No Balance Palace

Manuscript

This was the exercise given to him by the physiotherapist. She was an expert in dizziness. He had been dazed for weeks. Thanks to Hitchcock he had always thought vertigo meant fear of heights, but no - the vertigo he experienced was fear induced by the inability to process the three dimensions of space in accordance with his motions. 

She had told him to do the exercise for sixty seconds, five times a day, shaking his head as fast as possible without losing focus of what he was looking at. I was keeping count. Though unpleasant, the point of exercising was apparently to re-calibrate his balancing organ and thus to regain his visual and spatial orientation. Coincidentally the same could be said about the Master of Film program that I was attending.

I had suffered from similar symptoms. A constant distraction from ideas and desires; images concocted but never reaching a solid state. I had come to you to 'brush my habits against the grain' and to gain a new use of my senses – all for the purpose of ‘cinema’. Your formalities had demanded that any research proposal be rooted in previous practice. I had taken this literally. 

Gleaning through my works of the past five years, as different as they were in form and conditions, I discovered that most of them shared a peculiar element: one of lying and deceit. Whether it was something in the actual story that I had been attracted to, or something in the narrative mechanics applied by me, it stood out. It had importance. It had also inspired me in other makers. And I realized that false or at least shrouded pretences allowed for a certain seduction that I was apparently soft for. 

I entitled my application 'Lying for Truth'. You weren’t so impressed. "Every filmmaker lies for truth every time", Laurent van Lancker said. Later, after I had been accepted into the programme nonetheless, Eyal Sivan said, "Isn't lying truthfully the very definition of cinema?" I knew what you meant. But coming from traditions of journalism and public broadcasting with a different concept of truth. 

Though I didn’t believe in truth, singular, I thought you were miscalculating the ballistics. Even so it gave me something to chew on: If I had indeed come here for cinema and cinema was inherently deceitful - if that's in fact its raison d'être - then why spend my energy on a futile discussion about truth and lies? 

He said his condition was different from most other peoples. It probably came from a horizontal canal in the inner ear. Something wasn't moving right and the balancing organ was affected. 

To me, 'lying for truth' meant a radical shifting of narrative trajectory towards a goal. It's a forced perspective: the perception of reality is altered, and when, or if, the construction is revealed to the audience, it opens the door to different insights than otherwise. 

Lying and truth were notions difficult to shed. If he was the only one who could experience the vertigo how could we know he wasn't playing us? Were we abetting a lazy imposter? It seemed reasonable to expect medicine to come up with an explanation for him but he claimed science was inconclusive.

Even if he was a dirty liar – if science would have allowed us to look directly at indicators of vertigo it wouldn't have told us anything about the experience of vertigo. 

We have learned to accept these patterns of light and darkness as an image of a brain. It’s merely a representation of radiowaves reflected with magnetism and it doesn’t show us any essence or truth. But I enjoy these images just as they are. Perhaps you think you know what you’re looking at - but neuroscience said what you're really looking at is your own memory of fruit. Look closely at the bananas. Look long and hard. Banana. Banana. Banana. Banana. Is that even a word? 

I've become fascinated with the notion of Jamais-Vu, a psychological phenomenon of experiencing something familiar yet with the eerie feeling it's the very first time. There's no way of looking at an image of anything and seeing the thing itself. Is this really him? Am I – the I here – really someone dabbling with cinema?

Applying to the masters program I had wanted ‘Lying for truth’ to be understood in juxtaposition with the tradition I had been challenging. Eyal helped me articulate that my ‘Lying for Truth’ was primarily a device. The rest of the 2019 group helped me realize I was missing a field or a theme or a topic – or a subject: 

I had made things primarily on commission so they had been determined by the need of someone else. I had then tried to find ways to insert myself and make it interesting for me. But I had hardly ever made anything just for myself.

As much as he and I both liked the deceitful narrator and the imposter-character, I wanted to understand why we had that in common. It’s not like we didn’t share any other interests. We both appreciated classical music, thunderstorms and the eerie in the everyday. He had always liked animals. So had I. Especially in unnatural places, asking questions about reality. 

He was examined again by someone with new and alternative answers and little bottles of foul tasting herbal medicine. He had been debating himself whether to trust the guy or to refuse his methods.

We were all getting sick of staying in for weeks on end. But I didn’t leave, of course. We needed each other. It dawned on me that what ‘lying for truth’ was missing was in a way: him. 

For him it was clearly not a device. It was also not a moral question - but rather one about the conditions of socializing. I was reviewing my archive to find what I had hidden from myself. Something that would connect everything else. What was triggered in each and every intersection? The word was already there. Could this be it? Or merely: Trust?

I would have to investigate further. 

We weren’t really worried anymore. His vertigo was slowly getting better, and I had been appropriating the cramped space we were sharing. We decided to trust our ability to recover from each our condition.