@indigo

I wake up at 5:15am and eat two probiotic gummies from a jar on my bedside table, as if this might wake me up.

@indigo

In it, Pickford plays a wild girl, an untouched orphan in frayed clothing, who badly craves affection. She lives with her grandmother on the outskirts of a village and spends her days as a devotedly voyeuristic outsider to its festivities. Pickford’s Fanchon is feared by the others, because everyone had thought her mother to be a witch. She casts her sights on a man, Landry, with a doberman-like visage and a pressed collar, who is courting a woman with tightly looped curls.

Fanchon is transfixed by the rigid, paint-by-numbers courtship rituals that the couple stage in gullies and on riverbanks. It’s not that Landry is particularly attractive to her—the obsession feels arbitrary—but that, somehow, the possibility of all intimacy is contained in him. Pickford staggers between clownishness and tight-lipped severity. Her motions are jagged, impish, and expressionistic; her eyes are ringed and wanting.

In one scene, the villagers spread out in a field, sharing fruit in pairs, while Fanchon scowls at them from the top of a mound, cradling her very own apple. She contemplates throwing it, then reneges and bites into it, instead. She repeats this, rotating in petulant indecision, contemplating and biting until it’s too late; she’s holding a core.

“A sad heart,” reads one of the film’s interlaid cards. Another, simply “Eventide.” Fanchon moves between magenta, sepia, and blue.

@indigo

This time, on the cusp of sunrise when most are asleep, is of course quiet, but it also feels uncomfortably loud. I feel sensitive to every jolt and rustle, to every wriggle in the cold cavern of the screening room. I am conscious of my leather jacket creaking at the elbows when I drink. Around me, other leather jackets rub against the leather couch. A security alarm sounds in increments, each time only once, as if testing the waters.

@indigo

The gaps between noises are much less heavily plugged than normal; sound doesn’t stream but gathers and pools in spots. A wake-up alarm twinkles, ascending, and is quickly put to sleep. Exercises in attention are always exercises in distraction.

@indigo

I kept waking up during the night, thinking it was morning, and @tiia was outside my door, ready to pick me up. First at 11:30, then three, then four. It was even colder than yesterday, and I layered on wool, shivered to the car.

@indigo

The chill is apt; the film, The Valley of Silent Men (1922), is set in a below-zero landscape. It tracks the strange aftermath of the murder of an explorer, as a naively kind-hearted man, Kent, makes a faux confession from his (apparent) deathbed.

A dark-browed woman—Marette, daughter of a prophet—shows up in a swooping, fur-brimmed coat. A truth-seeker and a romantic (if one can be both), when Kent discovers he is well and is jailed, he breaks out and together they flee, scaling the mountain’s peaks, which fold over themselves like meringue. Marette slips into a crevasse, while Kent is slung to the other side of the mountain. 

From afar, their ropes look like skeins of dental floss. Snow—especially in black-and-white, reduced to its near-nothing—makes everything stark, and it moves and satisfies me to watch the pair together and adrift, two dark bundles in a crumpled void of white, stumbling and sliding with a helpless beauty.

@indigo

The truth? Today is the day that my attention waivered. I was hungover and my stomach was making strange noises. This might’ve been appropriate, because we were watching a movie about a drunken buck’s night escapade, where the out-of-towner groom, who everyone is suspicious of, lives up to these suspicions in the course of a swirling trail of misdemeanours, performed alongside a Danny Devito-esque sidekick. The untrustworthy groom’s eyes are kohl-lined, as if set out in a bold font, and he has a brilliant, cheeky face. The bride is a shimmering pixie with a braid lapping her temples.

@indigo

I walk today; the air is shifty and cold. A crescent moon is hanging as if from a string. Waking up at this hour makes me feel like I am going to the airport; it’s a destabilising feeling, but still precious, promising, like every second is part of an important transition.

Directed by William A. Wellman, You Never Know Women stars Florence Vidor as Vera, a cherubic, gauze cape-wearing butterfly impersonator beloved by her vaudeville troupe, particularly their resident Byronic escape artist, Norodin. She is also the object of a stoney investor’s obsession—a man who, in long stretches, we observe watching the troupe perform. He has an air of tortured discontent, but raps his cane on the floor when something finally pleases him—his way of scrambling to possess Vera, her world, and her show. The rest of the on-screen audience are enthralled: the kind of loose-jawed absorption one can slip into when they think they are not being watched, because this burden is being seamlessly deferred elsewhere, to the acrobats and clowns.

Looking feels especially kinetic when speech is unavailable. There’s a shot between a strongman’s legs, who is looking at Vera while balancing another woman on the soles of his feet.

In an early on-stage scene, the troupe’s members are revealed in a patiently curving pan, as they peel off their masks in sequence. Underneath is a second ‘mask,’ a theatrical, greasepaint smile, and it feels as if we could spin back to the beginning, again and again, forever. There is something about silence that seems to render a film both particularly fragile and somehow beyond the rhythms of time, like a self-sustaining trick of the light. Later, after the ‘family’ has been touched by grief, the same spinning-top shot recurs, but their expressions are now despairing; they stare deeply into the camera. There is a degree of blame directed towards the audience. For looking too closely? For not respecting the expanse between spectator and spectacle?

By this point, the person I came with had crossed the threshold and begun snoring softly beside me.

I realise each day how tenuous looking-power really is, though, and think about how witnessing art is often more of a dispossession. In silence, when you’re this aware of your body—swallowing, digesting, rumbling—the comfortable confidence of being a seer becomes especially flimsy.

@indigo

It’s Sunday. I think about absconding. I am afraid to walk to the gallery alone before dawn, so I splurge on an Uber. The driver has been working through the early hours, witnessing brawls on Chapel Street, and he is picking up some last little trips as he drifts back home. Perhaps because it is Sunday, and seven days have now cycled, the visitors to the screening room—which feels increasingly like a bedroom—seem to have settled into the routine of it all.

Gypsy Anne (directed by Rasmus Breistein and adapted from a short story by Kristofer Janson) is a Norwegian tale about a woman named Anne who, as an orphaned infant discovered in the barn of the industrious Storlien farm, was reluctantly taken into the fold of the owners’ family, becoming the adopted sibling of the farm’s heir, Haldor, with whom she spies on lovers and practises kissing as a mischievous child. Later, as an adult haunted by unbelonging, Anne herds goats and, when Haldor makes a controversial proposal and farmhand Jon gradually reveals his love, eventually sets the farmhouse ablaze. 

The fire is a dark smog which textures the silhouettes of the hillsides behind it and stains the rest of the film red. It feels right for it to be soundless. It holds a consumptive serenity. As the characters confound one another with silent admissions, a memorable effect repeats: faces are framed in blurry-edged spotlights, which contract around expressions while all else blackens. Feeling lights and blots.

It’d be amiss to call this week of dawn cinemagoing tranquil. At first I’d experienced an increase in focus throughout my days, and had thought of these mornings as meditations. Now my body feels confused. Still, I’ve enjoyed the sense of awkward communion, the sheepishness of small talking with strangers shortly after waking, the laughter that has nowhere to hide, the breath becoming a score.

I call my mum on the walk home. I haven’t seen her in months, but I know that, because it’s Sunday, she’s going swimming.