Consent to Distance: Notes Towards Haft Cinema

Consider the mobile — Calder’s Big Red (1959), for instance. As a mobile assumes its evershifting arrangements, our attention peregrinates over its constituent pieces. Focus lands on the circle, leaps to the triangle, breaks from the mobile altogether; returns. In her 2023 novel The Long Form, Kate Briggs writes perceptively of that ‘lilting canopy of overhead shapes,’ suspended over a baby’s bouncer chair. Briggs writes: ‘like this — sensationally, kinetically — the world hung all around her. It took shape. It changed shape.’ A mobile is an ever-evolving landscape, constantly reformed by the shifting distances between its constituent pieces. It is a figure for our encounter of one another. You, from your perspective, I, from mine, perpetually rearranging in and around each other in irrefragable, simultaneous interconnectivity and separation. Cinema, too, is a dance of shifting distances.

Perhaps the first distance is between a filmmaker and a camera. The material conditions of filmmaking have their constraints and freedoms: a lens sees differently than an eye, and film captures differently than the imagination. Equipment costs money, gets lost, is found; breaks. A complex tool does more than you could want it to, then won’t do what you want. Mapping this distance in her 1946 essay ‘Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film,’ Maya Deren recognises its ‘indefinitely large, if not infinite, range of potentialities.’

Abbas Kiarostami illuminates some more of cinema’s many distances in ‘An Unfinished Cinema,’ a brief essay written for the centenary of film and first circulated in December 1995 at Paris’ Odéon Theatre. In advocating ‘an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience, so resulting in hundreds of films,’ the essay celebrates the multiplicity of interpretive possibility vested in the distance between a film and an audience. These questions of interpretation open ‘an Aladdin's Cave of a positively limestone extent and complexity,’ as William Empson has it in the Autumn 1950 Kenyon Review. 

Kiarostami’s essay begins with a reflection on another of cinema’s distances: between individual members of a film audience:  

‘Originally, I thought that the lights went out in a movie theatre so that we could see the images on the screen better. Then I [...] saw that there was a much more important reason: the darkness allowed the members of the audience to isolate themselves from others and to be alone. They were both with others and distant from them.’

Solitary in the darkness of the screening room; sharing in the brightness of the film screen, audience members are, as ornaments on a mobile, amongst and distant from one another. This alone-togetherness is perhaps most consciously felt as a film ends. As the lights come up we are forced to recognise that our fellow audience members have been there all along — they, too, have just seen this film; they may even wish to discuss it with you. 

Briggs’ meditation on the mobile closes with the observation that ‘the bird outside in the tree stopped its peeping. Or, it continued, very likely. But in the remit of another window, a room inhabited by other people, a bit further down the street, somewhere else.’ Haft Cinema is also a response to geographic distance. Togetherness is a great sustaining force, and yet my dearest interlocutors are spread over continents. This problem is familiar to anyone who has ever left any place for some place else. It fundamentally structures life in the diaspora. Failing the possibility of watching a film together, live and in person, with those much beloved people in faraway places, one likes to imagine them watching films with people more proximate. 

Like pendants on a mobile, cinema’s practitioners and participants are constantly rearranging around each other, changing the landscape formed by its distances. What are we to do? In La Pesanteur et la Grâce, — fragments from Simone Weil’s private notebooks, as excerpted, arranged, titled, and published by Gustave Thibon in 1947 — Weil writes,

 ‘Aimer purement, c'est consentir à la distance, c'est adorer la distance entre soi et ce qu'on aime.’

[To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.] 

When she advocates a ‘consent to distance,’ Weil expands on the Platonic metaxu, encouraging an embrace of the space between. Her words are important: to love is to ‘consentir’ [consent] to and ‘adorer’ [adore] distance. We are not merely to surrender to distance, but rather to actively participate in furnishing its being. Weil’s description of two prisoners in adjoining cells, who communicate by knocking on their shared wall, is useful here: ‘the wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication.’ For the philosopher and heterodox Christian, ‘it is the same with us and God,’ and thus, more broadly, ‘every separation is a link.’ This principle, that all which separates draws into connection, underpins Weil’s understanding of love as necessarily a ‘consent to distance.’ 

Cinema is a landscape constantly recast by the shifting of distances, between filmmaker and camera; filmmaker and subject; filmmaker and audience; viewer and viewed; between members of an audience. These entities are held apart and inextricably intertwined. Haft Cinema is, among other things, a consent to cinema’s many-splendoured distances.

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Haft Cinema is a project conceived and written by Sarv Gersten. It exists thanks to editing, organising, web designing and invaluable advising by Ellithia Adams, Nayla Dayal, Adrianos Efthymiadis, David Gersten, Emmanuelle Hagopian, Harry Lowther, Sheila Mostofi, Alec Schellinx, Leo Shirky, Homa Shojaie, and Mia Wu, who reside in Athens, Claremont, New York, Oxford, Taipei, Tehran, and Toronto, and some of whom are yet to meet one another.