Notes on an Appearance

(Ricky D’Ambrose, USA, 2018)

Pitiless Documents

After all the empty time, all the lost moments, there remain these endlessly traversed postcard landscapes; this distance organised between each and every one. The sectors of a city are to some extent decipherable. But the personal meaning they have had for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.

– Guy Debord, Critique of Separation (1961)

Notes on a Appearance is not a conventional, investigative mystery story, but it is a meditative, at times wry inquiry – into disappearance as much as appearance.

Everything starts with a postcard, framed (as things often are in this film) to entirely fill the screen. David (Bingham Bryant) writes to his pal, Todd (Keith Poulson), that he’s looking forward to his trip to New York, and that his partner, Madeleine (Tallie Medel), is well set up in Milan. He ends: “There’s a lot for us to talk about, too”.

We hear David narrating this letter, but subtle scrambles backward and forward in the film’s chronology quickly alert us to the fact that this voice-over guide is probably something more like an after-the-fact reconstitution or re-imagining of events – and that David will soon vanish altogether from the ongoing present-tense of his own story.

It’s the veritable founding gesture of a modern cinema, the type of cinema that Michelangelo Antonioni bequeathed to us in L’avventura (1960): a leading character suddenly disappears.

Was it suicide, murder, a quick escape, a freak accident of nature, paranormal activity? The only thing we can know for sure is that we’ll never know the answer to that mystery. More immediately intriguing, for D’Ambrose as for Antonioni, is the unravelling of the remaining characters, and the slow draining-away of the depicted world and its contents.

When Madeleine comes to New York to engage with Todd in a search for David, a certain existential listlessness inevitably sets in. The people they interrogate seem to have half-forgotten him already; his old friends, even the members of his (divided) family, are less than forthcoming. Who was that guy, and what did he leave behind?

The assignment to which David was heading in New York involves the research for a biography about the late “American political theorist” and author of Violence and Its Valences, Stephen Taubes (who bears an uncanny resemblance, in his photos, to French philosopher Jacques Rancière). In the type of rubbing-up-against-reality frisson that Notes on an Appearance specialises in, the edgy, anarchistic, even shady nature of the Taubes œuvre is vouched for by the name of the editor on the cover of his posthumously collected essays: Avital Ronnell.

So the film follows along two simultaneous lines, two investigations. Taubes is said to have incited a “violent movement” – and his legacy is trailed by charges of anti-Semitism, due to a series of inflammatory articles he wrote in Austria during the 1980s (a transposed echo of the real-life story of the once revered deconstructionist, Paul de Man).

David, on the other hand, is a “good enough writer”, as yet unpublished anywhere. As viewers, we can imagine there might be some miraculous montage tie-up to reveal, over the long haul, some secret affinity or encounter connecting these two disappeared men … but that join never takes place.

The question is implicitly posed: Taubes the scandalous celebrity or David the modest, largely anonymous researcher – whose life, whose past, matters more? The film suggests an equality, a flattening-out of perspectives – and a quiet agony over the endless forgetting and oblivion that, sooner or later, envelop us all.

The often inscrutable traces people leave behind – cards, notes, videos – offer mute witness to their experiences, thoughts, and feelings. Other phantom itineraries can also be constructed and retraced – through paths on city maps, travel tickets, appointment schedules, expense lists. Personal diaries (whether of Taubes or David) seem to offer intimate access, but are more likely to frustrate the seeker of insight. And there are also gaps, censorings, material forever lost to any record. At one point, David reflects: “I quickly learned that some things are better left unspoken”.

Notes of an Appearance is also about a particular cultural milieu – the kind of small, intense, closed world of art and higher learning in which even grabbing a coffee at a local haunt is overlaid by random talk of “video installations”. In cinema, there are not many accurately observed, spot-on vignettes of academic life and its strange rituals. D’Ambrose manages to pull off one of the best of all deadpan satires of intellectual gloominess in his recreation of a (very) typical conference session (“on translation”).

The conference papers themselves are elided by D’Ambrose, and question-time reduced to a few garbled, representative phrases from the floor – while shots of each blank-looking participant (their resumés, spoken aloud by the session’s chair, are a rollcall of groovy magazine titles) get underlined by the burst of a church organ. The scene begins with “Please join me in welcoming our panellists” and ends, to no greater affect, with “Please join me in thanking our panellists”.

In the time David spent logging the 20 hours of rather enigmatic videotape left behind by Taubes, he had reason to wonder: “I didn’t understand what the tapes were for or why they were made … Their importance was unclear”. Their meaning is as vague as their manner is formless: idle, handheld pans along a wave-struck shore, meanderings down a crowded avenue or a lake path …

Notes on an Appearance, by contrast, has a rock-solid style. D’Ambrose’s pared-down but crisp and vivid cinematic mode inscribes the streets down which his characters walk, the cups they drink from, the books they read, the windows they stand at and look out from. The accompanying soundtrack is rigorously chosen: either ambient noise, or a strikingly selected piece of music. And always a static frame, into which bodies enter – and through which they pass.

The looming melancholy of evanescence is structured into each and every one of these frames. Our last glimpse of David, at the 18-and-a-half-minute mark, is like a long shot from a silent movie: a figure moving away, far into the distance, while the camera takes in an entire cityscape.

© Adrian Martin December 2018