“Moving Smoke” — Behind the Scenes: remarks by D. Shohl to MT
Mary,
The first things I noticed were formal or semi-technical. For example, the film repeats much of the material in a large two-part division, and there is frequent looping of shorter segments within the overall shape. The first half is dramatically separated from the second half by the filmʼs only dark screen (at about 3:21), which lasts several seconds and which is immediately followed by a radical change of perspective: there are now three frames on the screen at once (for the first time in the film) and they persist until the end of the last half.
The final half deploys another cinematic technique that appears in the first part but more frequently in the second: scenes of humans and machines in motion suddenly freeze into stills (beginning around 4:18). Actions can also slow down as the lens tightens in very closely, then stabilizes as a portrait of part of someoneʼs face, say.
The other technical/formal element I noticed was how well the soundtrack works, never mind I helped make it: its industrial, mechanical repetition and monotony now suggest to me a very long car trip or maybe an iron lung — but as a child would hear these things, without real conceptual grasp or context, merely following the redundant mindless patterns like clouds ...
It was only after mapping out some of these formal and technical structures that I began to comprehend what I was seeing — I figured out How and When things happen, but not What or Why. In other words, my abstract ideas led to material details that then led to greater understanding. (This canʼt be a good thing, but Iʼll consult an herbalist.)
First of all, I observed how everything starts (0:00). Everything starts with a woman who reminds me of our friend Therese as well as my older sister Barbara — letʼs call her Sister Barbara Therese of the Holy Smokes. From the front passenger seat of a moving car, she looks back at the camera with a friendly, warm smile.
Here I said to myself: the camera-person, the narrator as they say, is telling me the story of Sister BTHSʼ road trip and related incidents — her life story. SBTHS is looking backward, metaphorically speaking, to tell us her tale.
I figured that much out thanks to my initial formal survey: these opening seconds recur many times and at key moments, as Iʼll describe, making SBT a central figure (for me anyway), as if this script is related from her/the starʼs pov.
Immediately following SBTʼs oracular debut, we see several women, some with babies, who are all passengers on an amusement park ride, analogous to the moving auto in the opening. Echoing SBTʼs acknowledgment of the camera-viewer, the women in this sequence look at, and point to, the camera. In fact, the women also look behind them, away from the camera, as much as they face forward (the camera is facing the rear, relative to the rideʼs motion, that is to say, “looking back”).
The next shot is of an African-American couple running through what might be a path in the amusement park, their backs to us as they move out of the camera range. This sequence is immediately repeated several times — as if “looking again” or looking back — and it recurs throughout the film, so call it a Leitmotif.
A few more Leitmotivic scenes fill out the first half, like the man with a still-camera, a person waving a newspaper featuring a picture of astronauts walking on the moon, and some footage taken of, or from, docks and boats on a lake and/or large river/ocean.
Then I reach the midway blackout curtain and stop to consider what Iʼm being shown.
Iʼm watching moving people turning their heads to face the artist, whose perspective is the viewer’s (mine). Alternatively, people turn and move their faces away from the onlooker (me, through the cameraʼs eye).
Almost all the people seem aware of the camera — they know theyʼre being filmed, whether they engage the camera-person or look away.
I know from the title that Iʼm seeing motion and smoke: for example, various cars and boats in motion, people running and walking (even on the moon, which is itself a long commute) and people riding, being transported. And smoking lots of cigarettes in the process. Hence my mindʼs eye equates movement and smoke, which are both quintessential emblems of transience.
More specifically, these are emblems of the transience of life — life-as-passing-smoke. This means that the travel or movement through life, as the poets and Hermetics say, arrives at death (Shakespeare, for instance, calls death a “country from whose bourne no traveller returns”).
In this philosophical sense, the moving figures in the film are carried by the chariot of life that wheels them where it wills, which is ultimately toward death, and which the riders hope to “turn away” or escape from. Actually, life itself turns away from the living once we face death and see life behind us (“looking back”).
Suppose the seven-minute film is a lifetime, the life of Sister Barbara Therese of the Holy Smokes. Halfway through, at midlife, her story starts over again from the beginning, as I mentioned before (at 3:21). Shown now as three frames in one (as mentioned), the initial vision — that is, Sister Barbara Therese in her mechanical chariot looking over her shoulder to smile at the camera — is now staggered in close canon, making a time lag between what weʼve just seen in one frame and what we now see again in an adjacent frame. This delay creates a counterpoint between new footage that contrasts with what happened a few seconds before, and allows the material in the three juxtaposed frames to refer to and connect with each other in cross-temporal ways, you might say.
This is very powerful! The sequential scenes that I originally saw in the first half were separated linearly from each other, sometimes looped in succession, but now they overlap simultaneously and thus bring out previously unnoticed leitmotivic details. For instance, we see three frames of footage containing only women, or three frames showing only children, or three water scenes.
But why three points of view, and why recapitulate the first half in this format? My idiosyncratic free-associations wander to the “Three Fates” (as the Greeks personified the stages of birth, life and death), which conceptually represent past, present and future. After all, the filmʼs Master-Leitmotif, as Iʼve identified it, is “Looking Back While Moving Ahead.”
If the film is a lifetime, then the three “tenses” could only occur together AFTER childhood, since babies have no past — only present and future. In fact, the three life tenses (cinematic frames) must start at the filmʼs midpoint, which is the logical place for past and future to equal each other, leaving the present in the exact middle.
“Past is prologue,” Shakespeare says in “The Tempest,” probably speaking of this film. A minute into the second partʼs review of the past, all three frames freeze together for the first time (4:18) — life stands still, an omen of death (“the rest is silence,” says Hamlet).
The final sequence is totally in black and white (as the eyes fail in old age, and memory grays out), and remains in one complete frame until the last second — there is no more division this close to the end. Out of mist and fog comes a solitary man in heavy clothes wearing a hat. He seems to be the oldest figure in the film. Moving in the jerky way that we see in historical footage (fewer frames per second = less life left to spend, and “stiff with age”), he hoists himself out of an invisible ship onto a pier, then across a gate or stoop and staggers off screen. He reminds me of the liminal Greek figure Charon, who ferries dead souls across the waters of Hades, the threshold between the journey of life and whatever follows.
The word “liminal” comes from the root “limen,” meaning threshold. “Moving Smoke” exists throughout on the threshold, the liminal edge of the present that continuously apprehends past and future, life and death.
— DS
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