Not one person alive today lives in a pre-cinematic world; there is next to no one who does not have at least some idea that who they are, what they do and how they think can appear as a two-dimensional form in time. We are each at least vaguely aware how the flick of a hand, an adjustment of hair, the tucking in of a shirt, a tender sexual act or even an act of violence can feature as a flat imitation, either on a large screen or on devices in our hands. We are all imitators now. And this is the great knot at the heart of the performance in Huyghe's film – it's an imitation by those who don't know what it is to imitate, who carry on delivering imitation without that knowledge. Animals obviously mimic. But what they cannot do, as far as we are aware, is what Phoebe, in Shakespeare's As You Like It, can do: pretend to pretend, grasp imitation in their hands and imitate imitation.
Now counterfeit to swoon; why, now fall down;
Or if thou canst not, O, for shame, for shame,
Lie not, to say mine eyes are murderers!55
John Ashbery, writing about Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Mediation (written 1932, published 1956), offered a complementary thought in his description of how Stein's best lines attempt to do what can't be done:
to create a counterfeit of reality more real than reality. And if, on laying the book aside, we feel that it is still impossible to accomplish the impossible, we are also left with the conviction that it is the only thing worth trying to do.56
The original transformation of consciousness achieved through the introduction of the moving picture was continued through cinema's opening up of further perceptive possibilities: to see things in slow motion or sometimes upside down, or to witness an animated face in close-up, as large, radiant and star-like. But perhaps the cinema's most significant and in retrospect most revolutionary invention was the ability to show the world running backwards. Cinema introduced temporal plasticity, and reverse movement forces us to abandon all thought of instantaneity. A reverse sequence demands thought. I introduce this invention here because I believe Untitled (Human Mask) begs to be run backwards, back beyond its beginning, in order to reveal how they ended up there: the monkey, the cat, the cockroach, the maggots and the camera. To find out how they ended up alone. This looking back would reveal a contradiction. Back ‘then’ no one knew what was going to happen. History is complete mayhem, for animals as much as humans. It's all competing interests incoherently resolved through the madness of the everyday. Retrospectively, of course, you can make anything seem coherent. That's what films can do. That's what Untitled (Human Mask) refuses to do.
We are the Invention of Animals
What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.
– Saint Augustine57
Max Ophüls's film shooting style is like pellucid prose: graceful, deliberate, calming even as it disrupts convention and reveals radical invention. From the 1920s onwards he re-staged the invention of cinema inside of stories about the vitality and changing textures of modern life. Each of his films can be considered a provocative statement about the possibility of moving images – what they can do, the techniques and ideas they produce and provoke. His films recognise or anticipate the eventual solitary and independent life of the camera, how it will learn from life and then be free of its foundational constraints. In other words, Ophüls's camera considers a future of sentience, even desire. It's a potential now realised everywhere, and it's a potential that Untitled (Human Mask)'s camera is trying out for size. In Ophüls's films, you see the rendering of this future camera life, how it can become distracted by all things that remind it of itself: the giant mirrors and reflective surfaces that produce their own cinematic magic; the dancing bodies and shadows that densely populate social scenes, driving the camera frame to dizzyingly metamorphose. Ophüls's camera moves magically through walls and other obstacles as if these don't exist; it periodically ‘stands back’ and takes it all in, as if proud and curious about the cinematic ‘magic’ it has just presented. One of Ophüls's finest films is the anthology film Le Plaisir (1952), derived from three short stories by Guy de Maupassant. Of particular interest is ‘Le Masque’, the first in the anthology.
‘Le Masque’ opens with a dance hall that possibly doubles as a brothel, filled with excited people dancing, flirting, watching, making love, spinning with excitement. It's pure pleasure everywhere – in bodies, in objects, in the camera's libidinous perambulations. Everywhere there are mirrors, cubicles, balconies for watching, multiple floors, corridors for ‘inadvertent’ touching and frisking. It's frenetic and unstable, excitement oozes from every element and every person. The camera glides through the spaces with effortless grace. As Michael Wood describes it, the camera has ‘the gaze of a curious but unobtrusive god’.58 It can't stop moving as it discovers an infinite array of fascination. Into the fray enters a conspicuous figure in top hat and tails. He throws off his scarf and coat and immediately starts dancing and hopping frenetically. He seems strangely hybrid: half man, half automaton. He wears a mask very similar to the one worn by the monkey in Huyghe's film. Attached to the dancer's mask, though, is a Charlie McCarthy monocle, the sign of a dandy that accentuates the rigidity of the (porcelain?) face.59 It has the effect of making the man look like a young person trying to pass off as an adult (with his artificial whiskers). Suddenly he collapses to the floor with exhaustion. His mask is removed by a doctor and he is revealed to be very old and frail – an old man pretending to be a young man who in turn is pretending to be someone older. It's a hall-of-mirrors deception, matching all the dizzyingly, blindingly reflective surfaces of the dance hall. We never see the monkey's face in Untitled (Human Mask), and I realise as I'm writing that I know nothing about the monkey's age. I know nothing about how monkeys age in general, whether their faces betray the ravages of time recognisably, like humans’ do. I don't even know how long monkeys live, in captivity or in the wild.
The silence of animals, the fact that they can't speak to us, share their feelings, open up, is troubling. We might want to know what they might want to say to us, but they won't say anything, so we can't. We can only repeat our mistakes on them and, in the end, be silently grateful that they don't call us out; and in fact, don't take us out. As Verlyn Klinkenborg writes:
What we have to say about other species on this planet, not surprisingly, is completely out of proportion to what they have to say about us. This piques our vanity, and it blinds us to an important point […] in ecological, climatic, and evolutionary terms, we are the invention of animals.60