The philosopher Grégoire Chamayou has described the history of the drone as that of an eye turned into a weapon, one that makes it virtually impossible to die as one kills. Today drones, piloted by US contractors based in Las Vegas, are re-staging, in the skies over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Palestine and Yemen, the massive asymmetrical slaughtering of American indigenous peoples by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, Portuguese and Spanish guns. Typically drones adopt the view of the gods, but in Untitled (Human Mask) the drone is at street-level, perhaps wheeled as well as winged.
The drone sequence feels like a prologue. Prologue comes from the Greek prologos, literally ‘speaking before’, enabling the revelation of things and ideas that should be recognised and understood before the rest of the story unfolds. Here it figures something substantiaclass="underline" the apocalypse. This is the film's backstory. It's either recognisable and looks bad, or it just looks very bad even if you don't recognise it. The apocalypse is a revelation or disclosure of great knowledge; it often glues itself to the end of the world, but not necessarily. In Christianity, it is ‘a vision of heavenly secrets that can make sense of earthly realities’.16 The question of what comes after the apocalypse, what the ‘after’ might feel and look like, is a question that has consumed cultures and faiths, particularly Christianity, which has produced extraordinarily ambivalent works of art, full of tempest and temptation, death and sex, and punishment for everything. Now we have lost faith. The End was once a story about something specific to come, whereas now it is everywhere, all the time.
Untitled (Human Mask) confirms this contemporary condition of immanence. Its relentless documentation of a creature exploring what was once our world confirms our very worst fears that the end is not a story, but the reality of who we are. And because of that reality we will never bear direct witness to the monkey's disinterestedness. We are absent and thereby irrelevant. It's these thoughts that have me circling around and around the film, making me dizzy with references and a multiplicity of leads. It's a work that wants you to imagine, to think around and across, to follow leads as the film settles into its very casual routine. Though the end is everywhere in Untitled (Human Mask), it does not stop there.
The Abduction of Gesture
We need to embrace the vile along with the valiant, the evil with the eminent, the sordid and sad as well as the splendid. For the whole of the past is our legacy.
– David Lowenthal17
Thinking about the apocalypse, drones and the ineffable, I was interrupted by the memory of a visit to Orvieto, in Italy. I had gone to the ancient hilltop city to look at Luca Signorelli's depictions of the apocalypse and the last judgement in the Duomo's San Brizio chapel. After suffering one terrible disaster after another, at the turn of the fifteenth-century Orvieto was on edge, tightly bound by a torque of collective anxiety. For five years Signorelli worked day and night on his images of the end; for the town's citizens the eschatology would have felt very close, an emerging documentary of their own end-of-the-world anxiety.
I had gone to Orvieto to research a possible film to be ‘set’ in the chapel. I had only really discovered Signorelli within the last year, in the exhibition ‘The Renaissance Nude’ (2019) at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. A good friend of mine and I were completely stunned by a small painting by Signorelli, Figures in a Landscape: Two Nude Youths (c.1490) (fig.2). I made a film inspired by this discovery and I wanted to tell everyone about it – the painting, the discovery, the new film. But I kept forgetting Signorelli's name. Over and over again: it became pathological. Losing myself in the Google slipstream (and with a nudge from a good friend), I discovered that Freud had more or less invented his idea of the parapraxis after visiting the chapel to see the famous work and misplacing Signorelli's name. Freud observed that while accidents happen, mistakes are made. The frescos are shocking and full of psychoanalytic effect. It's somehow pleasing to know that the ‘slip of the tongue’ was given its proper psychoanalytic form in connection with a mistake while looking at a work of art. When I stood in the chapel – the only person there, straining to take in all the terrifying magnificence surrounding me, up and around – I fantasised a drone flying through the chapel with elegant swoops, collecting intimate compositions for my own film, to reproduce, in the third and fourth dimensions, the impression Signorelli's dramatic forms make. What about the sound of this drone? Should I hear it? An authorial flourish?
It was then that I realised the deep connection between Huyghe's Untitled (Human Mask) and Signorelli's frescos in Orvieto. They complement each other across five hundred years, mapping the transformation of ‘the end’, the apocalypse, from imminent to immanence. We know Signorelli was not depicting an absolute end without a sacred after. Christianity conveniently smuggled in a time for after the end, while obviously limiting those who could join. In Untitled (Human Mask), the end is rendered in the present, in everything all at once. Its unthinkability, its existence outside of narrative, is what is so terrifying. The drone fantasy led me to Orvieto, but Signorelli's and Huyghe's depictions of ‘the end’, their part in a long tradition of depicting the undepictable, this is what has kept me looking.
Inside
And then we are inside. The conceptual leap from the exterior to the interior of a restaurant/bar, in media res, is seamless. A montage effect that Sergei Eisenstein, building on the work of Lev Kuleshov, made influential. Chaplin, Hitchcock, Welles and Coppola all learned their montage tricks from watching Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1926). But the camerawork and montage inside Huyghe's restaurant are different from those in that film. From now on, Untitled (Human Mask) will be all tidy compositions, artful in a recognisable way. Focus is pulled carefully, revealing familiar, punctuated handheld compositions. It has all the slowed-down, syntagmatic rhythm that typically follows something disturbing and obviously dramatic. Like a pause. In other words, it is cinematic. And yes, something dramatic has happened outside and continues to extend its influence inside. Syntactically we might expect a return to the rawness of the exterior terror before the movie ends, perhaps revealing ‘the story behind’. But this doesn't happen. The exterior robotic camera and its mobility device presented a compelling backstory, but with the exception of three brief shots of the rain falling on the outside of the restaurant building towards the very end of the film, inside is where the rest will take place. Always, however, in the conceptual and figurative shadow of the exterior apocalypse. The brief late shots of the restaurant's exterior herald a return to the disaster mise en scène, even if they seem more pastoral and moody than threatening. The exterior shots have the feel of a real ‘movie’. After a shot of the monkey looking at water dripping inside, there is a cut to outside, to rain falling on a bush and the restaurant's roof. There is no monkey in the three shots in this interregnum. Nor does the shooting share any of the machinic grammar of the prologue.