Love, Mortality and the Moving Image by Emma Wilson (review)

The death of Susan Sontag in 2004 was captured in intimate photographic close-up by her lover Annie Leibovitz in A Photographer's Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006). Those haunting last images of Sontag are, Emma Wilson argues, illustrative of the involvement of lens-based art in the experience of loss, and they highlight the amorous and sensory relationship between the living image-maker and her deceased subject. Wilson's intellectually capacious and elegantly written book begins with this example to emphasize the haptic sensuality of the images of Sontag while alive, conveying a sense of 'what it was to live in touch with her' (p. 3). Wilson's analysis attests the variety of ways in which photographic and moving-image art have explored the disturbance between the living and the dead. The volume's preoccupations are the 'indexicality' of the still image (the imprint of a precise moment), affect (the focus on love, longing, and grief), the troubling relations with the dead (drawing on intimate examples of loss reconfigured by artistic practice), editing (the sequential, pictorial, and narrative organization of moving-image art works), and exhibition (the exposure to the gaze of the other). Wilson's case studies draw on a wide range of cultural theories of loss, stillness, and trauma (from Giorgio Agamben and D. W. Winnicott to Laura Mulvey and Griselda Pollock), including most centrally Judith Butler's understanding of the political implications of grief, her engagement with human vulnerability, and her important recognition that we are undone by each other in love and in loss. Wilson's book is framed by a series of simple headings disguising the complex internal rhythms of the writer's prose. The stand-alone case studies offer densely composed yet immediately graspable readings of a number of feature films, documentaries, videos, and art installations, offering variations on the overarching theme, which foregrounds the complex affective charge between mortality, love, and longing. The subtle, sophisticated readings of Agnès Varda and Sophie Calle are, to my mind, more rewarding than the chapters on more familiar work by directors Ingmar Bergman and Pedro Almodóvar, although all the examples bear witness to a writer on top of her game, both intellectually and stylistically. The juxtaposition of a sombre chapter on Alain Resnais's documentary of mid-twentieth century trauma, Nuit et brouillard, with an equally sobering one on Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, a politically engaged lament for the loss of home following Hurricane Katrina, deftly underscores the disjunctive structures at work in a number of the artworks under consideration. Familiar texts yield fresh insights: Wilson's return to Resnais's attempts to capture the brutal inhumanity of the Holocaust includes the perceptive remark that the film-maker's 'manipulation of images [. . .] betrays an awareness of the extent to which these images are screening us from the reality of the camps, rather than screening it for us' (p. 123). Resnais's film brings us close to the matter, substance, and affect of the images he manipulates, the movement towards abstraction between animate and inert matter attesting to the tactile contact with the dead. Despite its grave subject matter, Wilson's important book offers many pleasures, combining literary, philosophical, and visual theory with a series of richly layered textual readings.