Minute 24

Minute 24  (by Nicole Schmid)

Like mother, like daugher

When I got my two minutes, I realized that I would have to present them as the first and last minute of one session. Therefor I wanted to create both minutes as a frame for the session and connect them visually and regarding content, context and meaning. Both minutes are about people I love and miss. Minute 17 is about Andrea, one of my mothers, who committed suicide though carbon monoxide poisoning in 2005 when I was 18 years old. The other is about Luca, my daughter and my first child. She had anencephaly and was stillborn in 2012.

I was struck by the two newspaper quotes from the introductory lecture, namely:

“We already can collect and reproduce words; now we can collect and reproduce life. We might even, for instance, see those as if living again long after they have been gone” (Le Radical 30 December 1895) and “When apparatuses like this are available to the public, when everyone can photograph those that are dear to them, not only their posed forms, but their movements, their actions, their familiar gestures, with words at the tips of their tongues, death will cease to be absolute” (La Poste 30 December 1895)

Both for Andrea and Luca I predominantly have photographs readily available. I used my two film minutes to create video collages by adding a selection of this photographic material to the original minutes, and thus to give the photographs life through movement in order to “see those as if living again long after they have been gone”.

To me, both minutes represent two different types of decay. The fire hazard of nitrate film made me think of Andrea because she was a firefighter (as well as seeing decay as the loss of memory in addition to the loss of a person). The water damage on the film rolls used in Decasia made me think of Luca who was not able to live because amniotic fluid washed away her exposed brain in utero. Both of them have been put to the fire through cremation, both of their ashes have been added to the soil and humidity of forests.

Minute 24: …like daughter

In 2013 I started my B.A. in American Studies at Goethe University. A month prior I had just given birth to Toni Andrea, my first son, my second child, my first living child. When I, still on my knees, saw this bloody new human between my legs for the very first time, the only words I was able to utter, in awe, in disbelief, were: “It’s alive.”

Cut from this horror movie trope to another “horror” movie: One of the classes I took in my first semester was Bernd Herzogenrath’s lecture “Amerikanische Literatur-und Kulturgeschichte II”. There, in one of the first sessions, we watched the movie “Freaks” by Tod Browning, about and starred by carnival side show actors whose disabilities provided shock and amusement to audiences.

Exactly one year before, in October of 2012 I had given birth to my first child. In the middle of this pregnancy, during the 20-week ultrasound, an unnamed anomaly was detected, and I was referred to a specialist. While waiting for the appointment the uncertainty made me queasy. I knew I wanted to be a parent to this child. Whatever disability might be behind this odd ultrasound, whatever medical problem, I was sure we’d figure it out along the way. As long as this child did not die, everything would be fine.

During the specialist ultrasound my partner and I had an almost cinematic view of the fetus inside me. We saw it sticking out its tongue, like licking its lips. Then the specialist told us what she saw clearly and we did not. Anencephaly. A condition caused by the neural tubes not closing properly. Bones not forming on top of the head. The skull being open, exposed, and laying bare the brain. The unprotected brain subsequently being disintegrated and washed away by the amniotic fluid surrounding it. An infaust prognosis, incompatible with life. Such a child could live minutes, hours, a few days at best. No remedy available, no treatment, no chance. Just palliative care in case I decided to carry to term. She told us: “Don’t google the condition.”

Of course, I did google the condition. I was met with medical pictures, spooky small naked bodies exposed on green surgical tissue, their abnormalities held towards the lens by gloved hands. Or of anencephalic babies in jars, exhibited for their monstrosity. Fewer and far between back then: loving pictures of clothed anencephalic children in the arms of their parents. Those I only found in self-help groups created by and flocked with fundamentalist anti-choice Christians. This was a different kind of estrangement, a different kind of horror to me.

A year later, when I saw the movie Freaks and the microcephalic actors, I was washed away with longing. Their condition is visually so similar to the one of my daughter but they were able to grow into adulthood. In the movie, Madame Tetrallini gives a speech defending them against someone who calls them monsters. She points out that they are children, “most of them”. Of course, there is a problematic layer of infantilizing adults with disabilities as children, but for me, in that moment, in the absolute inability to mother and to care for my so similar child, this mirrored a longing, a sadness, and love felt in the acknowledgment that also, yes, my child was not a monster but a child.

For my video I exchanged the sound of the original minute with Björk’s

“Overture” of the film Dancer in the Dark, a slow and instrumental version of her song

“New World” from the same movie. This is what I repeatedly sang to Luca during pregnancy and during her burial.

My original video has three parts: a cesarean birth, a newborn being bathed, and a short blurry clip of woman weaving in clothing reminiscent of late 18th/early 19th century working women’s clothing. The very first shot in my video is a scanned ultrasound stripe from 1987 where my very own position in uterus is marked with a circle. After that, my collage also has three parts:

In the first part I play with the ascription of monstrosity by layering historical

medical pictures and drawings and photos of curiosity cabinet jars of babies with

anencephaly on top of the last part of the original video. I alternate these pictures with

printed ultrasound pictures of my first pregnancy, sorted by date. On top of the first part

of the original video (the cesarean birth) I layer more of my ultrasound pictures

alternating with film stills from the movie “Freaks”. To this visual I added an excerpt of

Madame Tetrallini’s speech (see here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2oFWF0yF8Y).

The second part is pictures of Luca directly after birth to the sound of Madame Tetrallini saying, “How many times have I told you not to be afraid”. Before birth, it is a common experience to be afraid of how the anencephalic baby may look but it is also common to find it beautiful and, in a sense, normal, and not scary at all. Of the pictures that have been shot with digital cameras, I have scanned the printed photos, which are the only ones I have available. They are followed by scans of pictures of Luca that I shot with a black and white film roll with an old SLR that is a remnant of my mother Andrea’s belongings. Here I alternate my own pictures of my dead and dressed up child with historic photographs and carte de visites of deceased children in the beginning of the 20th century. They share a similarity in depicting the dead child as living or only asleep and among other family members. Me photographing my own dead child in this way thus follows a historical trajectory. As a transition to the third part, they are paired with the video of the newborn being bathed from the original minute.

In the third part I center colorful pictures, detailed shots of Luca, and prints that I have scanned. The prints, for one part, are attempts to do footprints and handprints as keepsakes but the handprints show how difficult it is to make a print with a dead hand, those prints more look like mush than actual hands. The other prints are accidental prints where the color of ultrasound pictures wore off on the backside of other ultrasound pictures or on the paper card holding those prints. I then also included scans of the negatives of the b/w film roll and a long original printout of ultrasound pictures because they resemble the aesthetic of negatives and film rolls.

Visually I also tried to connect the theme of water as a source of destruction and as a source of life in the plant imagery of Luca’s hat and blanket. (Her nickname during pregnancy was seedling.) To do so I also altered the color of the original minute. (In minute 17 I altered the color to red as representative for fire.) The phrase “mother, daughter, alike” refers to minute 17 (“like mother…) and 24 (“…like daughter”) being connected, both my mother and daughter connected through death, and I, as their daughter, their living connection and holder of memory.