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Ghost Image
By Hervé Guibert, Robert Bononno The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1982 Les Éditions de Minuit
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-13248-8
CHAPTER 1
GHOST IMAGE
PHOTOGRAPHY is also an act of love. Once, when my parents were still living in La Rochelle, in that large bright apartment entirely surrounded by a balcony overlooking the trees in the park and, a little further off, the sea, I decided to take a picture of my mother. I must have been eighteen years old, and I had returned home for the weekend. I suppose it was May or June, a sunny day, a day of cool, fresh, and gentle sunshine.
I had already photographed her on vacation with my father, without giving it much thought. They were quite ordinary pictures that said nothing of the relationship we may have had, of the attachment I may have felt for her, pictures that stubbornly revealed only a part of her, a physiognomy. Besides, most of the time my mother refused to be photographed, pretending that she was not photogenic, that the situation immediately put her on edge.
If I was eighteen, it must have been in 1973, and my mother, who was born in 1928, must have been forty-five, an age when she was still quite beautiful, but a desperate age, when I felt that she was at the threshold of old age, of sadness. I should mention that until then I had refused to photograph her because I didn't like her hairstyle, which was artificially curled and lacquered into one of those terrible hairdos that my mother wore, alternating it with her permanents, and that encumbered her face, framed it inappropriately, hid it, falsified it. My mother was one of those women who take pride in resembling an actress, Michèle Morgan in this case, and who go to their hairdresser with a picture taken from some magazine, so that the stylist, with the picture as his guide, re-creates for her the identical hair style. So my mother had her hair done almost like Michèle Morgan, whom I obviously began to hate.
My father forbade my mother to wear makeup or dye her hair, and when he photographed her he ordered her to smile, or he took the picture against her will while pretending to adjust the camera, so that she had no control over her image.
The first thing I did was to remove my father from the room where the picture was to be taken, to chase him away so that her image would no longer pass through the one he had created of her, through his need to keep up appearances, so that she was thus temporarily freed of all the pressure that had built up over more than twenty years, so that there was nothing left but our own complicity, free of husband and father, just a mother and her son. (Wasn't it in fact my father's death that I wanted to stage?)
The second thing was to rescue her face from that mess of a hairdo. As she crouched in the bathroom, I put her head under the faucet myself so that her hair would uncurl, and placed a towel over her head to keep her shoulders from getting wet. She was wearing a white slip. I had her try on several old dresses (I remembered them from my childhood), for example, the blue dress with flounces and white polka dots, which I associate with Sunday, with festivity, with summer, with pleasure; but either my mother could no longer "get into the dress," or the dress seemed too much to me, it assumed too much importance, was too loud, and ended up "hiding" my mother again, but in an entirely different way than my father had, although in retrospect, all our efforts served only to reveal her further. I combed her blonde shoulder-length hair for a long time so that it would hang absolutely straight on either side of her face, without volume, without form, letting the purity of her features show: her long, straight nose, her narrow jaw, her high cheekbones, and—why not, even if the photograph would be in black and white—her blue eyes. I put a little powder on her—very pale powder, almost white.
Then I led her into the living room, which was bathed in light, a gentle warm light, the enveloping and restful light of summer's beginning. I placed one of the white armchairs among the green plants, the fig tree, the rubber tree, angled so that the light would fall more gently upon it, and I lowered the blind a little to soften the light's intensity, which threatened to obliterate and flatten her face. I then removed anything "distracting" from the field of view, like the plexiglass table where the TV guides lay. My mother was sitting straight up in that armchair in her slip with the towel on her shoulders, waiting, but without any sign of stiffness, for me to finish my preparations. I noticed that her features had already relaxed, and that the little wrinkles that threatened to pinch her mouth had completely disappeared. (For a moment I was able to stop time and old age. Through my love for my mother, I turned back.) There she sat, majestic, like a queen before an execution. (I wonder now if it wasn't her own execution she was expecting, for once the picture was taken, the image fixed, the process of aging would continue, and this time at a dizzying speed, and at an age between forty-five and fifty, when it so brutally takes hold of a woman. I knew that once the shutter was released she would let herself go with detachment, with serenity, with an absolute resignation, and that she would continue to live with this deteriorating image without trying to recapture it in front of a mirror with beauty creams and masks ...)
I took her picture. At that moment, she was at the height of her beauty, her face completely smooth and relaxed. She didn't speak as I moved around her, and there was an imperceptible smile on her lips, undefinable, of peace, of happiness, as if she were being bathed by the light, as if this whirlwind circling slowly around her, at a distance, were the most gentle caress. I believe that at that moment she was happy with the image that I, her son, allowed her to have and that I was capturing without my father's knowledge. In fact, it's that: the image of a woman who has always been criticized by her husband, enjoying what she could never have, a forbidden image, and the pleasure between us was even greater as the forbidden burst into pieces. It was a suspended moment, a moment of peace, serene. In some of the pictures, I had her put on a big straw hat folded back, which was for me the young boy's hat in Death in Venice and which I occasionally wore. In addition, I may have been projecting my own image onto my mother's; wasn't the image of my adolescent desire also a confidence I made her assume?
The session was over. My father returned. My mother put her dress back on and quickly redid her hair with the help of curlers and a hair dryer. She became once again her husband's wife, the woman of forty-five, while the photograph, instantaneously, as if by magic, had suspended age, had made it only an absurd social convention. At that moment, my mother had been beautiful, more beautiful than she had ever been as a young woman. That is what I wanted to believe. I no longer recognized her, I wanted to forget her, to stop seeing her, to remain forever with the image we were going to extract from the developer.
My father had just bought the camera, a Rollei 35, and it was the first time I had used it. He had also bought a developing kit, which he had set up in the bathroom. We decided to process the film right away, and the time it took to process it corresponded to the time it took my mother to remove the powder from her face, dry her hair, and restore her earlier image. That earlier image had been totally, irrevocably reconstructed as we tried to create the chance image, the subversive image of the photograph. But that image didn't exist. Looking through the film against the bluish light of the bathroom, we saw that the entire roll of film was unexposed, blank from one end to the other. Since it was my father who had done the processing, and since the image that he was reluctantly supposed to develop was a denial of the one he had spent twenty years creating, for an instant I thought that this was a plot, a diversion, a mistake in processing, even if unconscious. But I had to confront the evidence: I hadn't completely attached the film in the camera. (We hadn't? I no longer remember.) It had slipped off the small black teeth that held it in place and advanced it, and I had photographed nothing. Blank, the essential moment lost, sacrificed. It was the opposite of awakening from a nightmare: the development of the film was like awakening from a dream-session, which, instead of being wiped away at once, becomes, with the reality of the absence of an image, a nightmare rather than a dream.
For my mother and myself it was a moment of despondency and pain, a sensation of powerlessness, of fatality, of irremediable loss. It wasn't a fire that had destroyed all our personal belongings, our intimate letters, photographs of our childhood. It might as well have been that fire. There was no question of doing the session over, it was impossible.
That blank moment (that blank death? since one can shoot "blanks") remained between my mother and me with the secret power of incest. It had imposed a silence between us. We never spoke about it, and I never photographed her again. And she grew old as I had suspected. In one year ten years passed. She had remained a forty-year-old woman but she became a fifty-year-old woman. Every time I saw her, I could barely look at her: the wrinkles that pinched her lips, hardened her mouth, that imperceptible rosiness, the slight fuzz that covered her cheeks—they all provoked my aversion. It hurt me to kiss her. It seemed as if I were awaiting her disfigurement. Only when she was old could I look at her again, love her again.
My parents had to move. They had to leave the large bright living room where the drama, in negativo, had taken place. They went to live in a flat and monotonous suburb. My father gave me the small camera. He bought a bigger one. To hand the big camera to his son gave my father pleasure, and he asked me to photograph my mother. All three of us found ourselves in the big living room for the last time before the move. In the viewfinder, the blank moment flashed with the same frequency as the small red light that indicated the right exposure, like a stabbing pain in my stomach, and at that very moment my mother's face suddenly, unexpectedly, relaxed, rebelled, miraculously resumed the expression I had given her during our first session. Through the viewfinder, in the space of an instant, my mother became beautiful again. It seemed that she was trying to convey to me a message of her sadness.
So this text will not have any illustrations except for a piece of blank film. For the text would not have existed if the picture had been taken. The picture would be in front of me, probably framed, perfect and false, even more unreal than a photograph from childhood—the proof, the evidence of an almost diabolical practice. More than a bit of sleight-of-hand or prestidigitation—a machine to stop time. For this text is the despair of the image, and worse than a blurred or fogged image—a ghost image ...
CHAPTER 2
FIRST LOVE
THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPHS I ever liked were the ones that appeared on record jackets, and later, movie posters—the ones that showed a singer or an actor. Their bodies, their faces. I used to kiss them. Some of them had been signed. I put them under the glass that was supposed to protect the oak surface of the dresser. When I withdrew my lips from the glass, I would momentarily leave a mist, which I would erase with a quick motion of my sleeve. Now it would make me smile to reveal the name of the singer or actor—does indeed make me smile—an operetta singer who was almost my father's double, Georges Guétary, and then Terence Stamp in the role of Toby Dammit. I was twelve-and-a-half. My parents took me to the movies only to see Louis de Funès on Sunday afternoon, or Pouic-Pouic, or The Hibernatus. The Fellini sketch in Spirits of the Dead was an accident. I at once fell in love with this kind of image, this kind of film, and for the first time I fell in love with a man's image, an extremely morbid image, the image of the devil.
My father took me to the Rank casting office (I remember the story now since I've just read in the papers that Rank has gone out of business), where he had given five francs to a doorman, and we left with two film stills. Though they weren't for sale, I managed to get hold of them. They had repeatedly been tacked up in the window displays in front of movie houses. With a piece of cotton lightly dipped in alcohol, I carefully tried to remove the stickers promoting the film's distribution, because they covered the image with names I wanted to chase away, the names of other idols who had unfairly been given top billing (Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon). Beneath the glass on the dresser, the light discolored the ektachrome print; the yellows became yellower, the greens greener, at once more transparent and more saturated, like a picture taken through a filter.
I can still see those photos very clearly, but I don't want to return to them, they have been with me for too long; now they are at the bottom of a box. They were repeatedly tacked to the canvas that covered the wall, then glued, then unglued from a door. Always too large or too small to be hung. Too often seen as well, seen to the point of becoming invisible, irritating. In the first (I don't know why, really, I just decided it was first), against a yellow background, Terence Stamp is wearing a black jacket with a high collar. His unkempt yellow hair, dirty and discolored, falls on his shoulders. His skin is waxy, and someone has drawn a spider over his left eyebrow. He looks into the camera. His two hands, joined together, are stretched toward the edge of the picture frame. He extends them toward the pretty blond girl with the cunning smile and very pale skin who tosses a ball that is too light across the airport lobby, and who will soon toss his head along the fallen bridge after the accident in the Alfa Romeo. In the second picture, with the greenish background, we see him standing on the same bridge; perhaps he is already dead, but he has returned. He is wearing a pair of mauve satin pants and an open white shirt revealing a sweaty chest; he looks haggard, the spider still hanging over his eyebrow.
At night, when I go to sleep, I move over to make room in my bed for the people in the picture. And I talk to them under the sheets ...
CHAPTER 3
THE PERFECT IMAGE
ISLE OF ELBA, August, 1979. I'm leading the life of a convalescent here, dazed by the lack of activity. I've been alone all afternoon in this sacristy made to look like a bedroom, while the others went to the beach. I daydream, I sleep, I read a little, I try to write without really wanting to. Nothing seems to work ...
Then, like some insidious evil, the frustration of not being able to photograph creeps up on me. I had thought about getting rid of the camera, of giving it away, of putting it away forever. But this morning, because the sirocco was blowing hard and there would soon be a storm at sea, we went by car down to Rio Marina to watch the waves along the jetty. When I arrived, I was struck by a scene whose fragility I sensed and that angered me because I was unable to record it. I seethed with rage because I didn't have the necessary equipment with me as the image decomposed and crumbled into pieces before suddenly transforming itself into a regret. Between the jetty and another stone embankment there was a narrow strip of beach where the sea came crashing down, and on this gray tone, lightly tinged with blue, brilliant in its intensity, four young boys stood in a row beneath the great foaming mass, a small distance from one another, facing the water, braving the waves that washed over them, allowing themselves to be rolled around by them.
Why do I want to photograph this? I should really ask, why do I find this image "perfect?" Looking at that scene, I already see the picture that will represent it and the abstraction that will automatically result, setting off the four boys in a kind of fictive space beneath the foaming waves. First, there is the blinding, almost white, already abstract intensity of the storm, of the hot wind, the sirocco, which causes giddiness and somnolence and is said to provoke homicidal dreams. Then, just below, the four boys themselves, who form in the distance separating us, a strange, perfectly ordered image—strange their slim, dorsal nudity, though one is covered with fat and another is crowned with a plastic shower cap that molds his head. Their alignment, the equidistance that separates them on this thin strip of beach, is perfect.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ghost Image by Hervé Guibert, Robert Bononno. Copyright © 1982 Les Éditions de Minuit. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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