By Harry Bayley
When I watch a film, I want to see something. It’s how we read the screen, and how we construct meaning. A tear across the cheek of a femme fatale designates tragedy, a wide shot of a character in a vast landscape evokes loneliness. What about films that intentionally avoid this, what about those where images are obscure, films that deny easy interpretation?
Throughout Queer East we have seen images which resist categorisation. An obscure image could be described as something which is not clear, an image where we cannot see what exactly is going on, one which asks us to look deeper.
Take this image from The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience (2021) a Filipino production directed by Mac Andre Arboleda from April Lin 林森‘s “Harvesting the Fruits of Monstrosity”’ program. The Function of Fiction seeks to abandon temptations to define asexuality, resisting expectation to be “understood” in categorical terms. We see the inside of their room, pages of a book titled The History of Sex displayed in close-ups call to the words “our future” and “bodies”. Shots blend into one another as we dart across the interior hearing stories of how the protagonists have been interrogated about their sexuality.
This image is obscured with a vibrant glitch taking on the appearance of an oil spill, this texture feels wet, as if it is flowing out from inside them spilling out all over the screen. We cannot see the whole image, specific parts: face, poster, and bedframe are all obstructed from view. The quality of the image makes it hard to find much detail in the scene, boundaries are blurred, sharp edges and curves are difficult to make out. You see a person sitting underneath the window whose identity is obscured; we are unable to define exactly who or what we are looking at.
The placement of this obstructive layer in the frame draws a comparison between the two, one appears to be a person, the other something unknown formless, an intrusion, spreading out across the frame. Being about the refusal to define one’s sexuality in categorised terms, the use of this amorphous form spread across the screen disregards boundaries and obstructs what the film desires to withhold.
In contrast to The Function of Fiction where obscurity is attained through VFX, Taiwan Video Club (1999) directed by Lana Lin from the “Glitch! Rewind. Then We…” programme curated by Hsieh I-Hsuan and Chen Huei-Yin uses a more obscure analogue medium. Shot on videotape, Taiwan Video Club is a short documentary about Taiwanese immigrants living in the United States exchanging tapes of their favourite Taiwanese opera. The film explores how these low-grade tapes connect these women to their native culture. We hear stories of tapes going missing and anecdotes of how much these operas mean to them. The use of filming onto tape as a medium calls to the clarity of the present which is lost through the recording process, colour and depth is crushed into the cassette’s magnetic tape.
By recording directly onto tape the quality of the image is poor, especially in sequences where we are looking at recorded tape footage playing on the TV. The image begins to degrade much like these digital artefacts, and the memories of our protagonists seem to adapt to similar distanced layers – tape on tape. The aesthetic of the film asks us to look harder and become closer to the image to make sense of it so close in fact we can no longer read, mirroring the actions of the protagonist trying to make out the different actors on screen. The digital noise spreads across the image creating faint horizontal lines, colour is constructed in groups of pixels. This brings a significant tactile quality to the image, this tactility allowing us to hold onto these relics from the past being able to better associate a texture, a feeling or experience to the image.
Disconnect (2024) directed by E8 and Janice Kei employs a similar strategy in a different way, taking inspiration from the early 2000s and internet culture. Disconnect presents itself as two souls reminiscing sexual fantasies, stories and memories together, narration leads us through a hyperpop montage of images. We see a person in a park eating strawberries to explicit sequences of people in bondage. No one image is left alone, each sequence has multiple layers of not only different images but different formats spreading out across the screen at once. Rather than something more subtle like Taiwan Video Club, Disconnect takes a more maximalist approach. For instance, take this image. Here we have multiple mediums, blending what seems to be digital illustration, 3D modelling, still photography and animation. This scene comes towards the end of the film, as things are reaching their climax.
We have in the background a rose, a symbol of love and desire, layered behind a digital grid trapping it in the background. These dismembered bodies connected through black scribbles. One scribble spells on the Mandarin Chinese character “to die”. These could be different ideas of self potentially gesturing towards the different kinds of people we have inside of us, some left dismembered, left to die. Somewhere in the centre of the image, there is a spiral, something hypnotic asking us to look further drawing us into the depth of the image.
Disconnect approaches memory as something much more chaotic than Taiwan Video Club, rather than something specific and fading, these memories are vivid and multitudinous. In a different way to Taiwan Video Club questioning the permanence of memory through the use of a degrading medium Disconnect’s obscurity questions not our ability to hold onto images of the past but, where we hold our memories, in a world where we are constantly assaulted with visual information how do we decide what to keep, and more importantly what is meaningful?
By rejecting a rich, high resolution or easily interpretable image these films provoke debate and translation, my interpretation is one of many equally valid readings. I feel as though The Function of Fiction wants me to come close and touch the oiliness of the image to have intimacy with this form on screen.
These obscure images challenge film aesthetics and the medium is perhaps the message. To take from Hito Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image (2009):
“By [the poor image] losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the “original,” but on the transience of the copy.”
Illustrated in Taiwan Video Club, these copies bring people together to create networks of enthusiasts and shared histories. In a more contemporary way these networks have moved online and contain experimental, excluded, forgotten material but also large amounts of pornography. No online act of militant preservation, file sharing or pirating is free from pornographic material. Disconnect chooses not to close the pop up ads but instead to engage with the pornographic image.
An obscured or poor image is attractive due to what it does not say, the many layers of debates and translations it provokes. The space between the creation of the image and an individual’s interpretation is what draws me to them, the different possibilities and paths spreading out in front me.