Articulating the Ineffable: Recent films by Úrsula San Cristóbal
Over the coming weeks, I will be writing about some films which I enjoyed at the festival Instants Vidéo in October 2023.
In Un souvenir à demi-rêvé (2021), a beautiful seven minute film by Úrsula San Cristóbal, a woman hides her face in her hands, while numbers explode all around her. The numbers begin to undulate, as if on the surface of water. The title tells us we are somewhere between a memory and a dream. In the digital age, we understand numbers as information. Apparently the woman is being engulfed by remembered data.
As we drift through this exquisite video collage of sounds and images we are bathed in shifting textures: cloudy, watery, covered with flickering lights, deep blues and greens that glimmer out of the darkness. Wavering textures of dripping paint are projected onto the woman’s body as she wraps a network of ropes around her torso. The net confines her like a trap, but since she controls it with her own hands, it seems that it is her own mind which entraps her. Chanting voices are heard at a distance, intoning a plainchant as if from a remembered church service. The overlapping layers of sound share some of the isorhythmic structure of medieval music. The shifting layers of melody have an analogous structure to the shifting, contrapuntal layers of overlapping visual textures.
We see multiple images of the woman, twining her fingers in front of her face, as if trying to block out the over-intense light which is flashing around her, but also to untangle the strands. San Cristóbal has that magic artistic touch, where every image, every moment, is hauntingly, disturbingly beautiful and original.
We see strands of paint and fiber which seem to resemble writing, but the message is indecipherable, as it sometimes appears when we try to read something in a dream. A closing handwritten titles tells us that all of this is “only an image I’m pursuing.” This effort, to pursue an elusive inner feeling, a texture, a fleeting sensation, is everywhere apparent in San Cristóbal’s approach to filmmaking.
The primordial soup which begins the nine minute Inscrutable (2023) consists of letters rather than numbers, which drift out into dark blue watery textures. San Cristóbal’s medieval-inspired music here, with a wordless female voice, is akin to Meredith Monk’s score to her medieval film Book of Days. The letters flicker and vibrate in the void, potential carriers of meaning, suspended in the moment prior to comprehensibility, like quantum particles continually popping in and out of being. They gradually coalesce into handwritten letters, and documents covered with paint, needlework, and writing, none of it legible, except for occasional phrases, such as “woven sensations.” Fingers caress the appliquéd fabric, literally trying to pick up and decipher the sensations encoded within.
San Cristóbal is seen again, her nude body wrapped in fibers, the needlepoint covering her face like a mask. She extends her fingers and limbs into the fabric, trying to absorb meaning directly from the fibers. Once again, this can be seen as a metaphor for her artistic process: trying to unearth and clarify images and sounds through directly tactile bodily intuition, bypassing the verbal and the intellectual. A wild cloud of rising glissandi, played on string instruments, creates an atmosphere that is eerie and inscrutable, as the images continue to bloom and develop.
For artists working with a highly intuitive process, like San Cristóbel, the artistic process itself is often expressed metaphorically inside the work. To a large extent, the process, the exploration, is the content. This is not to say that San Cristóbel’s films lack content beyond her artistic process: her films are saturated with potent, vivid feelings and sensations at every moment. That these feelings are almost impossible to describe is an inevitable result of her focus on precisely those aspects of human experience which evade description and categorization.
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