And suddenly it feels like night, or at least it's dark in the restaurant. The monkey sits at the table. Everything here reads to me like her contemplation. He looks up, a gesture that doubles down on this interior possibility. What does he want from me? she's thinking, perhaps about the director's instructions given to her, via the monkey handler, just moments earlier in preparation for her medium close-up. ‘Just be yourself; you are stuck in a restaurant with only a cat for company, who doesn't even like you.’ Where has everyone gone? the monkey wonders. And then, in frustration, Does this guy work for the circus or the zoo? Anyway, my consent is manufactured (Noam Chomsky), engineered (Walter Lippman), subject to hegemonic common sense (Antonio Gramsci). This private critical discourse could be that of all captive animals dressed up, wearing masks and wigs and performing for others. How much of what we see here is actually hexis – something he's done before and doesn't even think about now? Perhaps she doesn't know he's doing what he does. Or perhaps she is a critical reader.
The camera inside is different, works differently. Outside it was all measured, mechanical, automatic. Inside there are tripod shots and Steadicam, with the latter's familiar drift, as if the camera were taking a measure. The Steadicam was invented in 1975 to enable dolly-like shots for difficult locations and small budgets. But along the way it invented a whole new look, passing effortlessly from one place to another, gently breathing to and fro. It's a cyborg camera that has slowly, surreptitiously seized formal authorship of the look of much television and cinema. Its quality of visual movement, somewhere between a glide and a gentle sway, has helped define a particular age of beholding, shaping how we experience the world through moving images. I never understood it quite like this before, but the camera in Untitled (Human Mask) has made me reflect on the history of that particular frame; how it was born of economy but – as if gripped by a subtle alien force – repurposed for discovery, horror and fear. The monkey rushes over to the hot towel cabinet. The fridge light is on. There's still power.
Conclusion
There they are. The objects that comprehend my world, and here I am unable to name them anymore – an ornithologist to whom all birds have identical feathers, a gardener whose flowers are all alike. Do you think, the man said earnestly, that's my malady? My disease, provided it is a disease?
– Alfred Hayes61
Then she touches the window screen, printed with an image of some forest. She traces some of the drawing and then strokes her hair. Is he making an assessment? Wondering why the forest is two-dimensional and not three-? Or is it just a visual noise that attracts her attention, like she is a baby playing with a toy. Learning. But learning what? As I wrote that, I was watching the monkey play with the plastic that wraps the flowers, then with his fingers. Is she cleaning her nails? She's doing what I do when I'm trying not to work.
As I try to write what I'm hoping is my conclusion, thinking intensely about Untitled (Human Mask), I'm reminded of, distracted by, the fantasy of another not-yet-made project of mine. Five Years takes its title from David Bowie's 1972 song of the same name.62 Five Years imagines a world where everyone has already come to terms with the fact of human extinction in, well … five years. They have the date and they are reconciled. The cause is not discussed; a quiet acceptance floats over most everybody and everything. We live, said Joseph Conrad, in the brief interlude between thousands, millions of years of darkness and the darkness yet to come. Extinction, then, should really be no big deal.
Who was it that asked why we are frightened only of the darkness ahead, and not of the huge frightening void before we were born? Surely both should be just as scary. Of course, we've been shielded from these existential threats by our very existence, the anthropic shadow that we cast across the universe. The fact that we are here means that extinction has not happened, and this modest fact protects us from its likelihood. Just as we are all protected from death by being alive. It's very hard to make friends with death. Here is Epicurus:
If I am, then death is not. If death is, then I am not.
And Samuel ibn Naghrillah, eleventh-century poet and warrior:
For my part, there is no difference at all between my own days which have gone by and the distant days of Noah about which I have heard. I have nothing in the world but the hour in which I am; it pauses for a moment, and then, like a cloud, moves on.63
Five Years imagines, then, the loosening grip of the anthropic fantasy and the embrace of Conrad's real. There is no reason why an end like the one that hangs like a cloud of difference in Huyghe's film should happen in the future. It's just as likely to happen now, or even in the past. Yogi Berra's apocryphal nonsensical common sense now makes perfect sense: ‘It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.’ If you were to die suddenly, from a heart attack – she was dead before she hit the ground – you would never know if it was personal or an extinction event. Ratiocination is irrelevant. A catastrophic event, as Untitled (Human Mask) is at pains to underline, is an actual catastrophe. If it really came, the lights could just go out and no one would ever know. Except maybe a monkey, a cat, some larvae and a cockroach. They and their progeny would have time to ponder. And if the universe is forever, then let's leave a record of the best we are. It could map, record, document, above all make something meaningful and legible of our earth, its wonder and magic. When we disappear, our earth ceases and the earth becomes a planet again, and it will carry, as it always has, its history of inhabitations, as a build-up of archaeological evidence, and even our brief troubled presence will leave signs and sediment. All this to greet some imagined visitors 999 million years after our almost certain extinction, to guide them through some things we have done.
If I were in charge of the Ministry for the Future,64 I would want to keep part of our world, to preserve it in some way so that if, a billion years from now, an alien species were to stumble upon the ruins of our extinction they would find this record of one of our successful forms. Huyghe's Untitled (Human Mask) is a film for and of that record, presenting, looping, perpetually playing as a virtual welcome to visiting forms: Look, it could be saying, we did stuff like this, as we puzzled at what it was like to be almost like something else. What distinguishes us from monkeys? Simply the ‘the privilege of absurdity’.65 That's how crazy all of this is. If we were to build temples to our hopes and loves, replicating everything, imagining visitors billions of years from now discovering these temples and learning, would we not want one such temple to be devoted to the cinematic effect, marking and revealing the radical discontinuity of self and moving image? The cinema represents a communion of pleasure across much of the world: everyone in thrall to what most everyone else is in thrall to. Not equally, of course – there have been deliberate exclusions, monstrous stereotypes, egregious defilement of non-whites, women, anyone subjugated by ruling classes. But movies have been made in vastly different cultures by vastly different kinds of people, and that, in my view, counts for something.
Untitled (Human Mask) is a depiction of, and speculation on, ‘something’ that brings the future and the past together. Without human presence, distraction appears decidedly curious and old-fashioned, as if it suggested your first time looking at things, turning them over carefully in your hands, wondering what it is about your leg that keeps swinging, retrieving towels from hot towel cabinets, sitting at the table, alone except for a cat who ignores you. This monkey is the future, except he has not yet discovered the cinema, nor any of the other moving-image developments that distracted everyone in the before. She has the things of the world as things for her to hold, touch and contemplate. Depicted here is a world that disrupts what Hollis Frampton once wrote about as the supreme ‘ritual of possession, the creation of possessable things, the conservation of the possessable, the ritual process by which the things of the world and then their reproductions or representations are validated so that they can become ownable, so that they can become possessable’.66 In Untitled (Human Mask), no living being owns anything anymore. Everything is something, but not for anyone in particular.