Texto - "The last letter" - António Rego

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Essay by John Culcutt
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THE LAST LETTER
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Four red missiles plummet swift and silent in steep cutting dive. As they impact on their pale cloudy target they explode and billow like cluster bombs, spreading shivers across a liquid terrain. The agitated milky surface calms but the red aftershock of the missiles continues to delicately blossom, plume and fade in gently swaying depths. Too soon to know their source or identity, these spreading invaders speak nonetheless of hurt. Dear Mouse. Four more missiles plunge, this time from the other side of the screen. They are heavier, redder, more violent than the first wave of attack. The largest disperses centrifugally into myriad fragments, but quickly reforms itself into a seeping mass.
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Dear Mouse. The voice is firm but affectless. The language is English, but spoken by one for whom it is not the mother tongue. German? There is evident care in the manner of each word’s cautious enunciation. The watery red cloud is spreading dense and thick, beginning to swamp its milky host. For a few seconds my mind and body felt the sweet memory of your smile. The intonation is uncertain, rising and falling in rhythms dislocated from emotion. The swelling watery stains begin to stabilise, but another wave of attack sends further shock waves across the still surface, spreading delicate rosy tentacles further into virgin territory.
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You are as alive as ever in my dreams. Almost imperceptibly, the seeping progress of the red invader through its overrun victim appears to freeze. Against the bleeding ambiguity of the visual image, the narrator insists upon the clear and precise articulation of each and every syllable: po-li-ti-cal.
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It is impossible for me to describe these last moments. Impossible because of an excess or an absence of emotion, I don’t know.
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Red is inadequate. The linguistic resources for colour are as impoverished and impotent as those for the emotions. Sorrow, fear, guilt and desolation are all inadequate, weak approximations of their referents. Even love fades and fails before its object. But what of this red that is not red? It is transforming and mutating before our eyes. We could attempt to track its flowing transformations through various systems of categorization. Linguistically : rose, rust, russet, ochre, maroon, madder lake, purple, black. In terms of natural resonance: Here it is the trace of flaming sunset (I am happy that you were spared that diabolic sunset), there the flames of a holocaust. Comparatively: At times it evokes Rothko's solemn meditations; at other times Matisse's joyful lyricism. Above all, it is dark red. Before anything, it is blood.
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The weight of the blood carries it further into the depths of the increasingly contaminated water where it gathers an ominous presence. As more showers descend they appear to be absorbed almost immediately into the thickening cloud of gore. It is no longer possible to follow the individual history of the successive drops; they add to the total only as a single pistol shot would to an artillery attack. A clearer disjunction now emerges between the sedimentary layer of blood and the surface of the water. Whereas earlier our attention was attracted to the invading blood at the expense of the neutral water, now it is attracted by the agitated surface of the water itself (the virtually immobile mass of blood acting as an impassive foil to the troubled water's traumatized skin). The sharp points of isolated droplets gradually give way to turbulent
waves.
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As our eyes absorb this chromatic drama, our ears drive the imagination further into a black region of horror, abjection and degradation. Dracula was dragged out of the car and so was Elephant. And I was only waiting for my turn. Dracula and Elephant were raped several times. I stuck my fingers in my ears so I wouldn’t hear their screams.
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The blood staining the eyes and the words assaulting the ears are becoming unbearable. A crime against nature is being witnessed, an outrage is being experienced. And the relentless splashing of blood into water now reaches a crisis point. Concentric ripples no longer spread from the point of impact to the edges of the screen; they now surge inwards from the margins and disappear in a point. Time and its incorporated actions have been reversed in defiance of all the laws of nature.
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We are less than three minutes into António Rego's video "Deep Under The Skin" but already we are immersed in its compelling horror. Dealing with such extreme narrative content (homosexual rape, torture, murder, suicide, madness) it would be easy to invest everything in pure sensationalism, tempting to allow free rein to the power of the shocking content. Rego, however, realises that power is more effective when it is channeled and controlled. When he immerses the spoken narrative in a sea of blood he does so with care and precision.
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As a purely visual construct, the video choreographs the imagery of pollution with deliberation and an eye for detail. There is a temporal rhythm, for example, determined by the intervals at which fresh blood impacts on the surface of the water. This rhythm depends upon gaps – upon the relationship of absence and presence between successive, discrete events. Simultaneously, another development is at work, one which we could characterise as melodic. This time, the effects are achieved not by gaps and spacings, but by means of continuous, fluent expansion. Once spilled, the diluted drops of blood remain constantly in view – melting, spreading and eventually thickening into a crescendo of colour. Furthermore, there comes a point, as noted above, at which the filmed image kicks into reverse. The video continues to run in real time, devouring as-yetunborn seconds and minutes, but we are presented with resurrected events, allowed to witness time rescued from its grave. This anti-time also releases an anti-gravity and, in a miracle of redemption, the broken skin of the water heals itself and now propels its former attacker into the heavenly trajectory of ascension. Unity is maintained throughout, however, by the continuing – an increasingly complex - counterpoint between 'surface' rhythm and 'deep' melody.
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In evoking resurrection, redemption and ascension I have already strayed from formal analysis into the realm of the symbolic. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the imagery of blood is heavily loaded with symbolism and connotation, both religious and secular. And it is this proximity of the religious and the secular that returns me to the video's spoken narrative. For it is in the story told by the narrator that we search for more precise meanings in the images we see. In video, image and word unfold in a rhythmically unified stream that resists interruption, but as a servant of writing I am forced to dissect the simultaneous and treat its components
separately and sequentially. In now attempting to overlay the spoken narrative onto its visual partner I misrepresent their complete integration. Nevertheless, it is still possible to direct attention to certain key aspects of the voice’s relationship to the image in "Deep Under The Skin."
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As already suggested, the timbre of the narrator's voice and its deliberate rhythms do much to define the emotional climate of the work. The contrasts and conflicts between visceral visual imagery, extremely disturbing narrative content, and the detached, impersonal tones of the narrator's voice serve only to sharpen the work's emotional edge. Once again, these key words resonate throughout the whole work: It is impossible for me to describe these last moments. Impossible because of an excess or an absence of emotion, I don't know. The only moment at which the voice departs from its narrow range of expressive effects is when it utters the words of others: He's fucking crazy, they shouted…
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The story begins, nevertheless, with a memories of love, tenderness and friendship: my mind and my body felt the sweet memory of our smile; He was right when he referred to love as the only solution to our conflicts… We were kids full of dreams… (There is still a residual beauty in the transparent pink filigrees formed by the blood.) But as the sense of impending threat mounts, the blood's dark opacity increases. Dracula and Elephant were raped several times. As the details of horrendous crime become explicit – as the violations of natural and social law are revealed - the video begins its reversal of time. The subtle interplay between the demands of the word and those of the image are well under way. The terms of their negotiation are not, however, formulaic. There are unexpected dislocations and tension filled misalignments; skillful edits of forward and reverse sequences; manipulation and hallucinatory intensification of colour: too many and too various to enumerate. The narration reaches a harrowing climax against the image of a stagnant, malignant pool of blood. More black than red, this malevolent presence now lurks below a pustular, diseased skin: a jaundiced parody of Monet's water lilies. We will love you forever.
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To stop at this point is to stop half way through the piece. As our minds try to absorb what we have just experienced and our eyes linger on the silent, scabrous pool, the narrator's voice begins again; Dear Mouse. The sequence that follows repeats the same verbal narrative, but to a differently phrased visual narrative. To repeat exactly would be a betrayal, a hollow and irresponsible claim that one formulation alone could adequately define that which defies definition by its sheer excess.
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Ultimately "Deep Under The Skin" is a poignant attempt to describe the indescribable, to present the unpresentable: At that moment I remember to think about the shape of the soul. The emotional and physical extremes that it tackles stretch the limits of representation to breaking point. It is an impossible project: Impossible because of an excess or an absence of emotion, I don't know. And yet it rescues elegiac majesty from the apparent ruins of the human spirit. The verbal narrative begins with love, and it ends with love. But this is not the love of romantic fantasy: it is love stained with the indelible dye of violence, guilt, perversion and death. The kind of love, in fact, that yearns for the sacred. The sacred: that ancient, buried region of the human mind where the irreconcilable is magically reconciled; where totem meets taboo; where the gods are next to shit; where love shares space with murder and bloodshed.
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John Culcutt
(Teacher and writer who works at Glasgow School of Art)
2000
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