Here's an essay I wrote on Brian Frye's 2000 film Oona's Veil some time ago.
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The film begins in blackness, a murk, a muck, a mire. But out of this thick swampy coat of darkness fragments of light frenetically emerge... And we perceive, in kinetic bursts of vision, a gentle face, slowly turning toward us.
She is smiling, and she wears a scarf on her head. The black and white dots on the fabric remind us of the pattern of transparency and opacity that endlessly tumbles over her image - here covering - there uncovering. For long painful moments, she disappears. And then, the ecstatic sight of her face returns to us, but only for the space of an instant.
In the light of her serene countenance, the battle on the surface of the image seems somehow less harsh... as if this jagged matter rushing across her face so tumultuously were only a pile of leaves scattering down a little road. Or pages of some ancient parchment turning too quickly to read. Or a candle's flame simply dancing and throwing shadows on the far wall.
This fundamental flicker is cinema itself. The flicker of light cast upon a screen, of each frame standing still for a fraction of a second, the flicker of the shutter closing just long enough to allow that frame to be replaced by the next, the shocking flicker of the edit, or the calming flicker of light on rippling waters... from time, which does not flicker, the preservation of movement, which does. And though the cinema re-enacts this movement, it is the epitome of frozenness, for, as Andre Bazin observed, it snatches pure moments OUT of time, rescuing them from their proper corruption.
Rescuing or imprisoning? This image can never grow, can never develop, can only corrode. Its utter stuckness in time coaxes us to write potentialities onto it. In old movies, especially old movies of ourselves, we see dreams which are not in the image and we see possibilities that never panned out. The image before us today, of Oona in her scarf, is not of ourselves, however. We should have no attachment to it. But it has travelled many decades to find its way to our eyes, and this alone might make it precious to us. However, it is not a particularly well-made image. The stock is cheap, the celluloid worn, the lens out-of-focus. This imbues it with a naive quality that makes our experience of it like an experience of innocence. Like those old images of ourselves.
But unlike home movies, with which we retell a familiar story, this picture of Oona is cut off from its own story. What happened before this image? What happened after this image? The camera, recorder of reality, exact duplicator of the precious curve of her lips, of her nose, of her forehead, of the aperture of her eyes, is absolutely limited by its own lens. It can give us no insight into anything it did not shoot. This tiny strip of film, like a potsherd from a forgotten civilization, is all we have to go on. Time has swept swiftly on, tearing out of the foundations of the past, and the context around this image has crumbled to dust.
From this image, we learn and we know that memory fades, and that memories of memories disappear. The whole film whispers this message. Even if we could peel back the layers of obscuring grime, even if we could fully lift the veil from Oona's face, what would we find behind it? Somewhere under darkness of loss, under the scratches of time, under the blurriness of a moment, under the profound silence, and under the absence of all other images of this woman, there must be a story; the film points to it. We know that she lived; we study her face and we know that she once knew happiness. Film has at least kept that much for us all these years - "So long live this and this gives life to thee" - but... but... but not well enough.
We deeply wish to be able to reach beyond memory, into layers of time we were not party to. Of course, we cannot. As we watch the film, this visualized inaccessability of memory perhaps leads at first to frustration, but as we gaze upon Oona's veiled face, the theme of unfindable memory begins to register as a timeless truth. The film speaks to its acceptance of this truth in every frame, and we come to accept it, too.
Film cannot tame time. Maybe memories were made to be forgotten. Forgotten so that their absence will be precious. Forgotten so that we will remember their absence. But what will happen when the last one to remember a memory's absence passes away? Oona's Veil, by covering itself with darkness, by burying itself in time, enacts and prophesies the coming absence of absence. It thus foretells its own death as an object and its own looming forgottenness. Through its brokenness, we learn that even if film could remember us for a while, we will all still be forgotten.
Is this in itself sad? Or is it only sad because art once promised to make us live forever?
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More information on the film here. And if you've never seen any of the films by his wife Penny Lane, you're missing out. Watch The Voyagers or The Commoners.
