Cinema Canada (Jun 1983)

by the selective focus detectable within the image, by the sun on the water sparkling in the background and by the distance established in our minds through the knowledge that the lens is in its telephoto position and, finally, by the cutaway to Duckworth and his crew in the distance—a cutaway that we later realize is diegetically dislocated. The film begins with its ending and ends with its beginning—but we cannot know that until we get to the end. The film ends with the twins’ arrival, thus leaving us with the suggestion that the real experience of the visit is yet to take place. Hence the nostalgia, endemic to memory indeed, to the very essence of photography — is challenged by this final sense we get that what we have witnessed is not what took place. We have watched a construct. Reality, in the brute sense, is yet to be undergone. And for all the detail of documentation, both filmic and photographic, that we have observed in the film, the absent one, the desired one — the wife and mother — is only present in the film in the form of a photographic trace, the presence of which confirms her absence and preserves her mystery. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance. The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman’s wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician’s face pinned on a Vvoter's coat, the snap-shots of a cabdriver’s children clipped to the visor all such talismatic uses of photography express a feeling both sentimental and implicity magical ; they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality. (Sontag, p. 76). Towards the end of The Wish, as the colour bleeds out from a freezeframe to become a still of the two children and their grandparents standing by a tombstone, and after the final expression of the wish, once again whispered, when the colour bleedsinonastill to become the scene of the twins’ arrival, the effect does seem “magical.” This cinematic magic, however, has been designed to signal a key sequence within the film and is very much the result of the film’s technical polish, of its emotional sensitivity, and of the authority of its form. By way of more detailed analysis, one might offer three structuring principles that inform The Wish: 1. First of all, there is the gaze — the gaze both of the twins as they look directly at us and of the photographs that these frozen moments in time introduce. Being lodged within a narrative, these family photographs are rescued from what Barthes has called “the vast disorder of objects.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 6). While they are obviously “an emanation of the referent’ (Barthes, p. 80), these photographs refer collectively to both asense of the pastandasense of loss. “The realists do not take a photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but foran emanation of past reality : a magic, notan art’ (Barthes, p. 88). The photographs are all self-conscious. They are all intensively posed, as if indeed to deliver up their “essence” (Elder, p. 48). For me, however, their collective punctum resides in the fact that they all involve holding. Although severed from the present by their place in time past, the characters in these photographs are all joined together. A little girl (is she the grandmother ?) stands onasmiling man's shoulders, while hints of country music are whispered in the background. Near the beginning of the film, we see a shot of the youthful Martin holding one of the twins; then another shot ofa woman whom we cannot yet know is the mother holding the other twin; and then there is a four-shot of all of them, united now in the present moment within the frame as they used to be in the pastin their life together. As in all the other photographs in the film, while holding one another the cha-> racters gaze out as us like some kind of plea, as if asking to be remembered, accepted, understood. This touching motif is also strongly present within the actuality sections of the film, between the girls themselves and between the girls and their grandparents — but never, inevitably, between the girls and their parents. With their immediate past, the twins are apparently “out-of-touch.” 2. There is an opposition between severance and suture that is also HARCOURT intimately structured into the form of the film. Throughout The Wish, there is a deliberate dislocation of space and time within the images and between the images and the sounds. This dislocation simultaneously parallels and _ kinaesthetically recreates the disjunctive, non-linear nature of memory and of dreams. The second shot of the film provides a characteristic example, After the twins have been established with a wishbone making their wish, we cut away to a group-shot of Martin with this crew, as if presenting the point-of-view, as if shooting the opening shot. But this image cannot suture in the way it appears to be doing. It-is “irrational” (in the sense that a drawing by Escher is irrational or that an equation in algebra can be described as irrational). Itdoesn't fully match. To begin with, although the twins have been established together by the lake, the camera in tight closeup panning from one to another, thus “joining” them within the shot, one of the twins is also present in the group-shot of the crew. Furthermore, by the time we cut back to the twins and, hear Martin questioning them about their wish, not only is the distance implied by the sound of his voice different from the distance implied by the long-shot of the crew but the girls have changed their position within the frame. Though both the purpose and the context is different, this effect is analagous to that found by Bill Nichols in the central still from Letter to Jane: The play between word and image remains a site for disintegration as well as integration, of noncooperation as well as incorporation. (Nichols, 7987, p. 64). There is something in these dislocations, in this “irrational” quality, even if just sensed on an initial viewing, that contributes to the anxiety of the film, to its sense of loss and its desire. By the end of the film, while these disjunctions are resolved in terms of the narrative (the group-shot of the crewis placed within a sequence that shows the twins arriving during the penultimate scene of the film), the anxiety remains. Furthermore, the twins give voice to the film's controlling mystery. “We don’t know yet,” one of them replies when asked a ee pe te ee ee ae 5