs, then people lifting a man who has collapsed on the sidewalk.
The woman begins frantically to rush around her apartment, as if trying to figure out what to do. She’s interrupted by images of yet another, different quality: performers dancing or acting. She takes richly red sheets from a closet and begins to wash them, as if trying to shake off her anxiety by losing herself in the routine act of doing laundry. The images of her washing and the sheets in the water are juxtaposed with those of the performers. They’re tearing at similar red sheets, shredding them into string. And then the string and sheets are lying over a dark haired woman, collapsed on the floor, surrounded by the performers. When the string and sheets are lifted, she’s revealed to be the same woman, the woman washing, and she looks dead. Then the woman appears again as one of the performers, surrounding the dead woman who is wrapped in red on the floor.
The scene changes: a figure, shrouded entirely in black sits cross-legged on the floor, rocking side to side. The camera too rocks from side to side, so the floor sways like the deck of a ship. The figure begins to strip off repeated layers of black clothing. It’s the woman again. Underneath all the black she’s wearing a red dress. These images are juxtaposed with images of the woman filling a table entirely covered with teacups. Then, in the film’s final sequence, she’s shown in her red dress, hanging up the washed red sheets on a clothesline, outside on the balcony of her apartment. The soundtrack, which throughout has played a dramatic string quartet, is overtaken by the sound, for the first time in the film of voices: crowds chanting.
II.
The film’s opening sequences help both to explain the phenomenological concept of existence that Heidegger elaborates in Being and Time and to reveal its limitations. The central problem that drives Heidegger’s early philosophy is to re-establish what he calls, the “ontological difference,” and to explain the nature of our being, not as statically given as an entity among entities in the world, nor as standing apart from the world and surveying it from the remove of an interiority, but rather as constituted in and through our involvements, as a dynamic process of “becoming,” marked by the play of presence and absence, coming to be and passing away. For Heidegger, subjectivity is coextensive with the world. He address it as Da-sein, a colloquial German term, which means “existence,” but translates literally as “Being-There;” and he explains the world – the there of Dasein’s being-there – as not merely an aggregate of empirical things extended in space, but rather as a meaningful totality, constituted as such in and through our projects. While certainly a commonplace cinematic device, Rashin’s introduction of her central character through the personal effects on her desk presents just such an existential entanglement of subjectivity and the world. These objects – the pomegranates and books, the bottles of ink and family photos, the teacup and glass of water – don’t present merely a eclectic collection of things, but rather constitute a meaningful context, a world, informed by a very specific set of involvements. Each of the objects is defined as such by its place in this world – its role in her life; and, perhaps specifically in light of the absence of any spoken dialogue in the film, these objects – as constitutive of her world – tell us about the character. We see her in them: her work and interests, her memories and lineage, her sensibilities. She is what holds them together, out there on the desk, as a set of projects still underway.
Almost immediately, however, the phenomenological concept of existence proves inadequate to address Rashin’s film and, in particular, two of its central, intersecting themes: a) the displacement of the subject by signifying systems in the age of hypermodern communication technologies, and b) the trauma of bearing witness to the suffering of others. As she stands distressed at the window, the central character in the film envisions on the streets below crowds of protestors, caught up in the strife that she was “chatting” about on the Internet. They are the crowds that we saw in the still image in the open window on her computer screen, now animated in short, low-resolution, video-clips. Sayeh Sorkh was produced shortly following the civil unrest in Iran, which irrupted last year following the re-election of President Ahmadinejad amidst widespread accusations of voter fraud. In form, the film was inspired by the role played by new media in defying the administration’s crackdown on communication, and getting news of the conflict to the outside world, by way of cell phones, the Internet, and the medium of Rashin’s own film, digital video. The pixilated images in the character’s hallucinations themselves came across the Internet during the crisis. They were shot on cell phones and hand held video cameras, and broadcast onto the World Wide Web. Rashin hasn’t reproduced them; she has incorporated them directly into her film. In Sayeh Sorkh, one might say, the central character hallucinates in Internet video. Her daydreams are pixilated. They don’t originate in her mind, but rather infect her from without like parasites.
In this way, Rashin’s film calls attention to the phenomenon, which has become commonplace since at least the middle of the 20th– Century, of finding oneself not as co-extensive with the world, but rather as over-determined by its ever more pervasive signifying systems, and rendered unable ever to establish mastery over even the meaning of one’s own experience. Accordingly, Heidegger’s concept of existence proves inadequate to it. For all of Dasein’s complication with the world, in Being and Time, the subject still remains philosophically fundamental: the horizon against which the world comes to be constituted as a meaningful totality. And Sayeh Sorkh calls for consideration of existence rather in terms of the de-centering of the subject, elaborated in such post-structuralist philosophy as Derrida’s deconstruction.
III.
In his work, Derrida develops Heidegger’s understanding of the subject as “standing outside” of itself, by marrying key aspects of his phenomenology to central insights drawn from Saussure’s structural-linguistics, and arguing that the subject comes to be constituted in and through signifying systems, which qualify it as fundamentally displaced, and so alien to itself in its very self-reflexivity. Key to Derrida’s thinking is Saussure’s well-known argument that signifiers derive their meanings not from the signified intentions of self-conscious subjects or from their reference to things in the world, but rather from their differential relationships to other signifiers. According to Derrida, not only do we find ourselves immersed within symbolic systems that condition the sense that we have of our selves and whatever we might mean, such systems lack any ultimate (metaphorical) foundations. Meaning remains ever elusive, along a limitless, (metonymic) horizon of indeterminate differentiation. In this way, Derrida radicalizes Heidegger’s notion of the subject’s intrinsic heteronomy – or, one might say, the “outside” of Dasein’s existence – and argues that the subject, rather than constituting the world as a meaningful totality, finds itself displaced in a world which remains constitutively incomplete and riddled by meaninglessness.
In Sayeh Sorkh, Rashin further captures this sense of our displacement within open-ended signifying systems, when she presents the film’s central character collecting the family photographs that have blown across the floor of her apartment. They are traces of her past, signifying artifacts, which at least momentarily have lost their frame of reference. In her distress, she appears to be trying not only to gather them together, but also, by doing so, to restore her sense of herself. However, if Sayeh Sorkh’s exploration of the role of signifying systems in the constitution of experience would seem to require one to appeal to deconstruction, the implications of Derrida’s theory of language as simulacal might equally prove its inadequacy to the film. Derrida’s insistence upon the groundlessness of meaning has established him as a leading representative of what some deride as “post-modern pastiche.” If Rashin presents the central character of her film as beset by signifying images and unable to make sense of her experience, she does not thereby affirm the contingency of meaning as an open-ended field of playful juxtapositions. In her treatment of the ubiquitous mediation of hypermodern experience, she does not thereby entertain the cynical notion (so commonplace now) that, because experience is mediated it is therefore unreal; and she certainly doesn’t treat the crisis in Iran – like that other philosopher of the simulacrum, Jean Baudrillard, claimed about the first gulf war – as if, because it only appeared the mediation of hypermodern communication technologies, “it didn’t happen.”
However, if Derrida’s philosophy indeed lends itself to cynical, postmodern pastiche, when pressed with the question of its social and political significance in the 1980’s, he took the opposite tact and piously argued that deconstruction is Justice. Rather than deriving our moral responsibility from our sense of self-certainty, he contends, our responsibility derives from the radical alterity of others; and deconstruction in its indefinite deferral of signification demands precisely such a deferential respect for difference. [In this way, Derrida again revises Heidegger’s concept of existence, insofar as Heidegger contends that … ] And here deconstruction both retains its relevance to Sayeh Sorkh and reveals the limit of its capacity to address the film. Beset by images and reports coming over the Internet from Iran, the central character in the film indeed feels responsible for the crisis. She wants to do something to stop the violence, to end the oppression, and to address the suffering she sees. However, her sense of responsibility cannot be accounted for simply in terms of the alterity of the other, as an undecidable matter of who the other is, what the other wants, and whether she has done enough. The absence, which defines the “outside” in the film’s treatment of existence, does not recede into the distance, as an uncertainty. It imposes itself with an unremitting force, as all too certain. It is precisely traumatic: an overwhelming, unassimilable presence, in its very absence… its very failure to transpire. And, in this light, rather than deconstruction, the film calls for psychoanalysis and provides support for conceiving existence in terms of the trauma of bearing witness.
IV.
At least since Freud’s meditations on the sufferings of soldiers returning home from WWI – if not from his very earliest work with hysterics – psychoanalysts have attested to the intimate, if somewhat paradoxical, link between trauma and bearing witness. What defines psychical trauma as such is its failure to have been experienced, its having been experienced too soon, before one was prepared and so able properly to metabolize it. Strictly speaking, traumatic experience has not been experienced. As a result, it defies testimony. At the same time, however, and for the very same reason, it demands testimony, reiterating itself relentlessly in the night terrors and neurotic suffering of its victims. In Sayeh Sorkh, Rashin reverses the terms and presents the experience of the witness as itself traumatic.[1] The film’s central character can’t get a handle on what’s happening in Iran; and it is this inability to experience, to bear witness properly, which sets off the hallucinatory breakdown that she suffers, and compels her to bear witness through the hysterical elevation of her washing to a mourning ritual.
In a Derridean vein, one might therefore contend that the force of the film indeed hinges on undecidability. The central character’s suffering stems from her inability to grasp what’s going on. Gaps riddle the text and images that she’s able to glean from the Internet, and compel her in her concern for the crisis. However, despite the vigilance that Derrida contends that it demands, undecidability connotes contemplation. It is decidedly reflective, and specifically gives priority to epistemology. And this is not how Sayeh Sorkh unfolds. The film’s central character is not provoked to further reflection on the crisis; she irrupts in a fit. Furthermore, despite her physical displacement from Iran, her inability to understand the crisis results not from her distance, but rather from her inability to get enough distance from it, i.e., to have enough information about what’s going on to put it in proper perspective. Instead, she finds herself overwhelmed. The absence that defines the force of the crisis for her is not its distance, but rather its excessive proximity. She suffers it, not as elusive, but as an imposition – an impossible demand. And, rather than its point of departure, distance is the result of the working through of her anxiety.
[1] In fact, this reversal is already integral of Freud’s meditations. The traumatized soldier is the survivor; the one who has walked away from the battlefield and bears witness, if only through his panic, to the death of his comrades.