Toby Ashworth “Tectonic memories”

Ashworth, Toby 2023. Tectonic memories: Film, geology and archives in Diana Vidrascu’s Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (2019). Studies in World Cinema. https://doi.org/10.1163/26659891-bja10024

Janine Marchessault has written that “new ecological approaches to media studies, or media studies approaches to ecology, ask us to see relationships between things in terms of a broader continuum rather than as discrete temporalities and objects” (2017: 205). Indeed, she posits that the question of ‘before’ and ‘after’ becomes markedly less relevant when discussing longue-durée processes since everything is connected and the conditions from one lead into the other: “There is no before or after, there is only process” (264). (2)

The island is, therefore, “either from before or for after humankind” (2004: 9); thinking of islands short-circuits understandings of our coevalness with the geological, re-calibrating conceptions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ to dramatic effect. Witnessing the emergence of new land from under the sea, human perceivers are made radically aware not only of the falsity of their assumption that the earth’s geological formation is complete, as Deleuze suggests, but also that geological processes can have discrete and perceptible manifestations. Deleuze is particularly interested in the imaginative potential of islands; of particular use here, though, is his characterisation of the relation between, on the one hand, the emergence of an island as a product of the processual non-human geological materiality of the earth, and, on the other, the affective contours of human encounters with such novel geological formations. (4)

Cinema’s ability – indeed, its proclivity – to record the ephemeral or contingent is widely acknowledged; Mary Ann Doane’s contention is that it “directly confronts the problematic question of the representability of the ephemeral, of the archivability of presence” (2002: 25). Tiago de Lucameanwhile, lends a sense of greater urgency to the medium’s “duty to record phenomenal realities on the verge of disappearance” (2022: 23). The spectacular event of eruption and the materiality of a new island are both subject to a recording or documentary impulse – the ephemeral nature of which is well-adapted to the cinematic medium – while simultaneously posing challenges to the medium’s audiovisual and temporal strategies of recording. (5)

Birth of an Island is an example of a documentary approach to volcanic islanding that attempts to avoid, but eventually proves, what media historian John Durham Peters identifies as “the productive impossibility of capturing what exists” (2015: 11). The film (and most particularly, its narrator) seeks to present a comprehensibly scaled, chronological, totalising account of the emergence of Surtsey, but in the interstices of this encounter of an archiving and indexical medium with the archival-indexical materiality of geology, there emerges a productive excess that reveals the difficulty of fixing and controlling the meanings of the volcanic process. (7)

Vidrașcu’s film, in contrast, eschews the scalar, narrative approach exhibited in the Icelandic film, in favour of an unfixed, nonchronological, polyphonic and interdisciplinary account of three (relatively) temporally distant but spatially local tectonic events. Moving beyond a conventional narrative approach, the film includes the voices of several different residents of the Azores whose accounts of islands and earthquakes are derived from divergent forms of experience and knowledge. The film uses its own materiality (it is entirely filmed on analogue film stock of different types) to comment on the speculative (im)materiality of the disappeared islands, while its soundtrack, like that of Birth of an Island, unfolds in abstract form alongside the images. Unlike Birth of an Island, then, and as its speculative subtitle indicates, Volcano is characterised by an attention to and a preference for that which is in excess of documentary recording, and for what speculative futures might emerge from the polyphonies of the volcanic and cinematic archive. (7)

That a coalition between forms of acquired empirical knowledge and imagined, innate, or affective forms of knowledge is required for ‘volcanic island knowledge’ is reflected in Volcano, whose polyphonic attention to volcanic events incorporates factual records, embodied human memories and speculative visual abstraction. (9)

In Volcano, likewise, the unnamed speakers refer to events and places that are not always explicitly named or described, and more often than not they gesture towards mystery, imprecision and personal resonance rather than to scientific or empirical accounts. In so doing, they contribute to the film’s weaving together of the multiple material traces and immaterial memories of volcanic events into a dispersed and collaborative exploration of the coeval human and non-human histories of the volcanic. (10)

In particular, the film’s approach to human perspectives and its loosening of temporal linearity reveal the coevalness of human and non-human time. Smaill argues that Guzmán’s style of interview brings about “the decentring of human duration, understanding it to be subordinated to, and witnessed by, the open duration of the non-human” (2020: 161). This is through the positioning of interviewees within the frame but also through their temporal presentation “in a simultaneous duration, rather than suspended in time, above, removed, and classifying nature” (161). For Smaill, then, Guzmán’s film “allows […] simultaneous duration to emerge precisely because it elaborates a web of ideas, juxtaposing different events rather than seeking the causal relationships that structure linear history” (161). In Volcano, meanwhile, the human speakers recount, in half-formed sentences that begin without preamble and out of chronological order, their relation to the radical eventhood of the volcanic eruptions, the formation of new islands and the transformation of the landscape’s archival materiality. (10)

The decentring of the human voice in Volcano is partially brought about by its relegation from a position of absolute authority over the images, to one where the imprecision and incompleteness of human accounts is foregrounded. (11)

In its unsettled, shifting effort to make contact with the disappeared islands through these traces and legacies, the film shows that such traces are not reliably to be found in the traditional archive, which cannot host such an event in all its scales and effects. Instead, the medium of film and its experimental excesses are made, here, to convey the contingency and coeval materialities of the sudden geological event. Among these excesses are Vidrașcu’s interventions in the medium, which interrupt film’s indexical link to filmed landscapes and project towards forms of visuality that are detached from representation but produced from archival footage, generating a textured and layered account. During Constância’s narration, beginning immediately after he names the island of Sabrina, an insistent, pulsing music begins to be heard under his voice, which increases in volume and continues after his narration ends. A sequence of three microscopic still images of geological samples fill the frame, two showing brightly coloured crystalline structures and the third a monochromatic conglomeration of more rounded particles. Having cycled through these images, holding each for just a few seconds, there is a sudden jump cut to a bright white frame within which there floats an abstract, black form, the lower edge of which fizzles as its blackness is replaced with a fast-moving, red-tinged tracking shot of a landscape held within the island-like shape. The shape is derived from an earlier shot of a small offshore island and is produced using an Oxberry optical printer and the matte technique, whereby an area of the surface of the film is masked, leaving it transparent, allowing another image or images to emerge behind it when the two are combined. Described by co-writer Johan Härnsten in a 2019 introduction to the film as a “celluloid eruption” that “[opens] up volcanic rifts within the film frame itself”, in the emergence of this abstract form, Vidrașcu’s account of the island now screens a particularly jarring contrast between epistemologies of the disappeared volcanic islands. (14)

Through the material and representational surface of a medium made transparent, then, Vidrașcu discloses the ongoing existence of the no-longer-material, lost, yet remembered and archived volcanic islands. To return to Peters’ contention that, in so-called elemental media, we might find a site for the ‘disclosure of being’, is seems that in Volcano, the opening of a gap in the surface of the filmic medium through which the form of an island emerges – like the emergence of the island itself through the elemental medium of the sea – performs a disclosure of an ontological entity (the earth) and its concomitant processes, as it “gathers its strength to punch through to the surface” (Deleuze, 2004: 9). Vidrașcu’s effort to capture the multiple material and immaterial aspects of the tectonic events through different forms of visual attention emerges, here, as a disclosure of the plural ontological status of the lost islands – material and immaterial, remembered and forgotten – as well as of the broader geological record, with the insistent reminder that both host polyphonic and multiscalar archival legacies that haunt the present. (18)