Invention

there are people who are already our friends before we know anything about them. that was how i felt when i saw callie hernandez. a familiarity without memory. as though i had been with her before, though i did not know where. [1] i had the same feeling with rebecca hall in peter hujar’s day: the impression that i was watching not an actress but a friend, and joining a conversation that had already begun before i arrived.

films about encounters fascinate me. perhaps because an encounter is a way for one thing to become another without ceasing to be what it was. two people draw closer and something changes between them. not necessarily within them. sometimes simply being in the same space is enough for them to begin producing a third thing, something that was in neither of them.

invention revolves around a death, but the dead man is almost never where we think he ought to be. he may be in the images, the objects, the stories other people tell, a patent, the debts, the people who knew him, the contradictions. the more we look for a dead man, the more he seems to shift. we look for one particular person and mostly find others.

an invention was what was left as an inheritance — a kind of promise — and it serves, above all, to produce encounters. it takes carrie from one person to another, but her investigation does not reveal exactly what she is looking for; it produces more things to look for. that is the function of certain objects: to keep setting things in motion.

i immediately thought of brion gysin and ian sommerville’s dreamachine: a machine made to produce images when we close our eyes. a machine that shows nothing, but creates the conditions for something to appear. images whose origins we cannot quite place. who knows, a film. and this one is made of remnants: old images, conversations, interruptions, memories. the story we are watching happened and did not happen. thankfully, the film does not try to resolve those differences.

there is something about 16mm that draws me closer. to me, the grain seems like a possibility of friendship. i suspect that this helped me feel that callie/carrie seemed like a friend. the film let me come close enough to begin filling in what i do not know. someone i do not know begins to acquire an intimacy that does not belong to them, or that comes to belong to them precisely because i cannot determine where it came from.

the same happens with the dead man. the more people talk about him, the less we know who he was. each encounter adds something and, at the same time, takes something away from the possibility of a definitive image. it is impossible to make a portrait of someone from what they left behind. the portrait happens when the remnants begin to touch.

the investigation does not need to arrive at a truth to produce a reality. it need only keep bringing things closer together. that is what an invention can be for: not to create something that did not exist, but to create the conditions in which something that already exists can finally appear.

a machine does not need to tell us what to see. it need only produce a situation in which we can no longer see exactly as we did before — like the dreamachine, a camera or a healing machine, like the one the dead man wanted to invent, though whether it worked could not be established. he did, however, leave a daughter with something to investigate. he left a film. that is what the things we create sometimes do: they keep producing effects after we can no longer decide anything.

invention is not exactly a film about a dead man. it is a film about people drawing closer to someone who can no longer draw closer to them. and i draw closer to callie. i see her. i recognise her. and, at the same time, i see carrie looking at something i cannot yet see — as in an encounter that had already begun before i arrived.

[1] only later did i realise that i might have recognised her from the series too old to die young (nicolas winding refn, 2019).