An essay film: “Thinking with water”
Kate Dangerfield, independent researcher
Transcript of the video essay
A black screen. These sounds are from some footage I filmed when I was swimming in Lulworth Cove on the 17th of April 2021. The water gurgles and bubbles as my hands push through the water. There’s something that sounds like some kind of organism. Oh, it’s the sound of the cord that connects the camera to my wrist.
These sounds continue throughout the film while the images change.
I didn’t watch the footage for months afterwards, but I knew that I wanted to do something with it. I started to learn how to breathe with water. I started thinking differently, or perhaps as Ashon Crawley proposes, ‘thinking otherwise’, which led to my interest in the concept of
and the title here… “Thinking with water”.
The text reads “blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut; rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to water world: we are bodies of water”. Astrida Neimanis.
I’m editing this essay film using the Adobe Premiere Pro software, but you can’t see me while I’m doing it. The screen shows the interface. There are four different panels that appear as sections. You can change and adjust these sections depending on how you like to work. There’s the project panel
on the bottom left, which contains folders. This is where you import the media. If you click on the clips here, they appear in the source monitor above and you can view the clips and decide which sections you want to use. Then you drag them onto the timeline where you create your sequence. On the left-hand side of the timeline there are small icons that you can use to toggle tools on and off. ‘Toggle’ simply means ‘switch’, like switching on
or switching off.
There are different tracks that run horizontally along the timeline, and this is where you place audio and graphics clips. There are wave forms on the audio clips. The final panel is the program monitor which plays what you have created on the timeline. The right side of the image is black and green. These colours drift into vertical wavy lines that are different shades of blue. Tiny white sparkles and blurred spots. The image changes in the program monitor. Murky waters. Blues and greens and greys merge into each other.
Bubbles glisten as they rush to the bottom left corner of the image.
But what is an essay film? Through reading the work of Laura Rascaroli, I learnt that the essay film can be a form or a mode or a methodology. For Rascaroli, rather than the essay film being an objective, permanent or fixed viewpoint on the world, it embraces openness and uncertainty. It must leave questions unanswered and accept the instability of its meaning. The essay film is experimental and reflexive.
The image changes in the program monitor. The pebbly seabed. Greens and browns. Different types of algae. The dappled light creates a web-like pattern. The water refracts. Complex interconnected worlds. The essay film offers a new direction in the field of Media Accessibility. The essay film ‘thinks’, which is something I discuss in my PhD thesis and in the commentary for this publication. But it also invites you to think. And more than this, the essay film is a means in which to think differently about the three shifts of accessibility. For instance, this essay film “Thinking with Water” which takes a proactive approach. There’s no active participation from users here. But, if, as Rascaroli argues, the essay film attempts to establish a dialogue with you, could this film be considered as the beginning of a conversation?
Active participation is still possible, but is not something I can determine
or guarantee. I wouldn’t consider my film as user-centred or maker-centred, which suggests I need to think outside of these categories in the context of essay films.
The software interface disappears leaving a full screen image of the pebbly seabed. The still image begins to move. I slowed the footage down by 10%, mainly because I didn’t hold the camera steady while I was filming. I swam with the cord wrapped around my wrist which meant the footage circled too quickly for me. I couldn’t see anything properly. Slowing the footage down also makes me think about what Rosi Braidotti says: “deaccelerate and contribute to the collective construction of social horizons of hope.” And if you pause the footage, there is more space to describe the images and sounds. Surrounded by bubbles, the same colours and descriptions ebb and flow. The image moves again. I recently attended an online workshop with Georgina Kleege who said to embrace subjectivity. For her, perfect objectivity isn’t possible, nor is it desirable. Kleege wants to know what your knowledge and personal background bring to the table. The image jumps.
Following Rascaroli, I argue that essay films ‘think’. For Rascaroli, the way in which the form thinks lies in addressing the dialectical tension between juxtaposed or interacting filmic elements and more precisely, the gaps that its method of juxtaposition opens in the text. It’s in these gaps, these in-between spaces that it becomes possible, as Adorno writes, “to coordinate elements rather than subordinate them and approach the real by allowing access beyond the immediate visible surface of things.”
However, it isn’t just that the essay film ‘thinks’. It also invites you to think. The dialogue and experience of the viewer is key. I address you and try and establish a dialogue with you. And for Rascaroli, you become involved in the construction of meaning. You become embodied.
Going back to Kleege and audio description, she advises not to invent a new vocabulary; she says to writes lots of notes and edit and keep editing. The quote she uses is ‘weigh your words.’ And keep asking the questions, ‘Why is this image here?’ ‘And what does it do?’
This image moves and explores. It’s the same as the previous image but it’s different, which chimes with the idea of being both different, and in common. Different viewpoints. On the edge of the water showing the landscape. The cliffs that create a cove. There is a mast of a boat in the distance. Following Braidotti, I’m trying to map my embodied politics of location which aims to account for one’s location in terms of both space and time while also tracking the production of knowledge and subjectivity and to expose power both as entrapment and as empowerment. For Neimanis, our watery bodies enter complex relations of gift, theft and debt with all other watery life. We are literally implicated in other animal, vegetable and planetary bodies that materially course through us, replenish us, and draw upon our own bodies as their wells. Human bodies ingest reservoir bodies while reservoir bodies are slaked by rain bodies, rain bodies absorb ocean bodies ocean bodies aspirate fish bodies, fish bodies are consumed by whale bodies which then sink to the seafloor to rot and be swallowed up again by the ocean’s dark belly. Thus, our watery bodies blur the boundaries between you and I, and other living entities.
The image jumps every second. Bubbles that sparkle like jewels. Horizontal wavy lines create a landscape. Teal sea. Pale blue sky. Gaps that emerge. Portals to different worlds. Light reflecting and refracting.
Sitting on the edge. The text reads… “The waters that we comprise are never neutral; their flows are directed by intensities of power and empowerment. Currents of water are also currents of toxicity, queerness, coloniality, sexual difference, global capitalism, imagination, desire, and multispecies community. Water’s transits are neither necessarily benevolent, nor are they necessarily dangerous. They are rather material maps of our multivalent forms of marginality and belonging.” Neimanis.
Back to the interface of the editing software. The image in the program monitor is black. There’s a tiny gap of light. Now to a close-up. But it’s difficult to determine what the image shows or what it does. Light seeps through, illuminating the material or the skin, turning what was black into grey. There are small dots on the surface. The shape pulsates and the light shifts. There are no universal claims. The fingers or tentacles part to reveal the cliffs and the blue sky.
The world is upside down. Who does ‘we’ include, and what do we want to become?