About Description

Zhang Ailing loved to write about the details of daily life. Her writing is one that depends on description.

I wrote to my linguist friend, Livia Polanyi, and asked

what is description?

She wrote:

representation of facts or opinions about entities -- persons, places, objects, events, times, abstract concepts.

I sent her some examples to see if I understood:

He was thinner than the last time I saw him.
The light filtered through the trees, making strange patterns on the sidewalk.
The cup, made of a crude thick clay, was heavy in my hands.
It happened suddenly, without warning.
At five am, I can hear the garbage trucks idling across the street.
Description is the representation of facts or opinions…

I commented that this seemed like almost everything was description.

Her reply:

Some utterances are not descriptions —

Yikes!
Get down!
I now pronounce you man and wife.
You bastard!
How much does that blue vase cost?
Are you hungry?

She explained that “blue vase” is not a description; it is a name. “The “blue vase’ exists. ‘That vase is blue’ is a description, because it says there is a vase and it is blue.”

I then asked some hard questions:

If you say something is "not blue" is that a description? or if you say "the vase could be blue" or "the vase might be blue" or "the vase would have been blue?”

She wrote that negation is an especially difficult problem but that she’d get back to me.
The blue vase is waiting to be filled.

Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is a novel that revels in description. Nazneen, a young girl brought to England in an arranged marriage, sees her new life in extreme close-up. When she kneels before her husband, cutting the yellow skin of his corns, looking up at his floppy belly, we are too close for comfort. The writing is cinematic. I can’t help describing it as though it were a film. The intimacy and disgust the reader feels as Nazneen moves through her daily life is visual, visceral. The writing tells me how to film these scenes: extreme CU.

In one of my favorite scenes from Marguerite Duras’ India Song, the camera moves slowly over a red dress, a wig, a necklace. It sensually caresses the empty clothing and then moves to two lovers lying on the floor, sleeping in the heat. The camera studies the room carefully, describing it, inscribing it, waiting for something that will never happen. In India Song, all of the spoken language is off-screen, whispers, rumors, gossiping at a party. The camera’s task here is description; the story is told in the past and somewhere else. The main character is dead. Because language is separated from seeing, the camera’s movements and framing pull at us. We pay close attention. The camera desires and so it describes.

It has been said that documentary film is a kind of description. In this context, you might think of ethnographic films that try to “describe” a culture. But documentary film has a polemic side (at least some of it does – I’m thinking of Joris Ivens, for example, whose films had political agendas) or a narrative side. And a film like Peter Watkins La Commune invents situations in order to dramatize historical events, not to describe them.

I’m also wondering if experimental film (what used to be called “avant-garde film”) is a cinema of description. I’m thinking, for example, of Michael Snow’s film, Wavelength, which is often described as a 45 minute zoom. There are a lot of things going on in “Wavelength.” First, it’s an anti-narrative film or rather a film that wants to show how the camera itself can make the narrative or better to say that you could find the narrative somewhere else. So, although there seems to be an event or two – a murder, a phone call – the camera’s relentless zoom passes over these events without stopping, framing them out of the picture – the narrative is the zoom. As for description – what we see is a large room – as the zoom moves in, we also see all sorts of color changes and other alterations of the film stock itself – and in the end, we are zoomed into a postcard of the ocean (a pun on wavelength). Can we say that Snow is describing the room with his zoom and at the same time describing film itself?

Rob Stephenson had this to say about Wavelength:

A funny thing about Wavelength is that it is made up of (I think) 3 minute rolls of film that are edited together to appear as a 45 minute zoom.  It is not a 45 minute zoom, it’s a fantasy about being able to have a 45 minute zoom.   How long did it take to make the film of the "single zoom?"

The purity of Wavelength’s vision is a kind of trick or joke.  Duchamp is out there in the ocean somewhere making waves.

I don’t think Snow is describing either the room or film itself.  I think it is a very narrative film.  He is making the room a fictional character and the story or narrative is the movement through the room and out of the room into the ocean or the idea of the ocean (a static photograph of something whose boundaries cannot be seen, instead of a moving image through something that has hard, obvious boundaries).  We live in rooms, but we cannot live in the ocean (unless we recreate rooms full of air in it).

And Scott MacLeod added:

A funny [thing] _________ made of ______three small [tiny?] breads covered together ________ 45 minutes expand. If you don’t have a 45- minute oven, pretend you have one. How long does it take to cover all the breads at the same time?

The purity of __________ is fake. You can help it. But think of __________ in the ocean, and how it makes you wave [goodbye?]

I don’t see any snow in the room even though you describe it that way yourself. I think it is very _______. He is making the room ________ and the story is moving ________ the room and __________ the room into the ocean or thinking about the ocean ( _______ pho2graft something something [edge] not seen, instead ________ a ______ something something _________ hard edges. We live in rooms _______ under water ( _______ full of it)

Rob:

Scott, That’s wonderful!  I have a few splinters from that frame breakage!

Say for a minute the zoom really is describing the room and the film.  How do we translate this film into words, a book, even?  The tiny breads, I mean the rolls of film could be chapters, but how would the incremental ever-closing-in descriptions of the room work?   I supposed we could eliminate pieces of language as we move towards the photograph, as objects slide outside the frame, the words that describe them could be lost.  There is no memory in Wavelength, is there?  Only forward progression in time and space that excludes everything but the photograph.   But since the forward progression increases the detail of what’s left in the frame, new language is necessary to describe it.  As things are eliminated, the remaining things become richer, clearer, full of detail.

The changes in film stock, the use of color gels.  How do we represent this in the book?  Do we simply alter the color of the walls and objects we are describing?  I guess not, because these changes are the things that remind us that the film is a film, so what do we do in the book to remind us that we are putting tiny black drawings on white paper?  Do we use different colored paper and inks?  That might not be convincing.  How do we signify these things and continue the zooming motion of describing the room?

At what point in the book does the photograph become recognizable as a photograph?  As a photograph of the ocean?  And when the photograph is all that’s left in the frame?  How do we describe it in its enormity, in its overtaking of everything else in the book so far and in contrast to it?   (Implying the recent past, but not mentioning it.)

David Stent:

From thinking about some of the techniques concerning description and narrative in literature, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, I thought the Alain Resnais film L’année dernière à Marienbad could be interesting.

I was also thinking of some of Andy Warhol’s early films, the most obvious being Sleep, or Empire, which were also falsely built up to their ’official lengths’ by combining shorter reels of footage. Perhaps there is something about these works, their simple, vapid presentations of object-occurance - a building just sitting there, a man matter-of-factly, brutally sleeping – that relates to an approach to description in film. For me, what’s also interesting is the weight of each film - they already seem laden with an excess of information, as if there is nothing that can be added. The surfaces are resolutely empty, and I suppose it’s precisely this surface rebound that Warhol was after - a blank gaze, returned.

As such, what might the role of description be? Perhaps there are interesting ways to break it up - from the camera describing something (which, as you say, might relate to Michael Snow - there was another film of his where the camera was placed on some kind of perpetual motion machine, a gyroscope(?) - the resultant footage of whizzing mountaintops and flashes of earth perfectly describing movement, or the capacity for movement), or the audience gazing at the screen, describing things for themselves (constantly registering and losing all manner of sensations) and an ’object’ somehow describing itself -  in its presence to camera.

I was also reminded of Bruce Nauman’s work Mapping the Studio, in which he placed cameras in his studio to record the activity in the space when he wasn’t in it - the ’downtime of the creative process’. I don’t know if one might say that the work somehow describes the studio, or the activity, both, none, or some other aspect here, but perhaps what is interesting is the manner in which it is shot. Cameras that are programmed to respond to movement, a gaze clinically following whatever stimulus provokes it, like an animal vision...

Ellen:

David’s examples bring up another aspect of what we might call description in film - that is the static camera framing "reality." In what way is this description? I’m reminded of Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielmann - my experience of seeing that film has mostly to do with being in the main character’s kitchen - we see the same shot of the kitchen many times - and the continuity isn’t always accurate - so one time, there was a chair missing or a new chair - I can’t remember - I just remember thinking - what does that chair mean? it wasn’t there before...or there is one less chair...I really got to know every detail of that kitchen because nothing else was going on...and yet, it isn’t like looking at my own kitchen - of course, I know my own kitchen and if a chair was suddenly missing, I’d wonder where it had gone, but by framing the kitchen, always with the same shot, Akerman makes us live in the details of that kitchen. Is that description?

Rob, I actually agree with you about Wavelength - I think that it is a narrative film, that Snow is redefining narrative with this film. So, if that’s the case, what is description in film? Can we say that Brakhage makes descriptive films? The whole writing, scratching, painting on film, burning, burying, school of filmmaking doesn’t seem to me to be descriptive. It’s too much about the material of film, about film itself - perhaps we could say that it describes film, but not that these films themselves are descriptive in the way that certain passages in writing is descriptive. What about Trihn Mihn-ha’s film Reassemblage? Is it descriptive?

Rob:

Should we consider Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece I Am Sitting In A Room?   In brief, the piece calls for the performer to record his voice in a room with a tape recorder and play it back into the same room on another tape recorder and record this on the first recorder.  Then replay that recording on the second recorder and tape it.  Do this over and over again until the speech of the performer has become only rhythm.  The resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves and smooth out what makes speech understandable. Another way of looking at this piece is that the sound from this process describes the room or at least the shape of the room.  At the same time, it still is the voice of the performer.

Some of my favorite films use tableau vivant. The most outrageous is Sergei Paradjanov’s “The Color of Pomegranates.” (He uses tableaux in other films as well: “The Legend of Surami Fortress” for example). But “The Color of Pomegrantes” is almost exclusively staged tableaux, usually some movement will lead to the still image. That’s why Paradjanov’s films are so visually arresting – the movement from action to stillness, the elaborate settings filled with valuable and luxurious objects, the processions that lead to the tableaux.

I decided to look up mise-en-scene in a French-English dictionary. It means: “to put on a stage.” I particularly like the word “put” here, or I suppose it could be “place.” These verbs imply a hand. Imagine a model of a stage, a hand enters with pieces of furniture, curtains, props, placing them one by one on the tiny stage. Now think of Zhang Ailing’s city, 1930s or 40s Shanghai, empty until her hand places the shop window or the cart or the roasting pumpkins. (I can almost smell them.) It’s the active nature of this putting or placing that gives me ideas.

Can description move through time? Let’s think about how a description works – I’m looking at the street. The first thing I see is a street market, people have set up small tables, on each table there are piles of vegetables or fruit. Here are small pumpkins and potatoes, then, a table of green vegetables, bok choy and cabbage, next to that, there is a table of pears and apples, and something else I don’t recognize – some kind of fruit I think – green, thick and spiny skin – very large. Further along the street, there are bags of rice and nuts, and closer to me, there are the spices. A woman stands over a large bowl into which she has poured chili peppers. With a giant wooden stick, she grinds the peppers into a powder.

This description moves through space, but also there seems to be an element of time that intrudes. All of the actions – setting up tables (we haven’t really seen this) and the woman grinding (which is on-going) and the fact that I’m there looking (at that moment or for as long as it takes for me to record the details) – all of these are subsumed in the sensory data of description.

The world as description moving through time - the immanence of description - or should I say the immanence of objects in the world. I’m always looking for ways to describe this immanence - it seems to me to be unsayable. Is this because words - in sentences - move through time, one after another, and immanence is at-the-same-time. Film is also like this, it moves through time - even though time can be slowed down, or completely stopped for a short time (using a still image to do this) - there will always be the next image to follow. It’s this one-thing-after-another in language and in film that seems to go against description.

I’ve always disliked allegories because I was taught (when I was a medievalist) that they have a one to one correspondence between image and meaning. The meaning of the word “allegory” has shifted in recent years to be more like “metaphor.” In other words, the meanings or the way that an image points to a meaning in this new allegory is much more complex. Still, I dislike the word.

I’d rather think of associations, a chain of them, take Tristram Shandy as my model. Sterne wrote: “…my work is digressive, and it is progressive too – and at the same time.” I’d rather move from image to image without narrative or stopping or slowing the narrative for this other structure, to tease out the meaning of the images, to jump unexpectedly or to flow through pictures and words. Through Sterne to Locke and a digression on buttons. What more could I hope for?

What does this have to do with description? I think there are many repercussions in the way that we think of moving from image to image and the way that we think of representation – that way we have of pointing to meaning from a word or an image. Whether I create a structure that depends on action, on maps or on a flow of thoughts (like a dream), I want to stay in images without interpretation, but move around through association. Digressive and progressive, as Sterne instructs.

Neil Chapman:

Digression, I think, is useful if it leaves a space open for creativity. Chains of association are perhaps more problematic. There seems to be an enigma around what, exactly, constitutes the link. This might have a disempowering function if it isolates the creative person in a kind of ignorance of how their working process works, as it were. The chain also seems to imply a background - there is an homogenized space in which the linking takes place, and which assumes a linking of a particular kind. Lyotard, in his descriptions of the institution makes it the institution’s peculiar function to produce this kind of continuity, ’after words, more words; after one painting, another painting’, or something to that effect. What is forgotten in this way of thinking, he says, is the possibility that next, nothing might happen. There is some kind of work that would be needed to demonstrate how that ’nothing’ would not constitute another disempowering for the artist. But I like the warning to remember the failure of the associative link: it seems to make deviation more likely somehow.

Ellen:

Maybe the word "chain" gives the wrong impression. I’m thinking of digression more like wandering and/or leaping. I also think that the "creative person" is often ignorant of how their working process works - the role of intuition is important here. Sometimes when I’m editing, I’m not rationally thinking that this image must follow this image, it’s a leap into the unknown, a trying it out, a feeling (that comes from years of practice and skill no doubt). In film, you must move through time - it’s linear in that way - or rather it’s time-based. But you can slow it down, almost stop it, and that’s interesting to me. Can description do this? Is this what description is in film?

I was talking with Jerry Rothenberg (the poet) last night. He asked something like this: if you "translate written description into film, should we still call it description or has it become something else? In other words, is description a term that should be confined to the linguistic?

I want to think more about presence, immanence, and the sublime. I’ve been using some still images of landscapes in the video I’m working on now. It was pretty easy to take gorgeous photos of this landscape -- on a beautiful day, clouds delineated in a blue sky, mountains all around – but I find that words don’t quite describe the feeling you get when you look at these images. This is not to say that there isn’t a feeling of the sublime that can be conveyed in words – it’s just that the feeling is conveyed in a different way.

In the first volume of The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau describes two different types of view: one, from the top of the World Trade Center; the other, while walking on the street. The view from above, of course, tries to take in the whole and freeze it, encompass it; the view from the street involves the kind of improvisatory process that De Certeau calls a “tactic.”

In his book, Detour and Access, Francois Jullien asks: “In what way do we benefit from speaking of things indirectly?...In other words, how does detour grant access?” In this book, Jullien compares the Greek and the Chinese ways of communicating; Western directness, Chinese indirectness. For the Chinese, Jullien tells us, nature (the landscape) is characterized by its continuous “propensity.” The meaning of the landscape is that it is itself and also that it alludes to other meanings, larger, sublime, but still exactly what we see: the landscape and its impulse toward…

Erika Lincoln:

I have been reading Edwin Hutchins Cognition in the Wild he refers to these two views in navigation. He writes of the process of reconciling being on the water and reading a chart, where the use of the imagination is needed to "see" a point of view that is never seen.

Ellen:

Awhile ago, I read Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi - the most striking thing about his account was the way that the captains of the river ships knew the river and the way they had to improvise because, of course, the river is always changing...there was an informal but crucial information network, people telling each other, perhaps as they passed on the river or in a bar in the evening, that a particular rock or shoal had moved or that the river was low in a place that it usually was high. The captain also made soundings as they went...Twain’s education on the river was informed by this mode of knowledge - crucial because a mistake could be deadly.

Gertrude Stein, master of description:

“Lucy Church Amiably. There is a church and it is in Lucey and it has a steeple and the steeple is a pagoda and there is no reason for it and it looks like something else. Besides this there is amiably and this comes from the paragraph.

Select your song she said and it was done and then she said and it was done with a nod and then she bent her head in the direction of the falling water. Amiably.

This altogether makes a return to romantic nature that is it makes a landscape look like an engraving in which there are some people, after all if they are to be seen there they feel as pretty as they look and this makes it have a river a gorge an inundation and a remarkable meadowed mass which is whatever they use not to feed but to bed cows…..”

(Lucy Church Amiably, Advertisement on first page)