Laura Waddington

/Press Archive

Gardens of the Moon : The Modern Cine-Nocturne

By Scott M. MacDonald

Border (2004) by Laura Waddington

British video-maker Laura Waddington’s cine-nocturne Border is an unusually direct and powerful invocation of a political struggle, a set of events that took place in France in 2002 but that continue to have obvious implications for many nations. Border is a meditation on Waddington’s many days and nights spent with Afghan and Iraqi refugees in and around the Sangatte Red Cross refugee camp in northern France near the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. As is true in Kristallnacht and Innocence and Despair, the political elements of Border are filtered through the emotional consciousness of the filmmaker, but here that consciousness is more obvious: Waddington narrates Border, providing information about the refugees and her experiences with them. She has commented on her use of narration:

After, with Border I had the constant feeling I couldn’t communicate what I’d seen in Sangatte. I knew it was impossible for me to speak from the point of view of the refugees. All I could do was speak about what it is to come from a society that allowed this situation to happen. I knew I could only leave a very small and incomplete trace. I think Border is a video full of loneliness, and one in which I am mistrustful of my own attempt to speak. In the voice over, I tried to say very little and to talk in an understated way, in the hope the audience would keep in their minds, the incompleteness of the picture I gave.48

Filmed at night, using only the illumination from the lights of passing cars and sometimes streetlights and searchlights, Waddington’s depiction of the refugees is deeply poignant, both visually lovely and full of the deep respect she came to have for them; her narration explains, “Even when the refugees came back gassed or injured, they’d talk to me so warmly and sometimes laugh and sing. I’d rarely met people so dignified and strong.” Individual Iraqi or Afghani refugees are seen hiding in brush beside a road, walking toward or away from the camera, demonstrating against the French decision to close Sangatte. Early in the film, a young man is seen dancing with a blanket under a streetlight (Figure 10.13)—he seems to evoke the powerful, enduring spirit of the men and women Waddington met and, in some instances, traveled through the darkness with.

Waddington’s video camera is handheld and sometimes moves with her gestures so that it captures and creates streaks of light. The shots of men hiding in a field near a road are granular, reminiscent of some of Blakelock’s more abstract Moonlights; the blanket dancer’s spirited movements evoke flickering flame; and within the action of the demonstration, as refugees get knocked around, Waddington’s camera is expressive of the violence: the images captured by the camera look like abstract expressionist painting. While these stylistic aspects of the film might strike viewers as “arty,” in fact, with a single exception, what we see in Border is precisely what the camera recorded. Waddington has explained:

It [Border] was shot with a very small mini-DV camera with the shutter open wide since the only ambient light was from distant lamps on the motorways or passing car headlights and that is indeed what led to the stuttering effect. I didn’t work at all on the image, except that because the police would sometimes flash very bright torches into my lens if they found me, I began to develop white points all over my images, which I believe were burnt pixels. I passed the images through a computer in post production to remove those white spots but I didn’t change or correct anything else.49

In other words, the beauty of the nocturne here is less an artistic gesture than an effect of the collaboration between the video camera and night itself.

Throughout Border, the visuals are contextualized by music composed by Simon Fisher Turner— night music, reminiscent of Debussy—which begins even before the visuals and is interrupted only during the violence of the demonstration.50 Once the music and visuals are under way, Waddington begins commenting, in a quiet, somewhat nostalgic voice, about her memories of meeting with, running with, and in many cases losing contact with refugees; what these experiences meant to her; and, insofar as she has been able to determine, what they meant to those refugees she was able to make contact with later on, many of whom wanted only to forget their experience of being on the run.

Border suggests different forms of solitude from the other nocturnes that have been discussed here. The refugees are, of course, isolated from their homelands and in many instances from loved ones, and they function out of sight of all but those charged with controlling or harassing them in and around the camp (and the few who, like Waddington, made records of their presence). And while Waddington mentions near the end of Border that “more than sixty thousand refugees passed through there,” she herself is isolated from these men, women, and children, not only in terms of her background and as a person witnessing and evoking their plight, but also in the deeper sense that she is unable to ameliorate the suffering she sees. All she can do is record the little that can be seen of the refugees struggling through the night to find their way to England and perhaps to a better life. In this case, the nocturnal darkness is simultaneously a literal darkness (one never lit by natural light, but only by the lights of the institutions charged with keeping the refugees under control and in Sangatte) and an ethical one: these refugees are the casualties of political decisions in Western nations that are now refusing to accept the responsibility for the damage their decisions have caused.

In its way, Border is as beautiful, even as romantic, as the musical nocturnes I discussed earlier and as Whistler’s and Blakelock’s moonlit landscapes, not because Waddington is comfortable with what she films or is ignoring the suffering her imagery cannot quite document, but because she realizes, in retrospect, that the experience of meeting these people was powerful and revelatory. What Waddington was witness to, and what she tries to communicate, is the beauty and strength of a group of people motivated by hope to attempt what seems impossible. What she saw in the darkness around Sangatte was always moving and sometimes tragic, but it was also a form of spiritual light in the darkness, something to be celebrated and remembered, brought insofar as possible out of the shadows.

Coda

In Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America, Sarah Burns makes clear that during the latter decades of the nineteenth century painters and the audiences for their work often understood the experience of looking at painting as a form of “rest cure.” The culture was coming to understand that “the ferocious pace of progress had far outstripped the capacity of the nervous system to keep up,” and what had come to be called “nervous exhaustion, or nervous bankruptcy, was the inevitable result.”51 A variety of new therapies were developed for dealing with nervous exhaustion, and within this new therapeutic framework, “painting functioned as a rest cure for the eyes—a vacation from the labors that forced them to exceed their capacities”; “landscapes most effective for eye and brain rest were those in which nothing happened, in which lack of incident and inflection enhanced the pleasurable action of pure color, light, and atmosphere on the senses” (Figures 10.14–10.15).52

We, too, live within what can only be called a culture of distraction, during a time when serenity is at a premium. Not only are we children of a century of unparalleled violence, but the globalization of electronic media during the past half century has made the world’s ongoing agonies an incessant interruption to our peace of mind. What is new in recent decades, of course, is the proliferation of computer and telephone screens. While the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the general illumination of public and private space—creating a nostalgia for the beauties of night that instigated the history of musical, painterly, and photographic nocturnes—the electronic revolution has taken illumination to an entirely new level.

Increasingly, modern people, especially young people, seem virtually hypnotized by illuminated screens, so fixated on these tiny lighted spaces that the light or lack of it in their general surround has become nearly irrelevant. Indeed, even within a darkened movie theater, many cannot resist an ongoing engagement with their smartphones, escaping from one of the few remaining public experiences where people share the semidarknessminto a global network of illuminated screens. I see the recent proliferation of cine-nocturnes as the modern reprise of a previous era’s fascination with nocturnal scenes, still another attempt by artists to remind us that the effects of technological advances are complex; that when something is gained, something else is lost; or in this instance, that when lighting becomes increasingly omnipresent, certain experiences of darkness become increasingly powerful and meaningful.53

The field of film history has adopted the term salvage ethnography from anthropology to describe the attempts by ethnographic filmmakers to provide records of ancient cultures on the verge of, or in the process of, dramatic change. The quiet, evocative experiences provided by the cine-nocturnes I have discussed here can be understood as analogous to salvage ethnography on at least two levels: they evoke forms of direct sensual experience that seem increasingly rare in our ever-more-digital world, and they are made for audiences who are willing to find their way to those precious, often financially endangered, screening rooms that are capable of providing these alternative moving-image experiences—screening rooms, that is, that are equipped with first-rate 16 mm and digital projection. Emulsion based cinema increasingly seems a meteor in the night sky of culture, but if this chapter can contribute to the continued exhibition of the 16 mm films I have described, within the now dominant context of the new digital image-making technologies, the writer will feel well rewarded. And should the remarkable film and video works I have described come to be more broadly recognized as significant contributions to a hallowed tradition in music, painting, and photography, then art history, as well as film history, will be the beneficiary.

Footnotes

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