Discussing the “liveness” of Mitchell’s Live Cinema work necessitates careful scrutiny of the digital methods on which these productions are predicated. Feeding multiple digital inputs, captured by microphones and digital cameras, through a media server, rendering them, and composing the live edit in real time as it is instantaneously projected onto a screen above the stage is, as Mitchell attests, “pushing at the edge of what the technology can do” (Dramaten 2012). Her theatricalisation of cinematic processes makes production, post-production, projection and reception all become simultaneously
available for spectatorial scrutiny.146 Indeed, this very simultaneity is what renders the
digital substructure of these shows visible. The ability to combine camera and microphone outputs in real time is contingent on digital technologies that convert image and sound input into code, which is fed instantaneously through a computer media server where any additional processing occurs. In response to the cueing of an offstage programmer, that aggregated digital content is sampled from and routed through a projector and speakers according to a pre-determined cueing sequence – nothing is
recorded; rather, it is streamed.
From this it is apparent how Mitchell’s instrumentalisation of technology intersects with the major debates around the implications of media (old and new) for perception. The link between her digital tools and their ability to facilitate a “modernist temporality” (Bay-Cheng 2010: 88) allows us to perceive Live Cinema as fulfilling Lev Manovich’s promise that, through the language of new media, “directions that were closed off at the turn of the century when [cinematic realism] came to dominate the
modern moving-image culture are now again beginning to be explored” (2001: 308).147
In exploring those closed off directions, Sarah Bay-Cheng’s work on Gertrude Stein offers material for a fascinating comparison between Mitchell and a key modernist literary experimenter for whom early cinema and literary strategies of representing
146See also Hadjioannou & Rodosthenous (describing …some trace of her): “The experience of
time, that is, is refashioned in the intermedial in-between of theatrical presence and cinematic pastness” (2011: 49).
147 This addresses the criticism, implicit in Birringer’s analysis, that Mitchell’s work is merely a
subjectivity became deeply aligned. Bay-Cheng foregrounds the importance of a “continuous present” (2004: 30) in Stein’s modernist experiments with linguistic repetition, particularly with reference to her “early textual portraits” of friends, which “attempted to capture the essence of a person in language,” both “as an individual and as the product of artistic creation” (ibid: 29). Crucially for the present study, Bay-Cheng demonstrates the link between Stein’s “continuous present” and the cinema: “Stein recognised that in film the eye has no memory of the individual frame, seeing only the images run together in movement” (ibid: 30). Repetition was, as Stein expressed in her deliberately naïve style, a linguistic strategy that replicated the temporal quality of cinema where “by a continuously moving picture of any one there is no memory of any other thing and there is that thing existing” (cited in Bay-Cheng 2004: 29). The quick succession of stills running through a projector, each subtly different from the one it follows, gave Stein direct access to the subject in what Woolf might have described as its very moment of being.
“Liveness” thus becomes crucial in foregrounding Mitchell’s representational strategies so as to, like cinema for Stein, lead spectators further into the “thing existing”. In this work, technology does not join with humans to create new forms; rather, it becomes a means of manifesting the temporal symbiosis of perception and creation:
seeing the making of releases the meaning of this work. However, although Stein, as
spectator of the archetypal film she described, remained temporally and spatially distant from the persons or objects represented in the light dancing on a cinema’s projection screen, Mitchell finds digital means of bringing all elements – including the spectator – into a single moment of temporal simultaneity. The “thing existing” merges with the thing looking.
Of course, live digital streaming has radically reformed the very process of still projection that inspired Stein’s literary strategy. More so than cinema, early photography offers a template for understanding Mitchell’s technique, and offers the means of connecting Stein’s interest in cinema with the auratic effects produced on
Mitchell’s stage. Interestingly, Walter Benjamin provides the theoretical tools for braiding all these strands together. Benjamin’s very interest in “aura” signals the generative ambiguity that lends his work longevity – even though his “Work of Art” essay was the most materialistic of his writings, the centrality of aura to the discussion betrays his interest in the numinous, and thus signals his usefulness in a reading of Mitchell’s work. Indeed, despite Benjamin’s endorsement of his montage techniques, Brecht himself was less generous towards what we might view as Benjamin’s productive ambivalence; Brecht called the “Work of Art” essay “all mysticism, under the guise of anti-mysticism” (Wolin 1994: 141).
In his essay, Benjamin stopped short of claiming that all forms of technological reproduction drive a wedge between subject and aura, describing how, in certain
photographs, the “human countenance” acts as aura’s “last entrenchment”.148
Discussing the history of the portrait he described how “in the fleeting expression of a human face, the aura beckons from early photographs for the last time. This is what
gives them their melancholy and incomparable beauty” (2008 [1936]: 27).149 In part,
Benjamin attributed this to technology. In his “Little History of Photography” (1931), he had described the effects of the long exposure times – determined by the daguerreotype and salted paper printing – as “the way light struggles out of darkness,” or the “breathy halo” (2008 [1931]: 283). These “breathy halos’” that Benjamin perceived in early photography’s soft and luxurious portraits correspond with the way Stein saw consciousness emerge in a succession of individual stills. Although they are writing about technologies belonging to different eras, both are interested in the powerful effect of
148 To be clear, Benjamin does suggest that the living person captured on film foregoes their aura:
“For the aura is bound to his presence in the here and now. There is no facsimile of the aura. The aura surrounding Macbeth on the stage cannot be divorced from the aura which, for the living spectators, surrounds the actor who plays him” (2008 [1936]: 31). Mitchell has worked free of this limitation by making production and reception simultaneous in a situation where all parties share the same space. Rather than substitute the audience for the camera, Mitchell enjoins the participation of both.
149 He dates the death of photographic aura to the pictures of deserted Paris streets taken by Atget
at the turn of the century (27; see also “Little History” 285). Benjamin has pointed towards the historical variability of the aura: as technology and historical and social context alter, the conditions for aura’s emergence may realign, as they do in Mitchell’s work.
something existing in front of a lens, and the crucial role of temporality in creating that effect. Although a photograph is a fixed physical artefact (rather than a moving image), individual moments of the “thing existing” superimposed to form a highly auratic image. In a revealing exchange with the film critic Mark Kermode, Mitchell explained
how the visual inspiration for the video output in …some trace of her came from the early
photographs of Lady Clementina Hawarden, who was active in the 1840s and 1850s. Mitchell suggested that through these photographs “you really get a sense in which you cross a threshold […] You feel you can stretch your hand through and touch that period” (Kermode 2008). Her comments chime with those of Roland Barthes, who also sits comfortably inside this alternative critical context for Live Cinema, and his concept
of the punctum. Based on his discovery (shortly after her death) of a photograph of his
mother as a child, Barthes developed the punctum as a way of making sense of this
photograph’s peculiar ability to evoke in his mind “the impossible science of the unique being”
(2000 [1980]: 71).150 Often locating it in an object discernable somewhere within the
image’s representational field, Barthes conceived of the punctum as a trigger that would
cause the viewer to add to the photograph, but which remained grounded in what was
already there (ibid: 55). For him, the punctum was a gateway into a “subtle beyond,”
gesturing towards “the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together” (ibid: 59). Although
Brecht was hostile towards photography for its lack of critical power, Barthes preferred photography to film, where images moved so fast that “I don’t have time: in front of the
screen, I am not free to shut my eyes” (ibid: 55). A photograph with a punctum, on the
other hand, causes a whole field to develop in the mind of the viewer; describing another photograph, Barthes wrote: “On account of her necklace, the black woman in her Sunday best has had, for me, a whole life external to her portrait” (ibid: 57).
150According to Barthes not all photographs possess this ability, nor can one manufacture puncta.
This corresponds with a detail in Woolf’s Moments of Being. Regarding the image of her own (long
dead) mother, she writes: “If one could give a sense of my mother’s personality one would have to be an artist. It would be as difficult to do that, as it should be done, as to paint a Cézanne” (1985:
Mitchell spoke to Kermode using similar terms, describing Hawarden’s portraits
as “tak[ing] us back into the 19th century,” to the extent that Mitchell and her team
could “feel, taste, smell the period” (Kermode 2008). His response that …some trace of her
was best described as “an animated still photograph rather than a film” is perceptive and
also answers Birringer’s charge that Mitchell’s actors are too still on camera. From Waves
onwards, the director has predominantly used cameras to isolate immobile actors (often their faces) in extreme close-up. The high magnification of their faces, often projected in tandem with stream of consciousness narration and soundscapes, meant that even the tiniest movements were perceptible over the course of lengthy, locked-off “exposures”.
Ben Whishaw (playing Myshkin) reported that, during …some trace of her rehearsals,
Mitchell gave him the note: “you’re going to have to try and think of something very interesting [during this close-up]. Just have a thought going on in your head so that there’s some trace of something in your eyes” (Grylls 2011b).
Birringer, then, is right to point out that Mitchell’s actors do inhabit a different tempo on screen to their frenetic activity as stage technicians, but this is the result of the intermedial exploration of photography through film. Minute alterations in the physiognomy, following on in quick succession, generate an auratic presence that combines Stein’s repetition of minor-differences with the ghostly exposures of early photography. Although Birringer finds that these acting bodies “do not resonate,” their screen close-ups – especially in tandem with thoughts and subjective sound – resonate strongly. However, although facial close-ups are a consistent component of these Live Cinema shows, the ability of technology to generate aura isn’t limited to the involvement of a “human countenance”.
Importantly, Stein attempted to capture objects, as well as people, in a moment
of consciousness. She saw her poem Tender Buttons (1914) – which used alienating syntax,
unusual rhythms and surprising word juxtapositions to describe mundane objects – as a new form of realism in which the optical register was privileged: “I was trying to live in
looking, and looking was not to mix itself up with remembering” (Frost 2003: 23). Once again, Stein’s formal strategy seeks to bring “existing” into focus.
It is one of Mitchell’s major visual influences – Francesca Woodman – who links together the various theoretical and artistic concerns of this chapter thus far. Like Hawarden’s images, Woodman’s black and white photographs (mainly taken in the
1970s) inspired the visual imagery of …some trace of her, and have been a consistent
reference point for Mitchell and her team across both naturalistic and Live Cinema
modes – most visibly On Being an Angel #1 (Providence, Rhode Island, 1977) provided the
poster for Mitchell’s A Dream Play (2005). Although Woodman committed suicide at the
age of 22, she left behind a vast body of work including over 10,000 negatives. Most of these are self-portraits; Woodman favoured long exposure times that frequently resulted in the photographer’s body blending with the derelict surroundings in which she chose to shoot. Woodman admired Stein, and played with language herself, forming “pirouettes of speech” that she carried everywhere and referred to as “Steinwriting”. Kris Somerville describes that “The yellowed pages of her journals are filled with oddly turned phrases: ‘just-breath summer,’ ‘sand thoughts all from the sea’ and ‘I get immersed in fog and grey monotones’” (2010: 80).
In a 1973 diary entry Woodman noted: “I think when I get home I should take pictures of objects: purse, hand, etc. ‘clues to a lost woman.’” (Somerville 2010: 82). Her
instruction could function as the title for the five final shots of Mitchell’s Wunschkonzert
(2008). She kept her camera running after Kroetz’s text ran out. Whereas his play ends with Fräulein Rasch, having swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills, sitting “quietly and thoughtfully” (Kroetz 1978: 36), Mitchell appended five minutes of extra imagery, created live. The extreme close-up on Fräulein Rasch projected above the stage cut out abruptly, and the screen stayed black for thirty seconds. When it went live again, it was clear that time had passed. A camera was positioned to capture a shot of the dining table. As this still life was projected onto the screen, and over the course of two minutes, a slowly dawning light illuminated the objects left strewn on the table – empty boxes of
pills, the wine bottle whose contents had been used to wash them down, and an empty glass, positioned next to a bowl where two goldfish circled. Other cameras were positioned to capture establishing shots of empty rooms. The video output cut next to Rasch’s empty kitchen, then thirty seconds later an overhead shot focused on her shoes, left empty in the hallway. It then cut to a shot of the empty bathroom, before giving way to the final composition – a close-up on a ticking alarm clock approaching 6 a.m. Suddenly the alarm went off, its shrill and violent ring cutting through the powerful silence that had accompanied this last sequence. Once it had stopped ringing the clock remained in focus a few moments longer, with the sound of birds faintly singing in the dawn. Then the screen cut to black and the show ended.
As in Mitchell’s naturalistic work, props became highly charged auratic objects
or, in the language of Barthes, functioned as puncta that evoked a whole lost life external
to the frame. Like Woodman’s “clues to a lost woman”, Mitchell’s use of technology to isolate, frame, and enlarge these objects, and to hold our focus on them for an excruciating length of time, meant that, despite her absence, Fräulein Rasch’s presence was strongly felt. Somerville writes that in Woodman’s photographs where the female subject blurs into objects and spaces, or leaves the frame altogether, the images are nonetheless haunted by “a felt presence in her absence” (2010: 82). As in Martin
Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, which Mitchell staged in 1999 and 2007, the failure of a
central protagonist to materialise doesn’t stop us imagining her.151
Barthes’ entry into the discussion moves us towards the psychoanalytical realm. The associations he documents, triggered by his mother’s image, invoke a peculiar blending of lens-based media and psychoanalysis that, as Margaret Iversen (1994) suggests, is productively read in relation to Lacan. In fact, Lacan’s theory of the mirror-
151The protean figure of Anne/Annie/Anya/Anoushka could never, of course resolve into a
single being (indeed, Mitchell asked Crimp to cut the first scene – a series of answer phone messages suggestive of a woman standing at the nexus of these various “attempts” – when she staged the play in 1999). Nevertheless, it triggers evocative associations that link to our reality. In the late 1990s, the allusions to an artist who had committed suicide – one speaker says should have been in a psychiatric unit rather than an art school – would likely invoke thoughts of Sarah
stage shines clarifying light on the obsessive attention paid to mirrors in Mitchell’s Live Cinema work, and on the theory of subjectivity that it animates.