419773 VCUXXX10.

1177/1470412911419773BalJournal of Visual Culture

journal of visual culture

Losing It:  Politics of the Other (Medium)

Mieke Bal

Abstract
Finnish cinematographer Eija-Liisa Ahtila makes video installations of
a particularly griping intensity, staging a contact zone for encounters
with otherness. They also deploy other media, such as literature, and
other genres, such as documentary, along with other states of being,
such as murder, maidenhood, and madness. This multiple otherness,
I argue here, is crucial for the understanding of the way this artist
uses a medium that is ostensibly visual to make environments that
are political through encompassing engagements with otherness as
other media.
In the reception of her work, this heterogeneity is largely ignored
in favour of interpretations of the installations anchored in a single
medium – video installation – and a political individualism. This is
most clear in the reception of The House, Ahtila’s best-known work.
This is consistently interpreted as a representation of schizophrenia.
That such negligence of a sophisticated heterogeneity has political
consequences becomes obvious once we see that the ‘madness’ of the
character in that piece is the symptom of her alterity, and is staged
through a discrepancy between image and sound – the schizophrenia
of the medium.
In this essay I briefly revisit three of Ahtila’s best-known pieces
in relation to an ‘other’ discourse: literature, psychoanalysis, and
philosophy. In each, both the other media and the otherness of
people take very different forms. In each case, though, the alterities
of medium and subject matter coincide to reinforce the point that is
basic to all of Ahtila’s work: the encounter with otherness on a non-
exclusionary basis, as, also, an encounter with the otherness without
ourselves. In the last section I also bring in two works by other
artists, to make a case for a political potential inherent in the art form
of video installation.

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]

SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)
Copyright © The Author(s), 2011. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav
Vol 10(3): 372–396 DOI 10.1177/1470412911419773
 Bal  Losing It 373

Keywords
alterity • contact zone • medium • multiplicity • video installation
• schizophrenia • subjectivity • political art

Authenticity and the Literary Masterpiece

In the monumental, six-channel video installation Where Is Where? (2008)
Ahtila broaches for the first time an overtly political topic. Commissioned by
and installed in the prestigious Musée du Jeu de Paume, at the Place de la
Concorde in Paris, this work is set in the proximity-at-a-remove – in time and
space – of the Algerian War of Independence, which has left its traumatizing
traces in both the French and the Algerian collective memory. Choosing this
topic is an obvious gesture of defiance as well as solidarity. It also stipulates
that Ahtila seeks to make political art. Also for the first time, in this work the
artist uses sequences of historical documentary, both of the Algerian War
and of other war-generated situations. With that ‘found’ footage, the issue of
authenticity and historical truth cannot remain unaddressed.1

Figure 1  Installation shot Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where Is Where? – Missä

on Missä? (2008) 53 min 43 sec, 6-channel projected high-definition
installation with 8-channel sound. Photographed by Marja-Leena
Hukkanen. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.
© 2008 Crystal Eye – Kristallisilmä Oy.
374 journal of visual culture 10(3)

Here I will, however, approach the political thrust of this work through the
least likely angle, the literary, poetic aspects of the installation – and this in
the literal sense. Documentary is only authenticating for naive believers in the
reliability of signs, however. In other words, it is culturally authenticating.
Hence, other means of cultural authentication are also possible. Indeed,
Ahtila pursues authenticity in another cultural embedding – an embedding
that comprises the lies of heroism and other rhetorical figurations. The
relationship to history at large as well as to the history of the medium is
further developed on the level of text and literature.
As if to foreground the authenticity of the archival footage in its relation to
history as a special case, Where Is Where?’s final sequence literally quotes
from a psychiatric expert’s work with two young boys who, confused by
the collective grief that surrounded them and the powerlessness imposed
on them as colonial subjects as well as children, killed a classmate because
he was European. This interview is transcribed by the psychiatrist, Frantz
Fanon, in his book The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre)
from 1956. In it, the boys display an iron-clad logic that confuses the adult
experts. Ahtila’s work quotes this source text literally. It is a case of ‘colonial
madness’ (Fanon, 1963). At the end of the 52 minutes duration, one of the
boys, Adel, shown in close-up against a burgundy background, says to the
doctor who is confused about the boys’ motivation to kill: ‘Anyhow, I killed
him. Now, you do what you have to do’ (in French, slightly differently:
‘faites ce que vous voulez’; do as you wish). In an oeuvre such as Ahtila’s,
celebrated for its fantastical character and its treatment of inexpressible
individual emotions and the unconscious (as in fiction), this double sticking
to documentary evidence might seem a bit unsettling at first sight.
Yet, the dilemma posed in this work is consistent with her earlier work, and
extends to video installation as a medium, in the sense of an apparatus or
dispositif. Whereas I argue that the earlier works are also deeply political,
I consider Where Is Where?, with its strongly political theme, a poetic work
first and foremost. It is visually poetical, and, as if to enhance this aspect, it
is also poetic as a literary work. The lines of the script read like poetry, and
the main figure is a poet. Not coincidentally, as if to drive the point home,
the installation is replete with connections to masterpieces from the literary
canon. I contend that the political force of this work resides primarily in this
poetical embedding, rather than its overtly political theme.2
First, there is the diegetic connection to Albert Camus’ L’étranger (1942),
a novel in which the central event is the inexplicable and arbitrary murder
of ‘l’Arabe’ by the protagonist, the anti-hero Meursault. ‘C’était à cause du
soleil’ (it was because of the sun [my translation]), Meursault insists in his
flat, colloquial language. Incidentally, this flatness in the language is the
literary equivalent of the deadpan acting style of Ahtila’s figures. Ahtila’s
figures express no emotion. Meursault, too, is a figure who refuses pathos.
But his explanation of his act amounts to something other than a French
expatriate suffering from the sun in a foreign country. It is the representation
of the murdered man in Camus’ novel that makes the connection significant.
 Bal  Losing It 375

The fact that Camus’ ‘Arabe’ is nameless and faceless, and that his slaughtering
is arbitrary adds to his erasure. A spark of sunlight on a knife, and the Arab
is erased, killed without even having had that label of personhood that is
the proper name. The murderer is an anti-hero indeed. Ahtila, however
questions both the heroism and the anti-heroism of the canonical text.
In Where Is Where? the situation is both repeated and reversed. This time it is
an Arab who kills a European. And the logic of arbitrariness is reiterated, yet
brought back down to earth – and to a different kind of logic than the white
man’s omnipotence and lawlessness. In Ahtila’s recycling, the arbitrariness
comes to the fore as defenselessness, as the only tool the boys think they
have to break the circle of powerlessness in which they have been caught.
The two boys choose a classmate, someone their age, because they do not
think themselves able to kill an adult. He had to be a friend; otherwise he
would not have gone with them to the quarry where the deed is done. Like
Meursault’s victim, the young victim does not get a proper name.3
Through another literary connection the right to a proper name is
foregrounded: ‘I am Ismael’ is the first sentence uttered by one of the two
boys who commits the murder, upon which the other boy adds, ‘I am
Adel’. This is an allusion to the opening sentence of Herman Melville’s 1851
novel Moby Dick – undoubtedly one of the most frequently quoted literary
sentences in the Western canon. The fact that this is a novel exploring the evil
of fanaticism also bears on Ahtila’s work. The use of ‘I am Ismael’ instead of
‘Call me Ismael’ in the installation asserts and stages the person’s right to bear
a proper name that individualizes him; that he is. Moreover, the slight change
in the formulation conveys that he individualizes himself. ‘My name’ – he has
appropriated, in comparison to ‘call me,’ which suggests that individuation is
in the hands of others.4
In Melville’s novel the narrator bearing that name is the only one to escape
disaster so that he can tell the story. Ahtila’s boy shares a similar fate. He
accedes to personhood through the assertion of his name and his agency,
but, in his case, most likely only to remain in custody. It seems relevant,
though, that this outcome is not spelled out in the installation. Moreover,
although it is the younger Ismael who has done the actual killing, it is
Adel who is the duo’s spokesperson. There is no result of the psychiatric
expertise; no judgment. Right after we have seen the other boy, Adel’s final
sentence imaged in close-up, the screens go black. The spectator is guided
out of the installation, only to be confronted with the archival footage of
war violence, including that of a dirty, discarded doll, which keeps one
lingering a bit longer still at the threshold of the installation. Within the
work, Adel remains the philosopher who incites the doctor to act, according
to his political conception – to act according to his duty (‘what you have to
do’) or his wish (‘what you want’).
The main figure, a Finnish Poet (played by Kati Outinen; henceforth called
the Poet), is both herself in mourning of someone she lost and is entangled
in the history of the Algerian War on which she is writing a poem, or a
script. The combination of drawings, staged fictional footage, and borrowed
376 journal of visual culture 10(3)

documentary footage, along with the abundant quotations from literary and
cinematic masterpieces, speaks to an intermediality, an incorporation of
‘other’ media. It is no coincidence that it also speaks to a sense of collective
responsibility in present multicultural Europe. This entails, among other
things, a questioning of the distinction between epistemology – what do
we know? – and ontology – what is (the truth)? This doubt also pertains to
aesthetic movements. According to the interpretation of the American critic
Brian McHale, the primary issue of modernism is epistemological doubt:
how can we know (what happened, in that war)? The primary issue of
postmodernism, in a radicalization of the modernist doubt, is ontological
doubt; doubt concerning the existence of the objects of our knowledge:
what was, and possibly, what is, the Algerian war?
These questions concern the politics of history, the relationship between
present and past, and the permeability of national boundaries. In addition
to these two novels, Where Is Where? also alludes to highlights of Western
modernist poetry. It invokes, for example, ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936), a poem
by T.S. Eliot about time. The complex relationship to history warrants the
enquiry into modernist time – fitting the period the story is partly set in.
Hence, it comes as no surprise that Eliot’s poem becomes, so to speak, the
theoretical starting point of the work’s project to adopt the past into the
present – the starting point, but not the end point. Eliot wrote:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future.
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is irredeemable. (quoted in Durand, 2008: 182)

Although it does not quote this poem literally, the Finnish work belabors and
critiques the conceptions of time that underlie Eliot’s modernism, especially
present in its fatalistic final line. The notion of a retrospective responsibility
contradicts this conception.
Among the many reflections on time Ahtila’s work includes, the following
seems to respond to the modernist poem, integrating into the philosophical
discourse of the poem a subjective touch that ushers in death:

that unexpected moment in time,

when timelessness and time meet.
A pause, a fit of absent-mindedness,
a lapse into recollection.

Especially the line ‘a lapse into recollection’ establishes an argument against

Eliot’s ‘all time is irredeemable’. With Bergson, Ahtila’s work and its Poet
bring memory into the present.
As it happens, Eliot is also the forger of the conception of time that I
have termed ‘preposterous’ (Bal, 1999). In his plea for a ‘preposterous’
 Bal  Losing It 377

Figure 2  Final image of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where Is Where? (Adel).

Photographed by Marja-Leena Hukkanen. Courtesy of Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York and Paris. © 2008 Crystal Eye – Kristallisilmä Oy.

conception of poetry in an ambivalent relation to tradition, Eliot wrote:

‘Whoever has approved this idea of order … will not find it preposterous
that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is
directed by the past’. In line with Eliot’s view in this passage if not with the
view of tradition and individualism in the essay as a whole, I endorse the
notion that, like any form of representation, art is inevitably engaged with
what came before it, and that this engagement is an active reworking. It
specifies what and how our gaze sees. Hence, the work performed by later
art obliterates the older works as they were before that intervention and
creates new versions of old works instead. This ‘preposterous’ vision of the
past in the present extends, Ahtila’s work intimates, to the historical past;
that too is altered by the present. In the case at hand this alteration lies in
the belated and anachronistic taking of responsibility (Eliot, 1975: 39).
This process is exemplified by an engagement of contemporary culture with
the past that has important implications for the ways we conceive of both
history and culture in the present. T.S. Eliot’s intuition as he articulated
it in 1919 finds a political counterpart in Ahtila’s positioning of the war
from the past in the present fiction, so that it, and its consequences, can
become real, alive again, and can continue to inform the present, with
the indispensable help of the imagination. In light of this conception of
preposterous history, the recycling of Fanon’s case history, of Camus’
and Melville’s novels, and of Eliot’s poetic lines, becomes as deeply
political a strategy as the recycling of war documentary footage. The latter
is empowered by the fictionality of the former; the cultural embedding
that we, in the present, need to actively imagine what retrospective –
preposterous – responsibility can be.5
378 journal of visual culture 10(3)

At the same time, the reflections on time in Where Is Where? join those of
William Faulkner, especially those in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) – a novel
that distances itself from Eliot’s poetry in verging toward the postmodern.
This tipping over into postmodernism is not simply a pedantic point about
literary history. It is significant here because of the content attributed to the
vision of these respective currents.
Postmodern logic runs thus: if the possibility to know is radically absent,
how can you know it is real, how can you be certain it exists? As it
happens, Ahtila’s figure of the Poet wavers between these two doubts
in her working-through of the Algerian War. As a result, ontology (what
was, and what is the Algerian War?) becomes epistemology again (what
do we know of the past?), and vice versa. This retrospective logic that
places modernism after postmodernism is a form of counting backwards
– and indeed, this is what the Poet puts forward. When the Poet counts
backwards, she appears to take up an action similar to Faulkner’s novel.6
As has hopefully become clear from this all-too-brief discussion, the literary
and the poetic intertextual moments of the work lead to philosophical
positions bearing on contemporary politics. This is not, then, an exceptionally
political work but one that, like the ones preceding it, addresses philosophical
conceptions for their political relevance, through an engagement with
another medium than the one in which the work is made and functions
primarily. This medial ‘otherness’, I contend, is one of many ways in which
this artist pursues political relevance, not through political topics – the one
so prominent in this work is, in this sense, coincidental – but through a
strong, often embodied, encounter with otherness.
This is perhaps most clear in a work that has universally been perceived as
concerning a single schizophrenic, hence, ‘mad’ individual – a work whose
strong political thrust has mainly been overlooked. When Ahtila offers
audio-visual philosophy, her artworks also bring into such thoughts their
own status, form, genre, and medium qua art. In The House, I contend,
this self-reflection on the medium is most radical.

Travelling as Losing It
The House (2002) is a 14-minute-long video installation of three screens, a
central one and two at odd angles from it: the classical form of a triptych.
The viewer is most likely to stand on the imaginary threshold between
outside and inside the space created by this old religious form. If the (only)
figure in The House, a young woman called Elisa, suffers from psychosis, this
psychosis is intertwined with the fundamental psychosis of the medium of
cinema, with its apparatus in the middle of which we are standing as viewers.
To put it briefly: cinema and all forms derived from it are fundamentally
schizophrenic media, in that image and sound operate separately even in
the perfect in-sync versions of it.
 Bal  Losing It 379

Figure 3  Installation shot Eija-Liisa Ahtila, The House – Talo (2002)

14-minute, 3-channel projected installation with 5-channel sound.
Copyright Crystal Eye Ltd, Helsinki. Installation view taken from Tokyo
Opera City Gallery. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and
Paris. Photo: Keizo Kioku.

Many filmmakers obscure this psychotic nature of the medium; some

foreground it. Ahtila is among the latter, and has done so from her very first
works, such as Me/We, Okay, Gray (1993). The psychosis of the image is
produced in a de-centering cinematography that is sustained and brought
to its maximal potential by the multiple-screen installation set-up. Such
de-centering is not just a critique of a naturalized perception of cinema,
but also, according to Paola Marrati, a fundamental characteristic of that
medium: ‘The mobility of the camera, the variability of angles of framing
always reintroduce zones that are a-centered and de-framed in relation to
any ‘perceiving subject’ (2003: 51, my translation).7
In the very act of centering – producing the illusion by means of the
meticulous method of filming and foregrounding it through the three screens
– the image de-centers. And this de-centering unmoors us, too. Taking self-
narration into her own hands, the figure of the young woman mixes her
doubt with ours, and, due to this stirring, subject and object converge.
Just one example. Elisa puts up black curtains to darken her house, saying:

I shut out the images.

When I don’t see anything,
380 journal of visual culture 10(3)

I’m where the sounds are.

In the street, on the shore, on the ship.

Like many allegedly mentally ill people, Elisa is hearing voices. And like
such patients, Elisa chooses sounds over images – sounds, not words. At
first, we assume it is rather easy to see that she is mentally ill. Due to the
triptych form of the installation, which encloses and embraces us, we can
have compassion with her in a tourist fashion. We can momentarily go
along with her madness, and thankfully withdraw from the experience
when it threatens to become painful. Surrounded by the three screens, we
are inside her head; just as we are inside the head of a Finnish forger of
words in Where Is Where?, in The House, too, everything that is presented
to us originates in a single imagination. Rather than being mad, Elisa is
simply ‘thinking in film’.8
The move behind the curtain that ‘explains’ how vision is always actively
limited has already been prepared by an earlier shot. There, a following shot
across the space of Elisa’s living room was necessary in order to stay centered
on her as she got up from the sofa and started walking, with some care,
perhaps difficulty, as if unsure where to put her feet. The moving living-room
space, set off against the central image of the moving body, totally normal
and routine for the experienced cinema viewer, retrospectively becomes
utterly strange here, when Elisa proposes limited vision as a phenomenon
of estrangement. Inside the installation, where the viewer does not have
an overview and cannot see everything at once, this estrangement is more
compelling, and the experience of it, affectively ‘contagious’.
Rather than mad, Elisa ponders cinematic illusion in a travelling shot that
precedes these words, while she walks through her living room. The travelling
shot, thus, becomes conceptual. The shot literally ‘travels’ and thereby
transforms our standard view of perception. The technique of travelling
camera work comes to stand for the transformative power of changing modes
of vision. The shot’s conceptual force stems from the tension between the
analysis the figure performs and her limited perception. As a result, fixity
is suspended. In this way, the shot embodies a denaturalized perception,
an impossible way of seeing that is nevertheless the only possible way. The
image unmoors the ‘natural’ environment in which the figure exists; hence
the shot where, incongruously, we see the young woman flying among tree
tops – which is now a conceptual flying.9
The figure of the young woman is an image concretely flying between the
screen and the viewer. Therefore, it is the image itself that is ‘psychotic’ –
and psychosis is enriching in this sense. It opens up new possibilities, new
visions. This is an important addition to the insight, put forward so strongly
in Where Is Where?, that the iron-clad logic of the boys who are nevertheless
under diagnosis as ‘mad’ binds mental illness to the politics of colonialism
and its violence.
 Bal  Losing It 381

Figure 4  Eija-Liisa Ahtila, The House, Elisa levitating. Photographed by

Marja-Leena Hukkanen. Copyright Crystal Eye Ltd, Helsinki. Courtesy of
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.

The House, set in an innocent-looking, idyllic Finnish forest landscape, seems

to position psychosis very differently from the later work. Whereas the boys
in Where Is Where? are able to articulate impossible political dilemmas, the
young woman who inhabits the house of this installation offers a logic of an
enriching kind of schizophrenia. In the travelling shot I just mentioned she
actually analyzes perception, and the use cinema makes of our limitations
to structure, its visual universe. The monologue sounds like a dream coming
to its self-reflective end. The unspoken key term is framing. The frame – an
eminently cinematic concept and tool – determines what we can see, selects
our field of vision for us, and thus sets us viewers, as well as the figures
and setting in the frame, up for a limited perception according to our self-
interested selection. I would like to see in this deployment of cinematic
artifice a conceptual proposition about the relationship between art and
‘reality’ – or rather, the world, life, and society.10
In the large majority of moving images, this relationship tends to be
anchored in representation. But, as has been pointed out many times,
this term harbors a deep and problematic ambiguity. Depending on what
preposition and object is implied, one can represent as in politics, where
a representative speaks for the electorate; or one can represent as in the
political, as describing, giving a version of, someone or something about
whom or which one speaks, thus producing an ‘object’. That is, producing
an image. Let us assume for a moment that cinema, video, and other forms
382 journal of visual culture 10(3)

of moving images are tools through which it is possible to represent in the

double sense: politically, to speak for, and artistically in the political, to
speak about. Through this potential the moving image has a great possibility
to intervene in the political, although it opens up the possibility for abuse
as well.11
In all of Ahtila’s works, traditional narration, with its attendant claim to
truth, is practiced while at the same time being accompanied by evidence
of its impossibility. This is seen most clearly when we consider focalization
(the subjectivization of narration). In The House, focalization is entirely
centered on Elisa as well as practiced by her. Both the object and subject
of focalization, she is utterly objectified and at the same time given total
mastery. Consider, as a counterpoint, the ‘once upon a time’ of fairy tales.
This formula is obliquely invoked in the scene where Elisa flies through the
trees. In her house the walls disappear and first a dog, then a cow, both
enter into her living room. She says:

Everything is now simultaneous, here, being.

Nothing happens before or after.
Things don’t have causes.
Things that occur no longer shed light on the past.
Time is random and spaces have become overlapping.

The idea phrased in the last two lines of this passage recurs so emphatically
in Where Is Where? that the latter work can in some way be considered its
necessary political elaboration. The suspension of normality that we tend
to attribute to Elisa’s alleged mental illness pushes forth a philosophical
questioning of the determinism of history – history, in other words, seen as
a chronological and evolutionist succession. Mark the word ‘random’ in the
quoted passage.12
The moment when the alleged mental illness becomes the royal road to
wisdom is the following shift between the discourse of madness and that of
political agency. This shift occurs when Elisa tells us:

Yesterday I was sitting with a friend

at a restaurant table eating,
and I started hearing
the sounds of a paddle boat.
I was simultaneously in the restaurant
and beside the boat in some harbour,
even though I’ve never seen the boat.
The sound was so loud
that it wasn’t part
of the background hum of the place,
but formed another space in my head,
where I was simultaneously.
 Bal  Losing It 383

Due to the triptych structure that encapsulates us, situating us inside Elisa’s
head, we are enticed into an inevitable solidarity. Ahtila’s installation takes
that conjunction upon itself by separating sound from image. Here, the
sounds are too loud, thus detaching themselves from the images. The boat
is there, on the left-hand screen next to Elisa’s gigantic head in close-up. The
sea pushes away the forest. And among the sounds, we simultaneously hear
the beat of the paddleboat, the announcement of the imminent departure
of the train to Albany in New York’s Penn Station, and the quick steps of
a woman, presumably Elisa, on the steps in front of her house. This is The
House’s cinematic form of ‘hearing voices’ – a hearing thought in film.
This moment raises the question that will come up again in later works, the
question about the placement of the subject: ‘Where is where?’ This question
is raised when the fragile boundaries between self and other are dissolving,
just like the walls of Elisa’s house. At stake in The House is the transfer,
or, to abduct a term from psychoanalytic discourse, transference, from
individual to social psychosis. The psychoanalytic term is only applicable
if we concede that a cultural ‘holding environment’ can function strictly
as a psychoanalyst, opening itself up to the transference coming from the
patient. Here lies the gear shift between psychoanalysis and the political,
the possibility of making this theory of the individual psyche function as
a social, political theory. This holding environment is primarily made of
sound.
This psychoanalyst we play, however, is not the power broker of classical
ideas of treatment. Instead, this figure needs to be convinced of the social-
scientific nature of psychoanalysis and learn from this ‘patient’ that her
illness is a socially induced one. If I try to see the work in that perspective, a
thematic element suddenly comes to the fore that, again, prefigures elements
of Ahtila’s later work. I see as the primary subliminal theme – to which the
works can by no means be reduced – the question of refugees.13
Even before developing it I immediately want to complicate this seemingly
thematic interpretation. Beyond the political issue itself, which is so crucial
in our time, this work about the house with the melting walls first of all
takes another step toward extending and generalizing the dissolution of
boundaries. The allusion to refugees is merely subliminal, to prevent it
from becoming another master narrative; it must remain a ‘little narrative’
(Lyotard, 1984) if it is to retain its political agency. Here, the boats Elisa
‘hears’ makes an iconographic reference to the drama of contemporary
refugees making the perilous journey to a safer life in overcrowded boats.
In order to succeed, the precarious bond between art and the political,
mutually interdependent, needs to be cherished and kept alive. This
breathing space provides a theoretical holding environment. That is to
say, the work cannot belong to or be appropriated by the realm of party
politics and propaganda. Instead, The House is above all a work on and of
schizophrenia – a schizophrenia of cinema, where fiction takes on the look
of reality and as a result transforms it. Identification is the primary tool
384 journal of visual culture 10(3)

of that school of psychoanalysis that takes itself as a social science. This

does not mean that the analysts become like the patients, espousing their
madness; nor is the identification an emotional one. Instead, considering
that madness is the breach of social bonds, the analysts stand next to the
patients, make themselves permeable to the latter’s transference, and thus
offer the beginning of repair for those broken bonds. The fragility of the
cuts of Ahtila’s montage embodies these broken bonds that begin to heal
by means of identification. Finally, high-technology cinema can assure us
that sound accompanies image in sync, but the sound cannot be one with
the image. Whatever the installation’s form, projection is always marked by
a discrepancy between sound and image that inscribes heterogeneity à la
Lyotard into the work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila. I contend that Ahtila’s narrative
teasers and sound discrepancies fulfill a similar function. Elfving formulates
it precisely when she writes, ‘the images appear at least as unfixed as the
voices in their complex choreography across multiple screens’ (2009, 139).14
Psychosis raises an issue that, once brought to bear on The House as a
fictional work of art, brings to the fore a question with profound ontological
resonances. In its simplest formulation this question is: how can we know
if someone else is ‘mad’? There is no either/or answer to this question.
There are not two but at least three options: someone may be mad, play
mad, or appear mad. The first is a state, but fundamentally in process,
hence subject to movement and duration, hence time, and always already
in transformation in relation to the moment. The second is the result of a
choice, although one can be caught inside such a choice. The third reverses
the perspective and burdens the viewer with the responsibility: someone
may only appear mad because the viewer’s conception of what is normal
projects madness onto the other. Moreover, the mad may possess wisdom,
knowledge, and insights not accessible to allegedly sane people; ‘solutions
to unusual situations’ (Ahtila, 2003: 207). This possibility further widens
the epistemological gap between knowing that madness does occur and
knowing who or what is mad – and why.
This, I speculate, is the point of the fairy-tale shot of flying. We are confronted
with the impossibility of deciding whether we are watching a fairy-tale
work of fantasy or the representation of a mentally disturbed woman. This
impossibility is an intellectual challenge, bound up with an implicit critique of
binary opposition as the predominant mode of thought in Western cultures.
It is also a deeply political challenge, as we are compelled to relinquish a
stark othering of madness in favour of the insight that one can learn from as
well as participate in the lesser or differently confined strictures of psychosis.
Specifically, given the strong difference in mood between the two choices,
the dilemma begins to affect our own sense of ‘having a grasp’. It becomes
doubtful whether this is a purely intellectual challenge. On the one hand, if
an intellectual Westerner is asked to understand the mental processes of a
psychotic patient, she may feel this is not easy, but, when aided by the usual
technical resources, not impossible. When, on the other hand, temporarily
having the experience of psychosis requires a disturbing kind of ‘tourism’
 Bal  Losing It 385

many will balk at, and which is in effect politically dubious, viewers of
that opinion may decline the tendency to couch this understanding on an
acceptance of the difference of mental illness.
The invitation to ‘tourism’, in turn, becomes questionable when we realize
that psychosis may be at issue. The figure herself is not psychotic in any
obvious way. True, the psychotic patient experiences sense perceptions and
thoughts as both bodily and located in outside objects. This matches the
states and events Elisa tells us about. We see, after all, the car on the wall
and hear the loud sounds of a paddleboat, and she tells us about a ship in
the harbor she hears while the voice of the friend she is having dinner with
fades into inaudibility.15
I suggest the two discourses discussed, the textual genre of the fairy tale
and the discourse of mental disturbance, are traps. Both, in opposite ways
– the one primarily as wish fulfillment, the other primarily as terror – put
us on the wrong track, that is, if we seek to use them to ‘translate’ the work
into a readable meaning. But they put us on the right track if their apparent
incompatibility makes us endorse the reluctance to translate, to rush us into
thinking we understand the work, and to declare meaning at the cost of
the work’s complexity. Instead of tourism, then, temporary, unsentimental
identification; instead of othering, self-doubt; instead of contempt (at worst)
or astonishment (at best), the satisfaction of novel experiences within which
what always seemed normal is not. What if this work is not ‘about’ fantasy
or psychosis at all, but only uses those discourses as part of its movement
and multiplicity, its heterogeneity? Then, a kind of translation becomes a
constant, inherent activity that can never end in a so-called ‘target language’.
This makes (political) sense of a very useful term in translation theory,
‘remainder’.
Lawrence Venuti uses the term ‘remainder’ to indicate an inevitable, but
also indispensable, leftover of the source language within the translation.
Translation – hence, also, image-as-translation – has a philosophical force
to it. This force consists of the capacity to preserve the philosophical force
of the source language as a stranger within the target language. Thus it
maintains the heterogeneity of the translation, while enriching the potential
of the target language. Between psychosis and estrangement from realism
within a visual realism, a double remainder persists: one that taunts viewers
with their own incipient madness, and one that opens up the normal, sane,
or natural to a view of it as just a bit off.16
The persistent presence or activation of the remainder is important, because
it is where imported values remain, precisely, open to questioning, instead
of being ‘naturalized’ by absorption into the domestic routine of the target
language. A translation, in Venuti’s eyes, ‘should not be seen as good, unless
it signifies the linguistic and cultural difference of that text for domestic
[target] constituencies’ (1996: 30). He argues that the ethical value of this
difference resides in alerting the reader to a process of domestication that
has taken place in the translating on her behalf, but also at the expense of
386 journal of visual culture 10(3)

source text. Hence, the ethics of translation consist in preventing that process
from ‘slipping into a wholesale assimilation to dominant domestic values’
(Venuti, 1996: 30). Something similar can be argued, I contend, about the
different visual discourses of The House. These supplement one another but
they are not seamlessly connected. In the seams, or cracks, between them,
the remainder activates the viewer’s own incipient or remnant madness.
This madness, at the very least, is receptive to the schizophrenic nature
of cinema itself; it’s always already operating discrepancies between sense
domains.17
It would not be desirable for Elisa’s ‘madness’ – the key element of the
source text, the discourse of madness – to become invisible in the new
discourse, the video installation. But the troubling point that no such
madness would be acceptable – aesthetically as well as socially, or perhaps
even ethically – in the target world, for today, that is, must also remain
visible. It is imperative that her madness not become so idiosyncratic that an
unwarranted ‘othering’ would result from it. The ‘conceptually dense text’
– Venuti’s term for philosophical texts under translation (1996, 30) – must
be made intelligible, yet remain, in its foreignness, informative as well as
actively provocative, that is, performative. This helps to understand why the
figure of Elisa is not at all mad, but instead more lucid about perception
than we viewers.
What the two discourses of fairy tale and psychosis do together, I submit,
is pose rather than answer the questions of legibility and of the relations
between the different registers involved in reading; this becomes possible
due to the remainder that makes either code deficient. Thus they fold the
work onto itself, and pose the question of how to make a meaning that does
not foreclose the work in its recalcitrant otherness or in its reluctance to
limit its speech to the intellectual register. Losing it, in order to get it: affect
is indispensable to make sense of this work.

Side by Side: Installation

Finally, I present an interpretation of video installation as a form and the
political potential it harbours. To make the case for such a generalization I
will also briefly bring in works by other artists. A multiple-screen work like
Where Is Where? and The House, If 6 Was 9 (1995) was the first work of this
kind the artist made. As the title suggests, it hints at the value of fantasy. It
presents five teenage girls in a composition of three wide screens.18
The screens are large: about eight feet each, which brings the total width
to 24 feet. The installation’s scale suggests a huge billboard in a big city.
On such a visually loud ‘billboard’ the work presents a group of people
ordinarily not listened to. It is a multiple-screen installation, with different
images on each screen but a single sound track and stream of subtitles. The
room is darkened, and seating is provided for the 10.35 minute duration.
In these two aspects, the frontal presentation and the darkened room with
 Bal  Losing It 387

Figure 5  Installation shot Eija-Liisa Ahtila, If 6 Was 9 – Jos 6 olis 9

(1995) is a 10 min 35 sec, 3-channel projected installation with stereo
surround sound. Copyright Crystal Eye Ltd, Helsinki. Courtesy of
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.

seating, the work resembles, or alludes to, movie theatre film. This double
proximity between the two dispositifs of theatre and gallery, and thus the
avoidance of too facile a definition of installation, underlie my choice of this
work to hint at the implications of installation.19
In distinction from this classic cinematic viewing situation, however, a certain
restlessness of viewing is enforced through the sheer dimensions of the
screens. The aspect ratio of the three screens together is almost 1:4. This
large format produces an effect of scale that is already a first indication that
the work is literally working with its own medium, installation. The screens
are not arranged in the form of an altarpiece or room, but simply juxtaposed
in a flat row, making for a triple-sized screen interrupted by two seams. The
emphatic horizontality that results compels viewers, even when seated, to
move their bodies from left to right and back, always giving off a sense they
have missed something. This compulsion to bodily movement addresses the
Bergsonian image’s quality of moving in-between, and moving us, by making
the need to move literal. The space of presentation – say, the art of projection
– proposes a threshold, in relation to the space of representation on the one
hand and the space of viewing on the other. It is in and through that triple
space that the work compels agency.20
The space of presentation where the two other spaces interact is the gallery.
This makes for a very different reception from that in a movie theatre. Yli-
Annala wrote the following about the effect of installation:

As in any film screening situation, the video installation fuses the

physical time and space occupied by the viewer with the fictive time
and space of the installation. In a gallery space, however, I am more
388 journal of visual culture 10(3)

acutely conscious of my environment and the people around me; I am

able to move around and thus to respond more spontaneously to what
is happening around me than if I were viewing a film in a cinema.
(2002: 223)

As this passage suggests, the primary distinction of installation is the

concrete and material space in which it is presented; in which the images
move and the viewer can move. In this context, If 6 Was 9 examines the
consequences and possibilities of the impossible, yet stubborn recurrence
of the opposition or separation between time and space that the illusion of
their separability keeps generating.
At the beginning of the work, before seeing anyone, we already hear voices
of two girls, alerting us to Ahtila’s signature use of slightly discrepant sound.
These voices evoke an ecstatic sexual moment presumably just after the
fact, in the past tense, bypassing the present. After this auditive prelude, for
which, however, no visual images are provided to match the fantasies with
some visible reality, the next sequence brings us outside, to three arbitrary,
culturally bland places: the entrance to the YMCA, a boulevard with
Christmas decorations, and the parking lot of a supermarket at a shopping
mall, all in Helsinki but at the same time anywhere. It is evening, and all
three images appear to establish the place where the story is set – a story
that is as little story-like as the places are unnoticeable places. One forgets
to wonder, though, why three different places are needed to establish a
single story. Thus, a suspicion concerning numerical discrepancies can set
in. These images establish not diegetic space but installation space: three
screens, hence, three places. They also establish time: the supermarket is
still open, and in terms of season it is near Christmas. A girl appears.
In a detailed reading of the work to which I cannot do justice here, Butler
(2005) specifically sets If 6 Was 9 off against Deleuze’s concept of ‘any
place whatever’ – a phrase that, even without Deleuze’s context, resonates
with the drab environment in which most of the work is set. With the
Deleuzian context it is the settings’ redundancy that strikes most readily.
Butler uses this theoretical backdrop to foreground how Ahtila’s installation
is politically forceful and relevant.
When the installation is crafted to ‘discuss’ with the spectator, the autonomy
of thought for the spectator is already enhanced, while the embodied
encounter remains in place. To shift the ground slightly so as to make the
artwork theoretically pertinent on a par with theoretical reflection (rather
than merely being justified by it), I contend that the formal and aesthetic
complexity of this work can serve here to understand the temporality of the
gallery installation in general. That is, it helps to understand this space as
‘thickened’.
The three screens fill up with images from Helsinki’s undistinguished
public spaces as if to contrast more forcefully with the distinction of the
gallery film’s space. Instead of the figures walking into the spaces, quick
 Bal  Losing It 389

Figure 6  Stan Douglas, Vidéo (2007), HD video with one sound image,
dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

cuts replace these images (at least on two of the three screens), with the
image of a girl waiting outside a supermarket. Quick cuts, slow waiting:
this paradoxical relationship between image and story already intimates
that duration is at stake. Especially in the context of video installation art,
duration is, I contend, key to the political. In an art of duration, the viewer
is asked, even compelled, to donate time. Duration is the object of giving; it
is what allows otherness to sink in and be shared.
But rather than basing that sharing on identification – which either
temporarily, at least stuns the subject of the identifier or cannibalizes the
other – Ahtila grounds the sharing on the threshold: a space we share with
the girls. What is the point of such a threshold to engage with these five girls,
and why should this threshold be built into a video installation? To answer
this question, let me take a brief look at Canadian artist Stan Douglas’ figure
of K in his Vidéo from 2007, not to suggest it is as such comparable to If 6
Was 9, but to suggest that a comparable deployment of conceptual personae
is a powerful possibility to be politically effective in two otherwise widely
divergent works.
Although a single-channel work, Vidéo is emphatically a gallery film. Douglas
made Vidéo to be included in an exhibition devoted to Samuel Beckett. It
is a powerful revision of Franz Kafka’s and Orson Welles’ figures of K, in
dialogue with the Jean-Luc Godard of Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle
(1966) and Beckett’s Film (1965). In distinction to three of these four works,
in Douglas’ work, this K becomes a black woman whose face we never get
to see – a cinematic veiling of the face that brings the work most intensely in
relation to Beckett’s Film. She is a conceptual persona, with her form filmed
from the back, her surface as that constant green jacket that sometimes floats
390 journal of visual culture 10(3)

alone through the dark frame, and her narrative position wavering between
victim and non-victim. With altogether different means and tactics, Douglas,
like Ahtila, undermines authority without relinquishing the leading role of
art-making as leadership – up to a point. The notion of the conceptual
persona helps articulate this. The primary difference is that Douglas’ visual
argument against authority is conducted by means of his conceptual persona
through intertextuality, the involvement of specific intertexts, while Ahtila
pursues a similar goal through interdiscursivity, deploying discourses rather
than specific texts as her interlocutors. This difference helps us understand
the difference between these two forms of allusion.
The similarity comes from a comparable questioning of ‘sync’, in other
words, an experiment with ‘off-ness’. Douglas’ K talks with her body – a
body that is young, female, and black – and the moment she does so the
camera visualizes the struggle for power in situ. First surrounding her from
above, in a manner reminiscent of many shots in The Trial, the camera
foregrounds her body language when, at the moment she points at the
detectives who are abusing her, the shots approach her drastically. K walks
as she talks – eloquently. The decision to show K’s speech only visually
changes the role of language. Rather than a tool for narrative coherence
and linearity, the ‘visual’ language of film is foregrounded and endorsed.
Ahtila uses opposite means to make a similar point. Her films are replete
with talk. The speeches in her work are consistently ‘off’ but for the rare
exceptions, when the synchonized quality of the speech unmoors fiction in
its untenable opposition to documentary.21
In conjunction with the ongoing story-telling in If 6 Was 9, Ahtila’s group
of girls also talk with their bodies. This gives additional meaning to the
editing in which sometimes they remain ambiguously related – do they meet
or not? Sometimes they are disconnected by a black leader, and sometimes
they are all there, but refuse to interact. Douglas’ K must remain wordless.
She raises the questions of the ‘mute witness’ who keeps together without
hierarchy the ‘contradiction that the visible brings to narrative signification’
(Rancière, 2001: 22).
Ahtila puts to use the increasing difference she has helped construct between
theatre cinema and the gallery film, or installation. In terms of visuality, in
both genres of cinematic works images are able to conjure figurations below
or beyond the threshold of rational thought. These images are new ones that,
in their endeavor to ‘become other’, establish contact with what we know
without knowing that we know it. This is either the cultural subconscious or
the individual unconscious, or better, the ‘unthought known’ (Bollas, 1987).
In mainstream cinema, characters and cinematic positions of identification
– ‘aesthetic figures’ – conform too closely to the already known and are too
easily absorbed. Social types or identities, on the other hand, lend themselves
to stereotyping but can also show social situations that we inhabit without
being aware of it and thus open up a space for looking and thinking about
the ways aesthetic figure and social type fail to match. Ahtila has an axe to
grind with the authority of the figure of the author or authority.22
 Bal  Losing It 391

In figurative art and, in particular, the art of the moving image, so easily
construed as conducive to identification due to figures closely resembling
human beings, the status of figures as ‘only’ figures does nothing beyond
displacing the issue. But there is more to this shift. If fiction is, as the
best-known definition has it, the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, then the
importance of fictional figures only increases instead of diminishes. Deleuze
and Guattari loosen up the authority/authorship of the philosopher herself by
means of the concept of ‘conceptual persona’, a figure that helps them think
as well as ‘become other’. This concept not only helps to solve the problems
of both authorship and identification-soliciting characters. It has the additional
merit of bringing philosophy (as a shorthand for theory, and thinking more
generally) closer to art making, or imaging. The term refers to ‘fluctuating
figures who express the subjective presuppositions or ethos of their philosophy
and through their existence, no matter how inchoate or unstable, give life to
concepts on a new plane of immanence’ (Rodowick, 2000: 3).
Importantly, such figures are not allegories in the traditional sense; they
do not ‘stand for’ some idea, concept, or thought. Such standing in, or
metaphorical use of figures would undermine the density of the effect – their
vitality in ‘vertical time’ (Deren in Fowler, 2004) – and might bring the work
dangerously close to propaganda. Instead, these figures figure, or shape,
the search for still unformed thoughts, rather than the fully-shaped thoughts
themselves. In other words, they give shape to the ‘unthought known’. What
happens, then, is the becoming visible, or appearance, of the unthought
known itself. The fact that, in Ahtila’s installation, there are five girls, on
three screens – a striking numerical discrepancy – is part of their figuration
as conceptual personae. Another brief comparison helps clarify this.
In a video installation from 2009, Belgian artist Chantal Akerman (who, like
Ahtila and Douglas, is keenly committed to exploring innovative forms of
subjectivity in relation to the political) experiments with the exploded image;
in a sense, the opposite strategy to Naumann’s physical objectification.
Akerman’s Maniac Summer consists of a large screen on which a real-time
video is screened. In this video the artist has filmed her home, herself, and
her view from the window. The image is a random recording, on tripod, of
moments when the artist is sometimes in the image, sometimes not. On two
diptychs of close-ups from the same film screened on the lateral wall the
same material is fragmented and pluralized – two forms of explosion.
The slowness effect of real time is not as prominent here as in the film Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce – 1080 Bruxelles (1975), three and a half hours
of film recording the mundane little acts of a woman. Instead, in the recent
film the spatial equivalent of real time is at work, the simple and seemingly
senseless recording of a limited space without care for camera position: real
space. Backlight fades the colors of the furniture, for example, and the only
truly colorful spot is the lawn in the park outside on which children play in
the bright sunlight. It does not take long to realize this contrast in color is also
a contrast in subject position. The woman in the apartment never goes out;
the children and passers-by never come in. There is no encounter. Similarly,
Ahtila’s five girls don’t communicate with one another.
392 journal of visual culture 10(3)

Figure 7  Chantal Akerman, Maniac Summer (2009), installation

views at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris (5 Dec.–9 Jan. 2010). Video
installation in 3 parts, 4 projections, color and B&W, sound, 34 and 32
mins, in loop. Direction: Chantal Akerman; editing: Claire Atherton.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris/New York. ©
photo: Marc Domage.

Here, the pluralization (not of the subject but of the fragments of the film)
leads to several forms of abstraction that, together, intimate the unmooring
of the subject caught between images that progressively lose their meaning.
The incidental appearances of the filmmaker in the image do not enhance her
subjectivity. On the contrary: since she randomly appears in and disappears
from what seems (but is not) an unedited image, she seems caught in the
generation of images that have lost their author. What we get to see of her
are fragments – of her body, of her life, of her subjectivity. In Akerman’s
work the fragment is a trope of the impossibility to be whole outside of the
orbit of the collective, the ‘world’.
I invoke Akerman’s recent work, that is otherwise very different from If 6
Was 9, because it, too, binds the exploration of a problematic subjectivity
to pluralization. Where in Maniac Summer the images pluralize, in If 6 Was
9 the protagonists do. The common ground is that figures, in a cinematic
work, are also just that: images. Akerman’s images lose their recognizable
form, for example, when a view of cars in the dark is zoomed in on to
leave only abstract red and yellow stains. Ahtila’s girls do not lose their
forms – although they remain nameless, and they too are sometimes hard
 Bal  Losing It 393

to make out. The tactics of discrepant sound and fast editing, making them
ambiguously together or separate and seemingly indifferent to one another,
all contribute to another kind of explosion.
But where Akerman’s subject seems ‘lost in explosion’, Ahtila’s girls benefit
from it. This is possible thanks to the threshold described above. From the
timespace of the installation they, or rather their subject positions, are able to
reach out to the viewer – and vice versa. Although obviously the viewer cannot
‘speak back’ to the girls, in the installation of gallery films she can speak
back in the sense of engaging with, on the threshold; of considering, and
revising their view of the conceptual personae the girls perform, ‘show’. This
potential – that visitors actually feel they can ‘speak back’ to the work, if not
to the figures – is sometimes what is meant by the term ‘resonance’. This term
imperfectly captures what I am trying to articulate here. Martin Seel defines
resonance, a translation for his German word Rauschen, as ‘an extreme form
of appearing: visual, acoustic, and semantic phenomena that fascinate us as
an “occurrence without something occurring” and therefore make perception
possible at the limits of our faculty of perception’ (2005: xiii).
This stretching of the limits of our faculty of perception is one moment, or
site where visitors can ‘speak back to’ or ‘answer’ the conceptual personae
embodied in the gallery work. This potential to be ‘spoken back to’ is the
primary point of the staging of such conceptual personae.

Notes
1. The French occupation of Algeria had started in 1830. In 1954 the Algerian
Liberation Front undertook what became an eight-year-long war of liberation.
For Algeria, as for France, the war has remained traumatic. See Shepard
(2006) for a historical-political overview. On ‘colonial madness’, see Keller
(2007). I have written about this work and its relationship to interdisciplinarity
elsewhere, an analysis I will not reiterate here (Bal, 2011).
2. These connections may or may not be noticed by spectators, depending on
their knowledge of the works quoted. This is why the reception of a work
can never be determined. A certain level of knowledge of the most canonical
works can be assumed among a public of an art exhibition, but even if one
does not know the works, my argument is based on the idea that the allusions
suggest ‘literature’ in a more general sense.
3. Many have criticized Camus’ attitude toward the Arab figure in his novel;
see e.g. Apter (1997). On the merging of memories of the Holocaust and the
Algerian war in Camus’ work, see LaCapra (1998) and Sanyal (2000).
4. I treat allusions as rhetorical figures on a par with metaphor, metonymy,
and synecdoche. Such figures are not necessarily intentional. Therefore I am
not imputing them to the artist but rather consider them reading devices for
viewers thinking ‘in’ literature.
5. I have devoted a book-length study to the implications of this view of history;
an argument I will not reiterate here (Bal, 1999).
6. On Faulkner’s postmodern tendency in Absalom, Absalom!, see McHale (1987).
The temporal confusion staged in the installation also recalls the traumatic
state of being stuck in time. See the very relevant analysis of Charlotte Delbo’s
poetry in the chapter ‘A Cry for Justice’ in Yasco Horsman (2010: 63–90).
394 journal of visual culture 10(3)

7. The original reads: ‘La mobilité de la caméra, la variabilité des angles de

cadrage réintroduisent toujours des zones acentrées et décadrées par rapport à
n’importe quel “sujet percevant”’.
8. ‘Thinking in film’ is the title of an interview of the artist with Chrissie Iles (2003).
9. This image has become the emblematic image of Ahtila’s work. Beautiful as
it is, I find it problematic that this facilitates a reading of the artist’s work as
fairy-tale-like, typically Nordic, and far removed from political reality.
10. On the conceptual nature of images, see Bal (2002: ch. 2). On the concept of
framing, see chapter 4 in the same work. On perception as selection, see Bal
(2010: ch. 5), commenting on Bergson.
11. See for starters the analysis of Aristotle’s concept of mimesis in Dupont-Roc
and Lallot (1980). On the politics of representation as ambiguous (between
speaking for and speaking of) see Spivak’s famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern
Speak’ in its reworked version (1999), and Bal (2010: ch. 2).
12. The cow peacefully walking into a living room recalls a certain brand of late
surrealism that was especially invested in the deconstruction of bourgeois
individualism. This surrealist trend used the fine line between ‘normal’ and
‘mad’ quite frequently. The transgression of these animals in The House
particularly invokes Luis Buñuel’s Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972)
and Le fantôme de la liberté (1974).
13. This conception of psychoanalysis is best represented by a small but growing
direction in the US and, in Europe, in Italy, Switzerland, and France; see e.g.
Benedetti (1995) and Davoine (1992, 1998, 2008). With Michelle Williams
Gamaker, I have made a film based on Davoine’s 1998 book, Mère folle. See
the project’s website, http://crazymothermovie.com/
14. A recent example of what Ahtila’s subtle work on madness is up against can
be seen in Martin Scorsese’s film Shutter Island (2010).
15. For a recent survey of views on psychosis, and a rejection of the unverifiable
term ‘schizophrenia’, see Read, Mosher, and Bentall (2004).
16. For the issues of translation in visual art, see the special issue of this journal
edited by Bal and Morra (2007).
17. Venuti’s argument can be claimed to shed ethical light on that other problem of
translation where the seams are better left visible, namely realism – the attempted
translation between reality and fiction or other forms of representation.
18. The girls are played by Eliisa Korpijärvi, Pihla Mollberg, Maria Mähkinen, Miia
Vainio, and Eeva Vilkkumaa.
19. Henceforth I call the genre of film made for screening in movie theatres
‘theatre film’, as distinct from ‘gallery film’. The word ‘theatre’ here refers to
the movie theatre, not to theatricality as discussed earlier.
20. The phrase ‘art of projection’ alludes to a book edited by (artist) Stan Douglas
and (curator) Christopher Eamon (Eamon and Douglas, 2009), with many
relevant essays (esp., for this reflection, the ones by Colomina, Lütticken, and
Joseph). On the gallery film, see Fowler (2004).
21. For more explanation on this device, see the chapter ‘Tensions between Visual
and Auditive Narrators’ in Peter Verstraten’s very useful book Film Narratology
(2009).
22. In the wake of Foucault and Barthes, discussed with great nuance and
relevance by Silverman, I have frequently attempted to argue against the
relevance of the author’s intention in the interpretation of art (Bal, 2002:
253–85; Barthes, 1986; Foucault, 1979; Silverman, 1988: 141–86). Silverman’s
response to the ‘death of the author’ thesis is the only one I came across that
makes seriously valid points in favor of the relevance of the author. However,
 Bal  Losing It 395

she does not propose to return to author-oriented criticism, but to read the
figure, as writing, of the author’s voice, especially when this voice counters
the traditional authoritative claims of authorship. Most other commentaries fall
back on the authoritative argument that solicited the thesis in the first place.

References
Ahtila, Eija-Liisa (2003) Eija-Liisa Ahtila: The Cinematic Works. Helsinki: Crystal
Eye.
Apter, Emily (1997) ‘Out of Character: Camus’s French Algerian Subjects’, Modern
Language Notes 112(4): 499–516.
Bal, Mieke (1999) Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bal, Mieke (2002) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Bal, Mieke (2010) Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bal, Mieke (2011) ‘Mektoub: When Art Meets History, Philosophy, and Linguistics’,
in Allen F. Repko, William H. Newell and Rick Szostak (eds) Case Studies in
Interdisciplinary Research, pp. 91–122. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Bal, Mieke, and Joanne Morra (eds) (2007) Acts of Translation. Special issue,
Journal of Visual Culture 6 (1) April.
Barthes, Roland (1986) ‘The Death of the Author’, in The Rustle of Language.
Trans. Richard Howard, pp. 49–55. New York: Hill and Wang.
Benedetti, Gaetano (1995) La mort dans l’âme: Psychothérapie de la schizophrénie:
existence et transfert. Toulouse: Érès.
Bollas, Christopher (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the
Unthought Known. New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, Alison (2005) ‘Feminist Film in the Gallery: If 6 Was 9’, Camera Obscura
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Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is based at the Amsterdam School
for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her interests range
from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th-century and contemporary art
and modern literature, feminism, and migratory culture. When writing on
art, she favors dialogue over the application of theory, and anachronism as a
magnifying glass over historical reconstruction. Her many books include Of
What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (2010), Loving Yusuf
(2008), A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities
(2002) and Narratology (3rd edition, 2009). She is also a video-artist, making
experimental documentaries on migration. Occasionally she acts as an
independent curator.

Address: University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

[email: M.G.Bal@uva.nl]