Respect
In a lecture delivered at the NFSA last year, the great French film director Bernard Tavenier showed a short excerpt from his 1999 feature It All Starts Today. The chosen scene shows a woman arriving to pick up her young son at the end of the school day. She crosses the courtyard in the grim twilight towards the building’s entrance, pushing a pram in front of her. Halfway across the open courtyard, the woman stumbles and falls. The whole scene is shot through a classroom window over the din of a busy class. We witness the fall from some distance, but it is evident something is wrong from her gait; she is drunk. Picking herself up, she falters for a brief moment before turning and fleeing the school altogether, abandoning her baby and his older brother inside.
Tavenier selected the clip to draw attention to the staging of scenes and the urgent problem of where to place the camera when considering each shot. Of this particular scene and his decision to shoot from a distance he said, ‘You must respect the character. When someone doesn’t want to be seen, you cannot show them’. Tavenier’s gesture of compassion is something we grasp intuitively watching the film. The distance in fact is a way of drawing out and focussing our empathy for the subject.
A similar action and effect is at work in Mark Hislop’s drawings of his nine year old son, Henry, and his friends. Hislop photographs the back of his young subjects heads before enlarging these images to roughly life size. After tracing the outline onto a sheet of printmaking paper with carbon, Hislop begins his work. He painstakingly draws in the hair, the nape of a neck, sometimes using the rim of a t-shirt or hood-top to frame the head. Outside the carbon outline the paper extends blankly to the borders. This formal isolation of the subject suggests a concentration of empathy. And this is underscored by the time involved in reproducing photographic detail in finely executed pencil work.
Hislop’s attentiveness to tweens recalls scientific drawings from the nineteenth century. In her essay on contemporary drawing, curator Laura Hoptman notes that the genre of scientific drawings flourished in the nineteenth century at a time when photography was growing in popularity. The simultaneous popularity of these different representational techniques highlights the fact that drawing often embodies a learning process. As Hoptman explains, “Beyond their documentary purposes, then, the drawings that appeared … seem also to have been made to encourage the aesthetic mysteries of the natural world”.1
Hislop draws in order to know about his subjects, but their turned backs consistently deflect his paternal attention. They do not want to be known or seen. Without seeing their faces we have no recognisable topologies of emotion, just dense hair. Hislop’s pencil marks replicate the linear nature of hair, which dominates the composition. His rendering of this enacts the problem of perception and proximity. Do you draw each strand or not? There is a process of knowing here, which is built on lots of small decisions about what to take notice of, and how close to look. Hislop’s unusual portraits display a fine sensitivity to the brooding moods, contradictory impulses and intense longing for privacy, characteristic of children on the threshold of adolescence edging tentatively towards independence.
Anna Zagala
1. Hoptman, L. Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p15.
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