In the 1890s, Bob Cole, an African American performer, radically parodied blackface minstrel shows by creating the character Willy Wayside – an African American man who ‘whited up’ his own face. Cole's most famous play was A Trip to Coontown (1898). By all accounts the play was a defiantly political theatrical act, drawing attention to white racism. Whiteface has always been about Black performers placing themselves in a critical relationship to race and class and how these are represented. When Cole became whiteface Willie Wayside, he satirised racial difference without insulting his white subject. As theatre historian David Krasner writes:
Acting in whiteface was indeed a bold act, an articulation of racial difference that dislodged a colonial representation that for generations framed the idea of race. […] Cole's whiteface performance disrupted the fixed stereotype, creating a transience that interrupted the steady stream of cultural signifiers aimed at reducing African Americans to ridicule.51
In 1965, Douglas Turner Ward, playwright and co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, produced Day of Absence, a one-act ‘reverse minstrel’ show (fig.8). The African American actors in Day of Absence wore whiteface to depict the white racist residents of a southern US town on a day when all the Black people inexplicably disappear. ‘The South has always been glued together by the uninterrupted presence of its darkies’, declares the mayor. ‘No telling how unstuck we might git if things keep on like they have.’ 52 Since whiteface is a protest against blackface and the culture that birthed it, the white mask in Untitled (Human Mask) makes you think of blackface. How could it not?
Film Consciousness
Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.
– Ray Bradbury53
Untitled (Human Mask) is in many respects a typical, almost ordinary film. Its look, its compositions, technique and topicality are easily recognisable. It brings together (at least) one camera; a main subject (an anthropomorphic monkey, a ‘reverse-furry’); some extras (cat, larvae, cockroach); a vague scenario (monkey inhabits human world without humans); familiar shooting and editing styles (quick cuts between wide, medium and close-up shots; narrow depth of field; careful, polite lighting); a ‘serious’, meaningful aspect ratio (cinemascope); and a catastrophic backstory (prologue of urban devastation, possible human extinction). Everything ‘works’: there is no immediate sign of abstraction or distraction; camera takes are neither too long nor too short. Apart from its length (on the long side for an ‘art film’ 54 but short for a movie), it's familiar and understandable as a film. There is no optical or formal revolution or lesser representational disturbance. No ontological challenge for art, no demand that we consider its expanded field. It is a traditional filmic form, but one that quietly masks a radical experiment in archiving something: what it might be like to be like something else when that something else has all but disappeared. It archives, let's say, the cinematic for a post-extinction world.
This cinematic mise en scène is the depiction signature of the twentieth century. In its ‘proper’ place, the cinema, the mise en scène is what Raymond Bellour has called an exemplary ‘successful installation’; its workings, tricks and unique trompe l’oeil effect were familiar to all and understood by most. This effect was fully formed by the 1950s, but by then already beginning its long decline. It was consumed and superseded first by television and later by the complex digital media of our contemporary world. Its invention and universal adoption, however, have been transformative for the perception and organisation of the world that binds us all together in some way, and equally revolutionary for self-presentation – how we engage with that world in the knowledge of. It's virtually impossible for us to think of how the world might have been ‘before’ the cinema.
Imagine, for a moment, you are walking down a busy city street around 1895. It's windy and you are clutching your coat close with one hand while the other holds your hat to your head. Out of the corner of your eye you see three men standing around a black box mounted on three legs. One of the men is turning a crank on the side while he looks over the top of the box. You recognise that the box is a motion-picture camera. It's the first time you have ever seen one being used. You realise that a movie is being made, of you. For you, this is new and you are startled. You let go of your hat and the wind sweeps it away, out of frame. You laugh. Who wouldn't? You have been thrown off balance by the realisation that a moving image of yourself, surnaturel, has split from you. You have now bifurcated, and the precipitating event is a beautiful, foundational moment of pure comedy. This moving-image reproduction of you in comedic full flow, free of corporeality, will circulate into the future and continue most likely long after you are gone. And once you know this, your every action, tick, gesture, mood will increasingly become subject to careful consideration, always in preparation for the next time. A spectre has been born and henceforth you are now you and your moving-image self, with your moving-image avatar taking permanent residency inside of you.
This is the selfie's primal scene. Today's apps that make you look like a perfect model of yourself, the plastic surgeries that motivate and are motivated by this tendency towards perfection, begin their invention here. When people first began to understand that images of themselves moving, detached from their bodies, like their very souls, could live alone in the world without them, they could not have known the extent to which we would increasingly chase the lure of this effect. That this new object of attention would become our near total distraction. Films began as the anthropological desire to show the world to the world, but some got bored of the real world and tried to create a better one on-screen.
Untitled (Human Mask) is the emplotment of the world condition prior to, but also at the moment of, familiarisation and assimilation with the cinematic mise en scène. Watching it in this way, embracing fully the preternatural condition that the film itself sketches as possibility, is to imagine how it might have been at that moment; to fantastically reify the cusp of the invention of the successful installation. In fact, we might even suppose that Untitled (Human Mask) is an origin story, if an unlikely one for sure. For the actors or participants, each time is the first time. The film loops so that it will forever repeat this allegory of the cusp moment, prior to our moving-image world. It is a moment none of us can return to (even that Edenic desire to ‘go back’ is developed and formed inside of the cinematic experience), but which we might enjoy imagining. Think here of all the thousands and thousands of ‘period drama’ films. That's what the ‘pre-cinematic’ looks like in film – fully cinematic.
Untitled (Human Mask) is a work about what it means to be presented and defined as cinematic. This presentation, this definition, is an integral part of our contemporary amour propre. We are indivisible from it; our existence as subjects is built inside of it. Untitled (Human Mask) depicts the mythical foundational moment I have just described, immediately prior to its extensive narcissistic inculcation, and after the disappearance of the last person able to recognise the condition. For the masked monkey it seems to us like pure repetition, playing endlessly, infinitely without human interpretation or intervention. If animals persist but their evolution does not bring them an ability to perceive what that persistence means, then the moving-image ghosts of these animals remain a kind of science fiction – a flicker of chiaroscuro that no extant life can recognise.