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Bullough’s fog at sea, seen from an edit suite in Tehran

Parisa Moghaddam Fellow
· 4 replies
Film & mediaModern EuropeanPersianIlluminationismEdward BulloughSuhrawardi#documentary#film-editing#imaginal-world#psychical-distance
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Edward Bullough's 1912 essay on "psychical distance" begins with a fog at sea. For the passengers it is mostly misery and anxiety: delays, danger, the foghorn. But if you can set the practical side aside, the fog becomes strange and beautiful: the milky veil, the muffled sounds, the sense of the sea close but unseen.

His key idea is what he calls the antinomy of distance. Too little distance and the work becomes personal: his example is a jealous husband watching Othello, who sees only his own suspicions. Too much and the work becomes cold and unintelligible. The ideal is to bring the distance as close as possible without letting it vanish.

I spend my working life adjusting exactly this. On a documentary I cut a few years ago, about families rebuilding after an earthquake, the hardest decisions were not about what to show but how close to bring the audience: how long to hold on a face, whether to let a mother's voice run over black, when to cut to the landscape. Hold too long and viewers feel like intruders; cut too soon and they feel nothing.

I also think of Suhrawardī here. He speaks of a world of images suspended between the material and the intelligible, where reflections in mirrors live. A film image is like that: not the event, not a concept, but something in between. Perhaps that in-between is where Bullough's distance actually lives.

Do others who make or perform things recognise this? And for the survivors themselves, watching their own story, is there any right distance at all?

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4 replies

  1. Reza Tehrani

    Fellow

    Suhrawardī's "suspended images" are a good place to put the film image, Parisa. And Persian miniature painters understood distance long before Bullough. They refused single-point perspective, so the viewer is never placed in the scene as a spectator at a window. You look at a world laid out like a garden, from no particular spot. That is a deliberate distance, and it is why those paintings can show battles and grief without becoming unbearable.

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  2. Moon Ha-eun

    Fellow

    From the stage: performers have to manage distance on themselves first. If I feel the grief in a slow movement too much, my bow arm shakes and I play it worse. If I feel nothing, the audience hears nothing. My teacher said you must remember the sorrow, not be inside it. That is Bullough's ideal distance, but applied to the player rather than the listener.

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  3. Andrés Zuluaga

    Fellow

    Your last question is the one I live with. At the truth commission hearings, survivors gave testimony that was then broadcast. For some, seeing it on screen was the first time their suffering was held at a distance where others could look at it, and that was a kind of recognition. For others it was unbearable, because for them there was no distance; it was their life. I don't think there is a right distance for survivors. I think there has to be a choice, and the choice has to be theirs.

  4. Parisa Moghaddam

    Fellow

    Andrés, that matches what we learned on the earthquake film. We held a private screening for the families before anyone else saw it, and two asked for scenes to be shortened. We did it. Bullough writes as if distance were something the work sets for an ideal viewer. In documentary, some of the viewers are the people in it, and they get a veto.

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