The Near Room

SOPHIE CUNDALE

The

Near

Room

The Near Room (2020), written and directed

by Sophie Cundale, is commissioned and produced by Film and Video Umbrella with support from Arts Council England, South London Gallery, Bonington Gallery, Curator Space and The Gane Trust

TEXT BY KATRINA BLACK

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He’ll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him to throw away the anger of all his bereavements. Perhaps you think this does not apply to you.

Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother’s funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore off her head and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drove away.

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons

01

A TEXT BY KATRINA BLACK

Diogenes the Cynic suggested that when he died his corpse should be thrown over the walls of his city – “flung out unburied” – and left to be consumed by dogs and birds. The dead body should never be pandered to, Diogenes urged the friends he had entrusted with the task. We should live in accordance with nature, and respect a corpse for what it is: organic matter now distinct from the fate of the living. It seems likely his request was ignored. It’s strange to insist on the sanctity of the dead, if the soul departing is determined for things to be otherwise. But the living need the dead, and their bodies, so that mourning can begin to unfold. We need the dead both in the “early stages of acute loss,” and in the longer, possibly indefinite stages of reorienting ourselves in the world. We “care about, care for, feel with a dead body, although we know that instantly or very soon after what we call biological death it notices nothing, cares for nothing, feels nothing” writes Thomas W. Lacqueur, in his study The Work of the Dead. When treated as they should be, the bodies of the dead create “a community of memory” that gives the living common purpose and “protects a definition of humanity itself.” 1 * * * In Sophie Cundale’s The Near Room (2020), two worlds are entwined in perpetuity, even as they play out across hundreds of years. Cundale never aims to cohere or resolve these narratives, but nor does she ever advance a sense of absolute nihilism either. She knows that a flight from meaning is not a state many people would aspire to, least of all when a life – be it their own or a loved one’s – has collapsed. The Near Room illuminates spaces connecting individual psyche and shared reality not only to demonstrate their existence, but to trace their painful intermittent disappearances.

So it seems fitting that the film finds its form through a warped kind of melodrama, shaped by the alternating escalation and breakdown of relationships.

As with many of Cundale’s previous films, no character is ever quite central; instead a host of distorted ancient types group together and redouble around an estranged family. If the characters of The Near Room are indeed a kind of family, they’re refracted through space and time, and through the structures of control they seem to variously

02

1

Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of The Dead, Princeton University Press, 2015

merge with and move between: the court, the convent, the Boxing Board of Control, an infinitely misguided anachronistic medical system. Exactly how all these structures interlink remains unclear. Life and death are not only contemporaries here, they are conspirators; melodrama shifts between worlds and scales, whereby both discreet emotional undercurrents and grand universal forces overlap and are loosely pieced together. If the form can be known by its proclivity for emotional overspill, filling up inside cramped domestic spaces, then The Near Room’s performances are too oddly subtracted to ever read as sincere – too prone to undercutting tense delivery with an eye roll or a sing-song response. The melodrama of The Near Room is messy, in other words, but it keeps the base and carnal close at hand. Despite experiencing states that might reveal aspects of the self otherwise typically obscured – through the extreme sacrifices, precision, and endurance of boxing training for example, or more straightforwardly perhaps the vertiginous terror of grief – the characters remain curiously flattened throughout.

Though dramatised as morbid (and subsequently as grounds to legitimise her incarceration), the Queen’s condition of Cotard Delusion, in which patients believe they have died, or that they simply no longer exist, is characterised not by its energetic excesses, but by its absences and removals. Described in 1880 by physician Jules Cotard as ‘a delirium of negation’, Cotard Delusion arises from a lack of affective reasoning – the depersonalisation and numbness to the external world (both emotional and physical) that can result either from injury, or from conditions of chronic depression, psychosis or grief. The delusion runs on a continuum from death to complete non-existence, in which the subject experiences the world as an ‘innate cosmos’, whose processes they can only recount as a coolly self-absented observer.

Symptoms advance through three stages: the first is ‘germination’, an advanced hypochondria; the second ‘blooming’, whereby the delusion takes hold; and the third ‘chronic’, in which the patient reports not changes in herself, but changes in the states of the universe – one component of which is her body, now thought of as another inert physical substance at first decomposing, and then finally disappearing altogether.

Cotard’s first patient was ‘Mademoiselle X’. “She conceives of herself as nothing more than a locus, not of experience – because, due to the complete suppression of feeling her perceptions and cognitions are not annexed to her body – but of the registration of the passage of events” one report explains.2 “She has effectively effaced herself from the universe: nothing which occurs is of any significance to her.” If somewhat less flippant than the requests of Diogenes, indefinitely occupying a decomposing corpse would likewise mean that it could never be repurposed for the rituals of grief; those who care for it could never start mourning. The Queen’s condition collapses the solemnity of death, perverts its course; calmly undercutting reverence with obscenity and gore – she kicks her doctor into submission, splashing her face with her urine, then slashes the throat of her courtly advisor Denia in retaliation to his attempts to manipulate her. “No-one can gut me. I have no guts” she retorts to his threats that ‘the plague’ outside her window could unravel them. “I will exist eternally if not burned. Fire is the only solution for me.” Interleaved with the telling of her story is the voice of the Boxer, who is similarly aerial to the course of his own experiences but through alternative means – a different kind of self-abstraction, a voice nonetheless seeking to establish where the care flooding in for his condition may

03

2

Gerrans, Philip; A one-stage explanation of the Cotard Delusion, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 2002

have tipped into a form of control.

Now in the twilight of his career, at one moment the Boxer reclines on a hotel bed, and watches as his trainer attempts to garner his cooperation in departing from the sport. Intimacy here is conditioned by a duty to form a bridge between two peeled-apart worlds, but acting as someone’s interpreter means both holding the authority on what should be omitted, and knowing when to close things down altogether. A trainer once described this to Cundale as a type of ‘caring abandon’.

Trainers have to act on what’s best, despite the separation this entails, because they have to keep things moving – a whole infrastructure reassembles once a boxer is removed. Unstable health would be a danger to everyone, and the evident strain of the Boxer’s condition on those surrounding him only further corroborates his isolation.

“It’s not really the fight that you lose but yourself,” the two-time world heavyweight champion George Foreman described the way this loss radiates. “One day people are walking by you afraid to even ask you a question, the next day they are patting you on the back with pity.”

Critical responses to melodrama are often concerned with it being cut short as a ‘serious’ form – as the sister, or perhaps offspring, of Greek tragedy, it alludes to both morality and redemption, and yet refuses to ever pin them down. It’s very difficult to be sure of ‘overcoming’ anything, of any scale, in such a shifting formless territory.

For all its prayer and iconography, there is no transcendent knowledge to be felt for in The Near Room, no hope of absolution or divine revelation. While Greek tragedy might shape a hero’s narrative through their battle with the Gods, torn between forces and grappling to redirect their fate, The Near Room calls for a differently nuanced understanding of relation and dependency – Cundale crams her characters into closer, weirder quarters, and lets action unfold on the ground. Private misdemeanours are revealed and not punished but swiftly lampooned. Characters conspire against one another, only to discover that such plots just amass without coming to fruition – the Sisters’ gleeful acquisition of royal treasure is interrupted by the discovery of Denia’s body, who in turn somehow survives despite the slice across his throat. Family

04

squabbles are elevated to a courtroom trial, the Boxer’s hospital bed becomes a negotiation table; conflict isn’t so much wrought within anguished individuals, hoping to ascend their earthly limitations through self-realisation, as it is thrashed out through all their petty trysts and bickers. The forces that might dominate a life aren’t mystified through sacred abstraction, pinned to the heavens or outsourced to the occult, they become kitsch and villainous parodies.

One of the important elements of Cundale’s work is a looping return to questioning how we make our emotional lives available to each other – and in this instance, how transformations of the elusive, disquieting qualities of grief can attempt, but also very frequently fail, to communicate. The Near Room makes use of the painful incidents and memories that can pool together inside a life, but always strikes a careful balance between disclosing the raw materials of those difficult experiences, and converting them into bawdy, soap-opera style fictions. Key to this balance is the embrace of mediation, and with it a spoofing of any self-serving ‘authenticity’ in film – not quite an undermining, then, but a playful recognition of its earnest limitations. These strategies exist alongside a sharp perception of discreet emotional registers, and the flickers that might indicate underlying disturbances – it seems the aim is not to ‘conquer’ or exorcise difficulty, but to use humour and absurdity to clarify an image of where her characters are snagged or inhibited. In its own way this suggests a call to pay closer attention; if grief and humour end up laced throughout everything (in this particular fiction as in life) then they might be used less in the work for emotional ballast, than for testing what parts of experience are shareable.

This deceptively tentative approach is also apparent in Cundale’s treatment of the differences between narcissistic performances of self, and the peculiarly subtracted demeanour that might arise from exhaustion, or long-term exposure to emotional pain. Denia, for example, who appears in one world as a courtly advisor, and in the other as a boxing promoter, is by nature intermediary throughout – although he frequently redirects or even forcefully intercepts action (as when he bullies the doctor out of her investigations, or coerces the Queen’s son to comply with his wishes), he is always reliant on the people he controls. This might also be why his lines sound like a cross between a threat and an aphorism – “Men die. Women grieve” – his expertise is obscuring the chance for thought to move or be refined through conversation.

Aphorisms have a special capacity to trash any hope of sincerity – in times of emotional extremity they can be worse than meaningless; in The Near Room they are almost comically pathetic in their dismissal, in their bland insistence on singular truths as a remedy for chaos. “Born alone, we die alone” intones Denia, halfway through boarding up the Queen’s window so she can no longer see outside, at the height of her isolated sickness. Later his exasperation borders on farce – the way he doggedly advances action, with no deeper motivation in sight, suggests that his deceptions might be largely just a way to pass the time. It would do nothing to lessen their creepiness; there is something “terrible in this kind of randomness,” as Anne Carson writes, in “the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, depravity has no master plan of any kind, it’s just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyse their own mania.” 3

05

3

Anne Carson, An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

Disengagement shapes the final moments of the ‘trial’ and the subsequent ceremony, by which time dialogue has devolved out of any kind of reciprocity whatsoever, and turned instead into a kind of layered and salacious formal speech. The bewilderment of loss is given over to ritual and irresolvable duration – in this sense we’re forever between the worlds of the living and the dead, and in the grim and heady blend of unease and catharsis born of moving from one into the other. This doesn’t always mean that release would be a welcome reassurance. There is a certain kind of dragging horror, a deeper pain in the possibility, as the poet Denise Riley has suggested, that “we can only stay in the company of our dead for as long as we don’t notice them as really separate from us, caught in their different realm.” 4 Consciousness and attention to the conditions of our enclosure – the strength to endure things as they are on the ground, however dimly lit, alienating or surreal they might be – is perhaps the closest we can come to any sense of resolution. Light floods in through the chamber of the final interior as the Boxer moves out of the frame, and we are left to decipher whether this is an image of release or return. If reading the work for heroism or redemption feels a little overblown then, or at least out of reach, The Near Room suggests we might consider instead the slow work of endurance and incremental repair, as another form of hope altogether.

Katrina Black is a researcher, writer and programme curator based in London, where she is also part of Jupiter Woods.

06

4

Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, Picador, 2019

THE NEAR ROOM WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Sophie Cundale

1ST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Katie Byford

EDITED BY Sophie Cundale Ben Gomes

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS Steven Bode, FVU Susanna Chisholm, FVU

GAFFER Max Gregory

ORIGINAL MUSIC Jamie Neville WITH Josh Barfoot Sophie Cundale Tomoya Forster Ben Gomes Douglas Neville

PRODUCER Laura Shacham STARRING (in order of appearance): John Harding Jnr Mark Tibbs Ahmet Patterson Chris New Penny Goring Bryony Miller Shayde Sinclair Laura Schuller BOXERS AND ADDITIONAL CAST Nathan Angol Ade Bademosi Javaun Bance Ansumana Conteh Niko Forcaneta Dmitry Frolov Sam McKay Taiwo Mosuro Tom Shacham Liza van der Smissen Charlie Sobiech Rosie Stewart ARTIST COLLABORATOR Ben Gomes CASTING Sophie Cundale Laura Shacham ADDITIONAL CASTING Emily Jones Helena Palmer Mark Tibbs DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Giacomo La Monaca 1ST ASSISTANT CAMERA / FOCUS PULLER Benjamin Smith 2ND ASSISTANT CAMERA Liam Touhey

SOUND RECORDIST Lubos Jurik Freddie Nevison CHOREOGRAPHER AND MOVEMENT DIRECTOR illyr WARDROBE Vincent Levy Sadie Williams WARDROBE ASSISTANT Zarina Shukri HAIR AND MAKE-UP / SFX Jennifer Drew HAIR AND MAKE-UP ASSISTANT Rebecca Mattsson HAIR AND MAKE-UP TRAINEE Emmal Baker ART DIRECTOR Billur Turan SET BUILDER William Wyld ADDITIONAL CARPENTRY Matt Evans Rupert Goldberg METALWORK Martha McGuinn ART ASSISTANTS Tilly Bungard Jamie Chu Emma Coles Angharad Davies Oscar Godfrey Shay Khelifa Norman Mine Marta Velasco Velasco PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS Sofia Bordin Jess Brown Dmitry Frolov Hoagy Hickson Leah McGurk, FVU

SOUND DESIGN & MIX Matt Jones, CODA Post COLOURIST Thomas Mangham, The Mill VFX Flock London POST-PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Alex Morley

SPECIAL THANKS Katrina Black CODA post production Crixus Studios Angie Cundale Danny Flexen Nick Garcia Tom Godfrey & Joshua Lockwood-Moran, Bonington Gallery Ben Gomes Steve Goodwin Richard Green, Angels Costumiers Peter Gregory, The Camden Studio Rachael Harlow & Margot Heller, South London Gallery Hospitalfield Roseena Hussain Jasmine Johnson Emily Jones London Film Academy Lynn AC, Camberwell Duke McKenzie OBE Clifton Mitchell Charlie Morris, The Mill Helena Palmer, RSC Dr Diana Rose Amanda Shacham St Martins Lane Hotel Mark Tibbs Jelmer Tuinstra, London Metropolitan University Danny Williams Professor Allan Young

The Near Room (2020) by Sophie Cundale is commissioned and produced

by Film and Video Umbrella with support from Arts Council England, South London Gallery, Bonington Gallery, Curator Space and The Gane Trust.

Publication © Film and Video Umbrella. Text © Katrina Black. Images © Sophie Cundale.

EDITED BY Steven Bode and Ellen O’Donohue Oddy DESIGNED BY Textbook Studio PUBLISHED BY Film and Video Umbrella COMMISSIONED AND PRODUCED BY FILM AND VIDEO UMBRELLA