In the online short audiovisual essay form that has come to be known as the videographic epigraph, or the epigraphic video, the usual procedure is to overlay a continuous or edited film or television programme extract with a quotation from a text that has no previous connection to the extracted sequence. The lack of direct correspondence is normally helpful in opening up creative, and sometimes surprising, forms of relationality or interstitiality, akin in spirit, I like to think, to Laura Rascaroli’s notion of essay filmmaking as the art of gaps (Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 

In Shira Havron’s brilliant work “Space Perception,” a videographic response to my audiovisual essay “Liquid Perception,” Havron utilises the same quotation as I do: some sentences taken from a paragraph in Gilles Deleuze’s chapter “The perception-image” in his book Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (University of Minnesota Press, 1986, as translated from the original French by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam [p. 79]). But as she matches them to sequences from Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, she introduces an epigraphic modality not present in my earlier work, which matches the quotation with the precise scene that Deleuze is writing about: the underwater disappearance scene of Juliette, protagonist of Jean Vigo’s 1934 classic L’Atalante, and the fruitless search for her made by her barge-captain husband Jean. Havron’s use of the same music as “Liquid Perception” conveys, to me at least, a wonderful sense of her work being uncannily haunted by, as well as mimetically connected to my video. 

The insightfulness of Havron’s epigraphic adaptation of “Liquid Perception” reaches across a number of its subjects. Her video draws out the beautiful connections between the liquidity of Cuaron’s cinematic staging of the weightlessness of outer-space and the slightly more gravitational qualities of watery forms of suspension. It also beautifully works through the different references to and broader themes of personal human loss in Cuaron’s film by connecting it with Deleuze’s lovely evocation of the tragedy at the heart of Vigo’s film. In my view, “Space Perception” is a perfectly conceived and realised videographic work in its wonderfully chosen focus and scope.

In “Movement in Water,” a truly inspired video by Ido Harambam in which the first part of Deleuze’s “liquid perception” quotation is applied to a range of cinematic underwater sequences from two films—The Piano [Jane Campion, 1993] and The Shape of Water [Guillermo del Toro, 2017]—the focus moves mostly to filmic forms of intertextuality and influence. The video’s comparative aspect conjures most effectively a revelation not only of Del Toro’s seemingly deliberate reworking of Campion’s film’s famous sequence, but also of both films’ indebtedness to Vigo’s even earlier watery explorations, as well as to the theoretical understanding of liquid perception and cinematic movement that his 1934 film sequence helped to generate. Harambam’s video meditation also centres on cinematic treatments of gravitational force and watery forms of anchoring through its vivid contrasting of the sinking piano and the very linear rope pulling Ada under with the other scenes of suspension and environmental / embodied holding. The fact that the “Movement in Water” chooses not to use the full Deleuze quotation from “Liquid Perception” doesn’t prevent the video from engaging very directly with some of those passages’ same questions of terrible loss, magical reunion and the need (in either case) to give oneself up to the water. Indeed, the filmic scenes featured in the video fully fill in for the absent words, and their precise juxtaposition—with its powerful conjuration of L’Atalante—generates similar and very powerful kinds of poetry.