Why would I want Huyghe's film to be mine, I wonder? Rivalry, certainly: wishing that I had made it, had thought of it, planned it, persuaded others to work on it; that I had engineered the obviously difficult film shoot with a monkey. But more specifically, I think it feels like the kind of film I might once have made: a very difficult location; a complicated mise en scène; a startling discovery; and perhaps most of all, a depiction of something interesting without a real end or conclusion, existing rather as a series of questions. I saw Untitled (Human Mask) for the first time at the moment I realised that my Borromini film was not going to get made. Was it, I wonder, a loss of agency, of verve, of money even? Why did I give up on the film while here was Huyghe managing something equally challenging, impossible in the same way as mine, but made nonetheless. ‘In every work of genius’, says Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.’ 11 We all live with this imaginary dimension of possibility when other lives seem possible. ‘Our self-portraits’, writes the historian Joshua Rothman, ‘use a lot of negative space.’ 12
1. Masked protestors in San Marino, 2021.
Photo: Nadia Shira Cohen
2. Luca Signorelli, Figures in a Landscape: Two Nude Youths, c.1490, oil on canvas, 67.9 × 16.4cm
3. J.J. Grandville, The Monkey and the Cat, engraving from the 1855 edition of Jean de La Fontaine's Fables
4. Congo, 30th Painting Session 11 December, 1957
5. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Le Singe peintre, 1740, oil on canvas, 73 × 59.5cm
6. Jean-Baptiste Deshays, Le Singe peintre, c.1745, oil on canvas. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Gérard Blot
7. Gary Winogrand, Central Park Zoo, New York City, 1967, gelatin silver print, 23 × 34 cm. © 1984 The Estate of Garry Winogrand. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
8. Douglas Turner Ward's 1965 play Day of Absence, performed by the Negro Ensemble Company, 4–11 December 2016 at Theatre 80 St Marks, New York, directed by Arthur French. Pictured in middle image, from left: Cecilia Antoinette, Jay Ward, Charles Weldon, Chauncey DeLeon Gilbert. Photos by Jonathan Slaff
Prologue and Disaster Mise en Scène
‘You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff’, a former CIA officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack. (He watched the carnage on a small monitor in the field.) Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: ‘squirters’.
– Jane Mayer13
When the film begins, the street-level drone sequence tracing the destroyed urban landscape lasts for one minute and five seconds. The destruction seems relatively recent. But the scene's contextual resonance outbids its brevity: everything that follows will be tempered by this performance's signification. These are drone shots of a town devastated by an infamous one-two-three punch: Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant meltdown. This specific context is documented in all the literature surrounding Huyghe's film; yet despite this, it also feels generic, a metaphor for these troubled times. What we are witnessing could easily be the end of the Capitalocene, or the emergence of the environmental uncanny as the ‘last exit human’. Humanity's final, permanent peripeteia. As I write I have just listened to an interview with Noam Chomsky. Ninety-three years old with age defying intellect, he pointed out that when Jim Mattis, US Defence Secretary from 2017–19, outlined the US military strategic posture, it was essentially in preparation for simultaneous nuclear war with China and Russia. Pause for a second and take that in carefully: the United States has effectively been preparing for the total and complete annihilation of life on this planet. Not to stop it, but if necessary to participate in it.
The very obvious drone shots drill with machine precision through a ruined and abandoned urban landscape, still bearing remnants of what seems to have been quite recently ‘modern’. We see restaurants and offices branded with their abandoned identities; many buildings half destroyed; a long street that looks as if it may have been a very important one; and later, things arranged, laid out as if they were waiting for humans to return. Everything feels orphaned and ossifying in that state. It's uncomfortable; the depiction is grim.
At least two of the drone shots ramp, and this, to me, is strange. Ramping – changing frame rates mid-shot – is a familiar technique. The Matrix (1999) was apparently the first commercial film to use ramping. Like drone shots, ramping is now ubiquitous. It's a small machinic rebellion by the camera, gaming its technical otherness: Your unassisted eye can't do it, but I can. But like most over-employed things, it has become a kind of tick in a lot of films, music videos and TV. I confess I can't unthread any interesting explanation for the ramping's inclusion in Huyghe's prologue. For the longest time I tried. But ramping effects are jarring, noticeable. They are puzzling, robotic – obviously. They even title the sequence, give it an air of purpose. But that purpose remains open-ended. Good art, Jasper Johns once said, is an accomplishment in ambiguity. It is interesting that ‘drone’ also names a particular musical effect, a repetition that is more sound than melody. Drone music is often described as the intonation of ineffability. It aestheticises doom, says the musicologist Joanna Demers, ‘opening a door onto once and future catastrophes, those that are immanent and those that, once believed to be imminent, are now detours in a past that turned out otherwise’.14 Drone music aims to defy meaning, to ‘flout’ interpretation.
The writer Alex Quicho, in her book on drones, reminds us that ‘though we're most inclined to think of it as an eye-in-the-sky, the drone is usually heard before it is seen. To get why it haunts our collective psyche, we first have to listen to its dread-noise.’ 15 The first radio-controlled aircraft was developed in 1935 by the British military and called the DH 82B Queen Bee; her many offspring are the drones that fly today. Drones are male bees without stingers – unloved, disposable and eventually killed by other bees. The first military drones were used for target practice; only much later did they start looking for targets themselves. Today's electric drones sound distinctive and much quieter than their diesel-engine ancestors. In the opening shot of Untitled (Human Mask), we have the tell-tale buzz of an electric drone, a well-recognised contemporary signature of the shots’ technical origin. After the first shot, the drone sound drops away, but other repetitious sounds come in and out: a woman's voice in broadcast mode, repeating something official, important – perhaps the last thing anyone will ever hear.