Figure Minus Fact (Mary Helena Clark, 2020) (Patreon)

For quite some time now, I've been struggling to come up with some sort of parallel or analogy for the highly evocative, poetic formalism of Mary Helena Clark's films. Clark tends to organize her work in a very capacious fashion, joining together sounds and images that do not have an immediate affinity. Her "soft montage" has a way of hovering in the unconscious for awhile, where certain connections and possible hints of themes begin to well up over time. And I think that with Figure Minus Fact, Clark's latest such work, I may have hit upon something.

Clark's cinema is a bit like the poetry of Lyn Hejinian. Both artists are resolute in their focus on hard, concrete images and are only as willing to dart off into the theoretical as is allowable while tethered to the observable universe. At the same time, the work seems to resist what we might call phenomenology in other contexts, because (unlike, say, Brakhage, or Charles Olson) we are not continually redirected to the membrane of the perceiver, the noesis / noema conflicts. Things are joined to other things, and this tends to build emotive contiguities across time.

I fear I am getting too abstruse here, so let me return to the film in question.  In the first shot of Figure Minus Fact, Clark shows us what looks like a bulbous Expressionist painting in pink and black, a biomorphic Guston. This image, or one like it, comes back near the end of the film. It may in fact be a biological object, like a cross-section of muscle tissue or possibly pooling lipids. We don't know. In the second shot, which is one of the most unassumingly dazzling I've seen in a very long time, Clark moves the camera gently upward inside a bell tower, along the inverted shape of the bell itself, as a shaft of blue light bisects the screen. We eventually see the weighted pulley mechanism that tolls the bell, although we hear nothing. Later on, we will see inside the swaying bells from below, their clappers immobilized. A hand thrusts a handwritten message toward the camera: don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

Much of Figure Minus Fact is comprised of portraits and still lives that recall classical painting, but are gradually altered in terms of color. One of Clark's frequent decisions is to saturate a scene or a body or set of bodies in a dense cobalt blue, a tone that alludes to oil painting while also transmitting to the eye a penetrative electric vibration characteristic of digital video. This positions the piece on the precipice of art and technology, aesthetics and science.

And this seems to be the zone Clark means for us to consider, as a creative as well as a social problem. The end of the piece features images of swimmers and schoolchildren, in the ocean or with their hands in tanks, engaging in hands-on interface with (presumably unwilling) sharks, rays, and other aquatic life. Research has devolved into tactile entertainment, the thrill of touching the forbidden. And this is perhaps where Clark's postulated problem, "figure minus fact," can end up.

Or, to put it another way. The film is mysterious and achingly beautiful at times, employing that "prick" of the affect that Roland Barthes described so well in his Camera Lucida. There is nothing at all wrong with the experience of wonder in the face of the world, and in truth, an affective desire that exceeds mere positivism is probably necessary if we are to actually save the natural world from destruction. We must love nature, not merely need it. But the flip-side of that emotional investment, of course, is the privileging of desire over fact altogether, the selfish imposition of ego ("fake news!") when nature tells us what we don't want to hear. Clark's film plunges us, it seems, into the defining philosophical chiasmus of our age. Yet another example of her peerless artistry.