Cinema Canada (Jun 1983)

HARCOURT about their wish. “So far,” says the other. Then the Kodak punch-marks flash through the image as it freezes on this note of non-resolution. The mystery is preserved. 3. While there are many other examples of disjunction and dislocation within The Wish — most obvious is the train journey to the cottage that appears in the middle of the film the third structuring principle that | would like to discuss as central revolves around the motif of the palimpsest. This also evokes ideas of changes over time, always with the potential of a sense of something lost... Anactual palimpsestis presentin the film in the form of an old French manual from 1850. Ithas been transformed into a cook-book. Similarly, in one scene we see the girls dressing up in old clothes and in yet another we see that someone is using the grandmothers old house in anew way. Artefacts from the past are utilized to bring about transformations. So Martin Duckworth has utilized his own past to bring about this film. This transformational process is most intricately associated with the use of two stills. Let us call them the Tombstone still and the Arrival still. For it is not true (as | have implied) that all the stills in The Wish are derived from the past. Some of them are stolen from the actuality footage, their colour is erased, and they are introduced into the film's structure— once as a recapitulation (the crewshot still) but generally as anticipations of moments yet to come. Both the Tombstone still and the Arrival still appear several times in the course of the film; and like the cutaway to the crew at the opening of the film, their appearance can create anxiety because, if we are watching the film closely, we can recognize that they donotmatch the “real” stills that are derived from the past. These freeze-frame stills, onthe contrary, anticipate the future — or at least a future moment in the narrative when their purpose willbe resolved. Furthermore, this sense of anticipation which builds in the film also contributes, kinaesthetically, to the film's desire. These two particular stills are crucial because they are used, finally, to frame a key moment in the film. This occurs at the end of the graveyard sequence which is the last extended narrative sequence in the film. The graveyard sequence is richin the twin associations of death and life, contrasting as it does the immobility of the tombstones with the energy of the children; and like the still photographs, the tombstones also contain traces of the past, of the local family history. They refer to what is absent (and what is yet to come). Indeed, itis largely because the girls’ wishis associated with this sequence that we might defensibly assume that their mother is dead. “Will you come home ?” or “Will you come home again ?” This wish has twice been heard before in the film (if our ears are attentive and the acoustics favourable): once over an earlier shot of the Tombstone still and one again over a still of the mother. This time, itis slow in preparation. After theirlunch, during which Marion had asked her question about dying and burying, the children have been playing about the graveyard, looking for signs of their grandparents’ past. Marion discovers the Ball tombstone which is the burial site of the grandmother's family. Sylvia runs off to fetch the grandparents, and then they all gather round itin contemplation of this collective trace of death. The action ceases, the image freezes, the colour bleeds out, and it becomes the Tombstone still that we have seen several times before; and once again we hear one of the twins whisper: “Will you come home ?” Then the four-shot that we have also already seen of the young Martin and his wife and family, and then we cut to the Arrival still (which also restates the “touching” motif) as the colour bleeds in and the arrival scene begins. This bleeding of the colour, here very much like a palimpsest, out and in again, framing the final references to the past and the whispered hope for the future recapitulates with enormous formal authority both the death/life oppositions that inform the film and the statement of the children’s wish and of the film's desire. Furthermore, this formal authority helps to create the extreme delight (indeed, une jouissance) that we can experience from an art work in which an aesthetic problem has been so innovatively resolved. Arguably, it is also the formal authority of this film that helps to imply a loss beyond that of the actual mother. The film creates a sense of something missing. “No fish!” one of the twins exclaims when they return from trolling with their grandfather; and during a later moment» when the grandfather goes out alone, all he brings back is “one medium perch.” Next time, as he says, he hopes to bring back “something worthwhile.” There is thus a generalized feeling of something-thatwas-there-then that-is-not-here-now. These effects all re-inforce the sense of loss and absence, and it is by these means that personal nostalgia can be elevated into art, that empirical.film practice can transform itself into theory, and that indeed — traces of the physical can connote the metaphysical: that which lies beyond. “These ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives.” (Sontag, p. 9) Will the mother return ? The twins cannot Know. But other questions are suggested by the film to which there are no easy answers. They too become part ofits mystery, part ofits generalized sense of Angst. While not wishing to get trapped in the intentional fallacy that would involve Martin Duckworth the man, | might nevertheless approach this matter another way by asking a highly speculative question : why was this film made ? Could we suggest hypothetically that, like most family photographs, the making of the film initially had something to do with the preservation of memory ? Memory implies a certain act of redemption. What is remembered has been saved from nothingness. What is forgotten has been abandoned. (Berger, p. 54). Kracauer also believed that through its articulation of the natural, photography could “redeem’” reality, that it could atone for past sins. Now it may be an extrapolation to speak about the feeling of guilt that one may derive from The Wish (i.e., the feeling may be my own) ; atthe same time this feeling is re-inforced by another “personal” film that Duckoe made at the Film Board in Although less finely nuanced (I eee 6