An invitation into tender edges: On Lucian Castaing-Taylor’s visit to The New School
Written by Hannah McCandless
“The problem, of course, was that from the beginning too much was expected of cinema. The fact that film could combine image, sound, and even visual and spoken text suggested to some that film could tell us more about the world than could just the written word.”
-Scott MacDonald, American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary
In the process of preparing to host Lucian Castaing-Taylor at The New School, I read as much as I could about his body of work, particularly about the three pieces we were screening, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Sheep Rushes, and Somniloquies. I read in effort to prepare myself, a curious non-cinephile, to engage with the work as well as to circulate materials to students whom I knew would be engaging as well. This is all to say that much has been written about Lucian’s work by film aficionados and ethnographers much more credible than me.
However, I am comforted (and perhaps even emboldened) to write this response to Lucian’s body of work by words he shared as he opened a GIDEST Seminar engaging with the work. Lucian, whose humility and at times borderline self-deprecation intrigued and surprised me, expressed in conversation that he was eager to hear the discussion, as he believes that a film is what it exists as in the mind of the viewer. And so, this piece is not a critique or an explanation or really anything other than an account of how these films existed in my mind the week of October 7, 2023 as they were screened and discussed at The New School.
I mention the date of our screenings here because the week of October 7, 2023 was a thick assemblage of human and non-human, living and not living things that webbed a web in which Lucian’s films entered and nested themselves in my mind. We screened the films a mere 36 hours after the latest outbreak of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, perhaps one the greatest eruptions, at least in my lifetime, of the colonial lava that our world is constructed upon. That conflict was in the room with me. This week also played a key role in the playing out of my own research which examines how all social thought and action can be understood by what it reproduces, what it resists, and what it worlds because of and beyond that dichotomy. So, reproduction and resistance were also in the room with me. Finally, during this week my MFA cohort was unpacking what it means to construct an assemblage in our own research. So, the process of crafting a constellation of conditions, objects, subjects, ideas, theories, histories, etc. was in the room with me.
I want to return to the epigraph that I used to begin this essay, which is quote from Scott MacDonald’s chapter on Lucian’s work and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab in his book American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. I pull this quote because I believe that it grounds how Lucian’s body of work lives in my mind and because I feel it shaped the conversations between Lucian and our collaborators at The New School. MacDonald’s words present the complex power of a sensory ethnography. Film as a sensory representation of an assembled ethnography is both powerful and fraught because of its ability to remind us that our knowledge and sentience is not shaped by the written word of the ethnographies we are accustomed to, but rather by the messy fragmented unpredictable synapses of these boundary projects we call bodies.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the central piece in our curation, examines the grotesque, the tedious, the perverse, and the beautiful complexity of the human body and our relationship to it. Several scenes in the film make the academic audience, steeped in our hallowed and haunted halls of higher education, sink quickly into our well-worn chairs of deconstructive critique. For me, it was the few scenes with women that led me there. A handful of scenes, in particular, sit with me: The scene of a c-section—a black woman giving birth to a baby girl. Perhaps one of the more gruesome moments in the film, we see the cut into the woman’s abdomen, the tearing of the flesh to release the infant followed by several minutes of footage of the freshly born baby, naked, umbilical cord barely cut, still covered in blood and afterbirth. And the scenes from a geriatric memory clinic—the disembodied squawking of a woman, later shown in a chair in her room and a series of shots following two women uttering tediously, seemingly in conflict with one another attempting to navigate the floor. Both scenes are uncomfortable spotlights on female mind/body boundary projects that left me and others in the room wondering, how could these two women, or the tiny newborn give consent? In these scenes I, and others with the room, experienced the camera as a tool in the master’s toolbelt. We watched as the camera probed at the tender edges of life, peering into moments we rarely have access to, moments of life before and after consent, in the codified manner we expect it, can be freely given.
And (that blessed and precious word that allows me to hold two competing truths at one time) then I wonder, are we, to borrow words from Scott MacDonald, expect(ing) too much of cinema? Perhaps our exacerbated discomfort, my squeamish response to and my budding questions around consent, are a bifurcation of why sensory ethnographies can and should exist. The film, a sensory experience, is more profound and personal to me than any written account could ever be (and I am first and foremost a writer). The stakes of consent seem higher, but are they? Is the issue of consent here heightened because while the tool of the subject investigating the object may be more probing, the veil of opacity between the subject and object is also more transparent and the resulting vulnerability and rawness invites me to question my own relationship with my own body?
In the conversations with Lucian, in rooms full of academics, there was a grappling with consent that was emblematic of, at least for me, my reaction to the violent outbreak in the Middle East, which calls us once again to feel compelled to be warriors and protectors of the oppressed. And perhaps the interrogation of consent was also a move toward innocence, a way to work through our own fear of the pointer finger of probing subjectivity coming at ourselves and our own work. We held a piece of cinema to a higher standard of consent and positionality because it’s sensorial effect on us is less opaque, a more layered and accurate representation of reality. In essence, heightened critique is a response to a thicker sensorial experience of not just the other, but the self. The film is more fraught than a written ethnography because it is thicker-- more richly effective at making the strange familiar and, more importantly, the familiar strange. It is more fraught because it brings us into our own sensorial being, into these sacks of meat, these border projects, that we call bodies, in a way that breaks down our understanding of the other in such a way that we can’t help but confront our own tender edges.
After the first screening of De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Lucian made an off-handed aside that struck me. In speaking about his own experience rewatching the film, he mentioned that it had always lived in his mind as a “tender film.” I frowned, taken aback. And then exhaled—perhaps a sigh of relief?
Tenderness. The vile language of Somniloquies, the harsh landscapes and animalism of Sheep Rushes, and the gruesome, brutal, and perverse examination of the human body in De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Somehow, tenderness made sense. Somehow that web of “someones” who were in the room with me as I watched that film, the weight of conflict in the Middle East, the potential of finding something beyond the binary of reproduction and resistance, and the notion of constructing constellations, caught that word, “tender.” Opening myself up to tenderness, I discovered that Lucian’s work lives in my mind as an assemblage of edges, an invitation into a tender bearing witness to the grotesque, the forgotten, the animal, the subconscious, the perverse, the tedious, the monotonous, an invitation to bear witness, not just to the other, but also finding there the tender edges of ourselves.
In these pitch-black rooms, images of flesh flash, a cry rings out in obnoxious repetition, and in those moments we find ourselves and each other. We find a lamentation and a rejoicing in the edges of our own humanity where we are simultaneously lost in horror and found in witness.
I want to end with a quote from Lucian’s own syllabus for a course he teaches at Harvard, quoted by Dennis Lim in the New York Times “If life is messy and unpredictable, and documentary is a reflection of life, should it not be digressive and open-ended too?” I will play on Lucian’s words, to succinctly express how Lucian’s body of work lives in my mind with this provocation: “If the edges of human life are grotesque, vile, beautiful, complex, perverse, and tender, and ethnography is a reflection of life, should ethnography not be grotesque, vile, beautiful, complex, perverse, and tender too?”
If Lucian’s work is anything, perhaps it is at the very least, a tender invitation to bear witness to the edges of our own beautiful grotesque complexity.