ANA VAZ
SECESSION, VIENNA
MARCH 9 - MAY 18, 2025
The next day, I went back to see the film. I arrived a bit too late, and entered on the image of stones and construction. The cameras, (there is a split-screen) are looking at - or looking into - railroad tracks in Paris, tracks that connected Paris to the port of Le Havre, which in turn connected France to the West Indies and Americas. A narrator describes his own (?) experience of living as a night owl while continually maintaining these tracks - always when the trains are not running, during the darkest hours.
Afterwards, the film departs from this reality - one that we still recognize - and leaves on a more hallucinatory trip. In the background, there are sounds that I don’t know, yet already heard. Things moving in the belly of a metal ship, something groaning in the deep sea, far away. The inside of a large pipe that carries a heavy substance.
They are sounds that I have learned to place and name through media and film; I think I know them like I know myself. Later, one of the narrators is talking about a black substance coming from beyond the sea, of which no one can pinpoint the colour. Is this the substance I hear moving through the pipes, in a low hum? I read it as being oil, one of the many things that Westerners have ransacked the world for. The narrator is speaking about a Crystal, which supposedly does even more things than what petroleum can do. You start to read the film as being more and more grounded, all the while the narrative dives deeper into dream and hallucination. I imagine this is one of the things Vaz was motioning to above and below for.
On the screen, a leopard is pacing, behind bars. Do I see the bars? I don’t know if they’re in view, but I know the animal is caged. I know it intrinsically in the way that it is pacing. This is one of the things Vaz was motioning to above and below for.
Where we started with the railway-workers, now non-human animals are acting in the film, both spoken and seen. In the narration, the animals are actors and their role is to hold up a mirror to ourselves. When asked why he drew animals as opposed to people, Walt Disney responded “It’s easier to humanize animals than humanize humans.”1 The deep-voiced narrator’s animal-friends have routines in day and night, learn lessons (in how to take and survive the ‘crystal’ they both worship and need), they have prejudices toward each other, …
Alongside the spoken text, the animals on screen too have become actors because they are filmed in environments that we created
But the film here becomes more a pattern than a document. Vaz mirrors the image, and the following footage goes spinning, sliding or turns upside down. At times, I have to look away before I become nauseous. Ocean and waves, city, carnival rides, a crane arm picking up and moving different kinds of waste. Sometimes, in between, there is nothing but the record of dust and scratches on film, becoming a simple galaxy against which the poem - or story - is set.
As I am leaving, I pass once more the show Autofictions in stone by Aglaia Konrad underneath the ground floor of the building where videos of construction cranes and cut marble lead you into a stone-filled exposition. Above connects to below. In the city center, coins are lying in the exposed ruins, resembling stars. On the flight home, there is a lot of turbulence, and I get incredibly seasick. This time I cannot look away.
2. Balázs, Béla, and Erica Carter. Bela Balázs: Early Film Theory. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011
Both mentioned in “Animals, Framed”, by Jacob Lindgren in ZOO Index - Reader, 2024.