Red, Red, Red: An Essay/Film in Eleven Parts

Conducting a linguistic analysis of the filmic image, Roland Barthes found something traumatic about his object of study. His semiological methodology required a comparison between cinematic units of signification and language. The analogy brought forth an important distinction: “language doesn’t use supports. . . . The word doesn’t support the meaning: it is the meaning”(1985, 52). In other words, the word unequivocally declares what it is that it signifies. This one-to-one semantic relationship between signifier and signified does not hold for film. The dissimilarity between word and image is what, for Barthes, affords the image its traumatic element, its inclination toward semantic ambiguity. A picture is worth a thousand words and pictures in motion are worth more yet. In conventional films, the traumatic kernel of the image is managed and bound by meticulously plotted narrative practices. The film is constructed in such a way that the spectator understands, moment to moment, what the images presented before him or her mean. And so, films typically reassure instead of traumatize. One formal technique to attune our comprehension toward a stable end is voice-over. The device, though not limited to such, is most famously linked with the documentary. The voice-over is an additional stratum of signification layered upon the image. Yet instead of enlarging the semantic field of the film, it contains it. Most often voice-over directs the spectator’s manner of engagement with the image, allaying its trauma. But what is the voice-over without the images it’s meant to accompany? Might words then solicit the variety of trauma Barthes locates in the filmic image?

What follows is the voice-over text from my experimental documentary Red Red Red. The project had many false starts, unsatisfactory interviews, and ultimately uninspiring filmed tableaus. It was only when I wrote the voice-over that the film began to take shape. Instead of recording “reality” and molding my film from the patchwork of fragments I had collected, I wove its images, its rhetoric, and its world around words. Red Red Red is an essay film, a text that takes shape through a mediation of my subjective and often esoteric thoughts and sounds and images recorded in the world around me. In its early phases, I too confronted my “film” in the version you are about to encounter. It is not so much that the words of my voice-over wrangle and corral the logic of the images they accompany; rather it is from these words that the images are summoned, produced. As I reread my voice-over after the film’s completion, I find myself nostalgic for a time when the image track wasn’t finalized and the possibilities of my film were not, in a sense, foreclosed. Perhaps Barthes wasn’t completely correct. Maybe words don’t instantly and finally point to what it is they mean. Within the words of my film’s narration there was always another substrate, one of images. Their possible incarnations left me frazzled, excited and, yes, perhaps a bit traumatized. You can watch my film online at the following link: http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi2632097049. Yet with respect to the incarnation of Red Red Red before you, please read my “film” first—that is, my film’s bare bones. As you read, imagine a film, imagine the words opening unto an imagistic field and in-and-of themselves incomplete. The series of words that form this text call for and render something beyond them. They are in such a context, traumatic, empathetically uncertain and saturated with a stubborn potentiality. Then again, was Barthes right? Are these words, despite the context from which they were pulled, quite simply enough?

To begin teaching someone: “That looks Red,” makes no sense, for he must say that spontaneously, once he has learned what Red means, i.e. learnt the technique of using that word. For if someone has mastered the use of what looks red—or indeed what looks red to me—he must also be capable of answering the question, “And what is Red like?” and ‘What...