Why doesn't the monkey tear off its ‘human mask’ and wig? The better to transcend irritation and examine these strange objects’ particularities. Just as she has done with most everything else. Why not pour over the mask, inside and out, and ask, in her own special way, What is this thing? What, after all is this? Perhaps the monkey did pull off its mask and hair many times during the shooting of the film. Maybe it was difficult to keep her focussed; maybe the film's edits hide an even fuller range of the monkey's instinctive curiosity. Maybe, in fact, she is always, every time we see her, on the verge of taking everything off, this au naturel concealed beneath every cut.
There is the sound of rain; for a moment it's quite loud. The monkey retrieves a bottle of liquor and places it on a table. She seems to be staring at the bottle. But it's impossible to know what she's actually looking at. We can see the mask's eye holes and speculate, but we can't see the eyes that stare out from behind them. And then the camera starts making super-tasteful compositions, like a television advertisement, perhaps for fine food: out-of-focus objects in the foreground; careful lighting that has everything not quite in shadow.
The monkey seems unaffected by or completely unaware of what we presume to be (or rather not to be) ‘the outside’. Perhaps it's a kind of allegory of what it means to be human – always on the verge of not being. After all, being human is a type of achievement; it's certainly not a foregone conclusion that we will remain human. Being human requires structure, order, at least a very rudimentary philosophy of people and things. Otherwise everything is just phenomenological flux, and, butterfly-like, we might be continually distracted by things appearing as others pass from view. Human experience would be everything all at once, and this ‘everything all at once’ is deep inside the film.
The monkey, in the absence of the human, is a kind of surrogate form, on the cusp of structure or regressing out of it. Could she have been reborn through metempsychosis, when the souls of extinct humanity pass on secretly, silently to monkeys, cats and cockroaches, so that they can be more than ‘almost human’ (monkeys), silent company (cats) or perpetual nuisance (cockroaches). According to Ernst Cassirer, humans were once without structure. Homo sapiens did not at first understand how things in the world related to each other and had no way of distinguishing between what happens ‘in here’ and what takes place ‘out there’.29 In Untitled (Human Mask), it's Armageddon outside. Inside, it's all curiosity – things bleeding, one into another, part and whole, living or dead, and when they cease to be in (the monkey's) view, they disappear forever until they come back. Will the monkey ever understand the basic laws of fiction?
Does she recognise that in parallel with her performance on camera there is the real animal who she is, the one who lives and breathes before and after the film's time? That le personage … n’est personne?30 It's certainly not possible for us, as viewers, to listen to Huyghe and the monkey discussing between takes how she should walk and carry the liquor in frame. Maybe they discussed Tippi Hedren's performance in Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) – her walking on the train platform as the camera dolly did a contra zoom behind her. At around the fifteenth minute, the camera tilts down and we see the monkey's prehensile feet, so animal-like, reminding us that she likes to live where she can climb – high, across the heavens, so far and so safe from us.
The monkey looks up. The sound suggests that she is listening intently to the pitter-patter, looking for the source out the window and beyond. But this is a cinematic sleight of hand. Typically in my work I keep away from sound – it can be too strong, too manipulative. But here the manipulation feels right. It draws your attention to the mask as philosophical challenge. Because he is wearing a mask, we really see nothing. Her head is up, but she could be looking down. Or her eyes could be closed. The mask pulls our focus to the question of how and why those things – the look of the eye, the furrow of the brow, the tightness of lips – can have meaning, how they give cultural value to an intention. The mask pulls you to imagine these signs of intention as being branded, indelibly, on the face of the thing behind the mask. Even though the mask itself has a very narrow range of possibility for displaying much of anything.
The cat has its back to the monkey, who is swinging his legs backwards and forwards with renewed vigour. She starts turning around and around, like a kid, and then drops to the ground, all dizzy. She touches a mirror with its reflections, literalising the metaphor of being touched by an image. What is capturing her attention? The reflection; the shiny, specular surface; the colours? Into the kitchen. There seem to be sounds, from above, outside perhaps. He looks up. I notice here how cinematic continuity is not strictly obeyed: eyelines are crossed between cat and monkey. Do machines not care about suture? There are dead flies, some of which are really quite large, scarily so, trapped between the window and its screen. There are thousands of maggots consuming something left behind. The maggots and the food. These are the leftovers.
The monkey's gestures creep with too much sincerity, as if what she is doing is everything he ever dreamt of. Sometimes watching her can be unsettling, provoking an unexpected, even disturbing somatic effect, a minor bodily convulsion. The French have a good name for this type of thing: frisson, its fricative opening almost onomatopoeic and very close to freezing. It's like a shudder. I shuddered the first time I watched Untitled (Human Mask).
Frank Kermode, in his last published essay, wrote that a shudder is the horror, or even the beauty, of a body's response to violent stimulus: when you look at something captivating, your body responds.31 The shudder involves mimesis, an experiential moment when the subject or viewer imitates the object. Adorno gives the example of a subject or viewer's ‘goosebumps’, when instead of overcoming an object through discourse (for instance, thinking of a field of cows as merely meat or milk), the subject in a sense ‘becomes’ the object. The shudder describes the subject's being overwhelmed by otherness, horrified by it even, and, for a moment at least, recognising and embracing the impossibility of categorisation. You shudder when shocked by the qualitive thickness of an object or an animal, in a sign of radical recognition; it's the violence that gives birth to subjectivity, hence its physical impression, the marking of your body with a slight, but nevertheless uncontrollable, movement or shiver. The shudder, writes Adorno, ‘transforms art into what it is in-itself, the historical voice of repressed nature, ultimately critical of the principle of the I, the internal agent of repression’.32 The shudder arrests or, more typically, delays commodification.
Untitled (Human Mask) refuses to let what you see be reduced to its referents: the monkey is not to be abridged through our anthropomorphic projection, with its roots in colonial histories, white supremacy and species domination; the ruined city we see is not just a specific place in the world, Japan, but rather is place in general, in a time perpetual, with a force unthinkable. Kermode identified that W.B. Yeats's ‘Leda and the Swan’ (1933), that great shudder poem, is also about animals and orgasm:
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,