ARTS
NTIMACIES temporality, motion, and sensuality of life, an illusion that approaches reality in an asymptote. But it will never quite meet it. In the shot, the water falls into an unseen abyss, returning only upward plumes of gently dissipating mist and spray, transforming into a figurative and evocative portrait of loss—of love and its potentiality slipping away, returning only the immaterial, ephemeral mist, an unsteady, wavering image or screen that disappears as quickly as it appears. +++ Together, Happy Together and Your Name Engraved Herein seem to share a common understanding of the ambivalent and conflicted operation of queer cinema. On one hand, it is a means to beautifully and evocatively materialize that which is forbidden. In moving images, inexpressible desires, taboo fantasies, and suppressed queer romances are given beautiful, artful form. On the other hand, the impermanent nature of the cinematic image painfully acknowledges the difficulty of actualising such idealistic images of intimacy and love in societies in which non-normative relationships remain taboo and are subject to oppression by cis-heteronormative structures of power. But in its ending, Your Name Engraved Herein chooses to reject this pessimistic and bitter dissolution of the filmic image. It chooses to let A-Han and Birdy step back into that world of fantasy together once more. Film is not merely conceptualised as an escape, a brief distraction from reality, but rather something that does work to reality, that reckons and grapples with it while also imagining a better version of it: a space for healing, and for hope. At the end of the film, in Canada, A-Han unexpectedly bumps into Birdy—who has also come to Canada to pay his respects to Father Oliver—for the first time since high school. From the moment that
they meet, the last ten minutes of the film consist of two long shots that track A-Han and Birdy together as they walk through the empty streets in the hours before dawn, awkwardly talking and rediscovering one another, so many years distanced from that initial love, that initial pain. In those long, contemplative shots, they are not separated into different frames, different gazes, different images of one another—they share the space of the frame, share this image, in which they are bound together by mutual gazes, mutual understandings. They finally arrive at A-Han’s hotel, and part ways—but as Birdy turns to leave, alone, A-Han bounds back down the stairs and breathlessly meets him. 我再陪你走一段好了。 I’ll walk with you again, for a while more. The walk will end, the credits will roll, and the film will fade to darkness, but then again, films don’t have to obey the same kind of temporality that we do. In the filmic image, temporary moments that come and go, like a mist of water ascending to the sky, are immortalized in beauty, preserved in the mind’s eye forever, even as they have also passed from sight. In films, the inevitabilities of time can be reversed, and the past can be re-lived, again, for a while more. At this moment, Birdy and A-Han abruptly stop and turn, both hearing something, and the camera swivels, following their gaze, only to see, on the empty streets, their younger high school selves, sauntering together, singing the song that A-Han would sing to Birdy years later, only now singing it together, singing it to one another. It’s a moment of the past that could never have happened, an impossible, beautiful vision. But it’s an image that they are both creating together, sharing in the eye of their mind, within the space of the cinematic image. This final shot also transcends a different kind of time, stitching together a history of Birdy, Happy Together, and now, Your Name Engraved Herein. It
calls on us to re-examine those films, to challenge the assumption that Birdy’s escape and the Iguazu Falls can only ever be escapist fantasies of impossible realities that are unchangeable parts of the past. Through the very artistic gesture that it enacts—building on these past films to create something new—Your Name Engraved Herein suggests that cinematic images can proffer resolutions toward the past in order to project, into the future, new possibilities. These images have yet to materialize into reality. But it is exactly this immaterial, ephemeral nature that fills these images with powerful potentiality, with the excitement and desire of a fantasy. As the two young lovers sing, laughing at one another, the unspoken hurt and pain of their past is replaced by declarations of love. Through song, they confess their deepest, unspoken feelings. From a history that didn’t allow this relationship to exist, the two boys draw together the pieces and rebuild a world of love together. And as the wounds of the past are healed, the future of Birdy and A-Han is opened up, built on this vision of what could have been, what still, now, could be. CHONG JING GAN B’23 wishes he could engrave all those names in his heart.
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