Toward a Horizon of Un-Knowing: Voice, Aurality, and the Politics of Identification in the Art of Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier

Abstract

These are the words that open the film All that’s solid melts into air (Karl Marx), a film made by Vong Phaophanit (b. 1961, Savannakhet, Laos) with text by Claire Oboussier (b. 1963, London) in 2006. The anecdote is recounted in the Lao language and is foregrounded only as sound: the voice of the artist. No visual imagery is shown, only a black screen with English-language subtitles. For those who do not understand Lao, the words are slowly processed as sonic textures, as vocal rhythms. Through their translation, the words engender a relationship between storyteller and listener, speaking of speech and describing the sound of song. Lured into this sonic imagination, this intimate matrix of memory, conjured both at the level of listening and reading, the transition to visual stimuli feels sudden, like being jolted awake. We now perceive a film crew from afar, as they ascend the steep steps leading from the river’s edge to a temple at the top of a hill. We follow their progress in closer proximity as a procession of flower-bearing young women crosses the top of the steps, passes under, and continues along the length of the camera jib crane, heeding the director’s prompts (Fig. 1). A moment later, we watch the crew ascend another set of steps to reach the temple grounds, the team working together to transport the cumbersome jib crane. From there the camera zooms in to focus on the eerie and seemingly autonomous rotational movements of the film camera mounted on the jib crane as it stretches to an optimal height for panning its setting in Luang Prabang, Laos (Fig. 2). Evincing an omnipotence of vision, and set in stark contrast against the sky and temple rooftop, this representation of the optical apparatus in motion heightens our attention to the work of visual capture, or the shaping of what one sees on film as a process that conditions the act of seeing as one of knowing.