“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” So writes Audre Lorde in her essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” quoted by artist M. J. Harper to introduce the screening of their film, Arias for a New World, by Matt Lambert.
The screening was an intimate gathering, of friends new and old, in the auditorium of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), organised as a satellite event for the 16th edition of Diane Pernet’s festival, A Shaded View on Fashion Film (ASVOFF). In the auditorium, we all sat awaiting the premiere of Arias, knowing nothing of what was to come, as all details on the film remained unshared. Later, Lambert would tell me that this was no accident, for it is a film rather difficult to introduce. It was easy to understand what he meant by this. I would argue, moreover, that the film actually benefits from an unknowing audience. In fact, Arias even encourages us to feel lost in its world, to be infantile, or, more strongly, to feel reborn through it.
Indeed, this sentiment is rendered obvious if we understand the first sequence of the film in terms of a nativity scene. The first frames of the film capture a burst of light from an intensely lit stage, which transformed the darkness of the auditorium wherein we sat into a pool of illuminated faces. Light is the focus of the first few shots, for there is nothing to focus on otherwise. Like a baby opening her eyes for the first time, blinded by the world into which she is born, the audience is struck with a degree of infantile blindness as we are introduced, birthed, into the world of Arias.
It begins in darkness, and then there is light—this is the beginning. Shortly afterwards, Harper enters stage left, staggering somewhat, with choked breaths, carrying a thurible lit with incense. Harper is seemingly on the cusp of speech upon their entrance, but ultimately these stunted ‘words’ vanish into incomprehensible, breathy, slightly frightening, noises. During this sequence, a close-up shot frames a microphone from an angle such that it seems to be pointing towards the audience—perhaps an invitation to us, the audience-infants, to take our first breaths and gasps, to speak our first words, along with Harper in this new world. Before Arias properly begins, we are cradled by this prologue, as if to prepare us for the world in sight. Such is our figurative birth and the figurative mothering of the opening sequence.
Not only might we understand the beginning of Arias in terms of a birthing ritual, so to speak, but also in terms of its reference to Christian symbolism—these two vantages are of course similar. Just as Arias begins with light and breath, so too ‘the beginning’ in Christian mythology involves Light as well as the Word, or God, “YHWH” in Hebrew, aspirated consonants representative of breathing sounds. With the Christian motifs of light and breath at the forefront, in view of the above, it becomes even more clear that the openong of Arias functions to establish a ‘new’ world not only for Harper’s ensuing performance, but also for its audience members, who are being invited to experience along with Harper the various adventures — Harper’s, dare I say, christlike pilgrimage — narrated throughout the film.
Where does this journey lead us? Eventually, in the film’s narrative closure, it leads us to Harper’s symbolic death, in which Harper lies down on the very stage that birthed them in the beginning, the stage that made the whole performance possible in the first place: Harper ultimately exits the world of Arias via the stage that metaphorically gave life to their performance. As such, the ending performs a return to the beginning by this gesture to the stage on which everything began. Harper never truly leaves us, in other words—they never exit the stage at all. Instead, they merely lie down on top of it as the lights fade to black. In this way, Harper symbolically returns to the entity (the stage) that has given life to Arias: the ‘stage-mother’ we might say.
These themes of the mother, birth, and beginnings are central not only the narrative opening of Arias, however. They reemerge throughout, proving to be the thematic framework of the story as a whole. In Arias, Harper is constantly, almost despairingly, in search of their mother, a search which seems to be synonymous with finding a home. They remember well the feeling of being mothered, of being protected and nurtured in the home, but such feelings are present now for Harper only as nostalgia—these are some of the first details Harper shares with the audience as they sit on a stool, thurible by their side, to wash their feet in a bowl reminiscent of a holy water basin, an act the symbolic structure of which forcefully augments the already present biblical connotations.
Harper tells us that washing their feet reminds them of their mother and the safety she once provided them with, a reflection Harper reminisces about variously throughout the film. But in due course, one must leave the home for the world, which means leaving behind these safeties—a reality Harper is well aware of. Nevertheless, the desire for a mother, for a home, is hard if not impossible to abandon. Perhaps it is then as an effort to resurrect their mother, to live with their mother in fantasy, that Harper begins to wash their feet in this bowl while talking about her, a scene which reads as a child’s call to their mother, a plea to return to the first home, the womb.
However intentional, the symbolic relation here between the bowl of water and the amniotic sac, coupled with the phallic imagery of the foot, will delight every psychoanalyst, I am sure. The freudian motifs are palpable, underscoring more than anything Harper’s strong desire for their mother (curiously, the oedipal undertones are heightened by the fact of the father’s absence from the story, a form of narrative patricide). From a psychoanalytic perspective, the narrative closure strengthens this view: as Harper lies down on the stage preparing for their symbolic death, they rest their head beside their heels. The motif of the feet from the beginning preserves itself until the ending in which we are most confidently able to understand Harper’s plight: the inability to relinquish desire for the mother. To boot, we might understand Harper’s symbolic death in terms of Lacan’s understanding of the death drive, which signifies a nostalgia for a lost harmony, a desire to return to the pre-oedipal fusion with the mother.
But—to continue along this lacanian trail—if the child is to successfully enter the social world, the child must detach from the imaginary relation with the mother. The narrative closure appears to enact this detachment. It is through Harper’s ‘death’ that they are able to be reborn properly into the social world, leaving a nostalgia for the home and the mother behind. That is, by framing the narrative closure in terms of a death, Harper appears to acknowledge, and thereby lay to rest, this saga of their life that Arias represents. Through the film, Harper is able to “give name to the nameless so it can be thought”—Harper is able to think through part of the story of their life which begins namless, only as the muddled sounds of their entrance, to emerge thereafter more at home in the world, as opposed to forever searching the world for a home.
Arias is this and much more. It is funny and sad; it is engaging and confusing. Sure, it is about mothers, Harper even referred to it as an ode to their mother, but it is also about alligators, show business, and countless other things. Lambert told me afterwards that he thinks it is a film during which one’s mind might wander, but only to refocus itself again. To find itself back at home, we might say.
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The word ‘Aria’, Italian for ‘air’, is a technical term in opera to describe when one voice sings alone, often for the purpose of explaining what is going through the mind of the character in the moment. For Harper, Arias is a voice that’s been approaching crescendo for almost a decade, and it is finally here brought together in a visionary work of film by Lambert, which I cannot recommend enough.
