8/6/2019 Outer Bodies

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Outer Bodies

Mihaela Brebenel

With a suggestion to open our senses and a review promising somatic

experiences,Swans

has caught its Berlinale audience by the hand. Sadly, it let go mid-way, leaving a rather unsettleing sense of abruptness.Director Hugo Vieira da Silvas cinematic investigation into the image of the

human body aims at creating an affective attunement between body of film and bodies ofhis audience. In turn, its editing choices and recurrent themes surfacing in the images

have the ability to create another type of body, to which audiences do not seem to be ableto connect with. It is a body of the performer, an artificial body; its internal workings

visible to the audience; its intentions persuasive, and its making exposed. Somehow, atthe end of the screening one is left with a feeling similar to going to the chocolate factory

as a child: excited about the prospect of witnessing the process in its entirety, with all thehidden and mysterious passages, but saddened by this disclosure, acutely sensing

something was lost.By the same token, Swans displays body paraphernalia in full throttle, looking for

hands that come together in clingy gestures, making visual parallels with large machines performing human-like actions. Touch is visible, the body is in focus. Central to this

large array of touch-performances is a comatose body, the epicenter binding allcharacters but leaving underdeveloped the body of film, the only one that could offer an

opening for an empathic vision.At times, the audiences senses are opened, as advised prior to screening; there

are scenes in which moving images move the spectators bodies. Sadly, these images areintermittent; they are just flashes of a desired body, of potentialities projected onto the

images. And it comes again as sheer dissatisfaction when there is no sense of attunementdue to the lack of a body to attune to. Notwithstanding, multiple bodies are offered to our

senses though the images: they stand before the gaze, inviting our touch, smell, taste.They are not making offerings for visual empathy, but only inhabiting a moving space

before us: clothed or naked, appealing or appalling, comic or tragic.Repeatedly, these bodies are merely presented on show for our vision, they could

never be part of it, one might argue. Nevertheless, a truthful feeling for the other body isimpossible in as much as we think we can imagine being that other, but the empathic

vision that the film wishes to convey is one where there is feeling for the other entailed inits irreducible and inaccessible difference. Why I believe it fails to achieve this? Because

it comes full circle in this process and can only lay in front of our eyes bodies that blurtheir own inaccessible differences. And because the film relies so heavily on these bodies

to facilitate the emergence of a body for itself, it expels empathic vision through anexcessive flow of touched and touching bodies. Thus, it becomes an outer body, one

which we look at from a distance, like it is believed a comatose persons vision of his/herbody might be.

Swans (Germany, Portugal, 2011)

Director: Hugo Vieira da SilvaBerlinale Forum