Spray & Velez: Manakamana (2013)

For all its kinetic escalations, one of the biggest casualties of the digital era has been the capacity to evoke or suggest a camera being propelled through actual physical space. On the one hand, tracking-shots have become so crisp and streamlined that they’ve dispelled the notion of space altogether, while portable digital cinematography has overcompensated with a space that’s so jerky, fragmented and chaotic that the camera itself no longer feels extricable from it. In both cases, what’s been lost is the sense of fragility, or fallibility, that once accompanied the camera on its forays through the world – the slight shudder, jump or bump around the edge of the glide that reminded us that we were still working within the realm of human and mechanical error. Of course, those errors would have been seen as limitations from an analog mindset, but they’re now, in some ways, what makes analog fascinating – a magnetic and charismatic ability to be “messy in just the right ways” that propelled Stephanie Spray and Pacho Verez to choose analog for Manakamana, their first work under the aegis of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. In fact, Spray and Verez don’t merely employ an analog camera, but what is in some sense the analog camera, at least of ethnographic film – the camera used by ethnographic pioneer Robert Forster – planting it within one of the cable cars used to transport Nepalese pilgrims across the jungles and mountains to the remote shrine of Manakamana, and impassively filming a variety of non-professional actors as they make the journey there and back. In that sense, the film is very much an act of media ethnography, an ethnography of analog film, as much as a study of the Nepalese pilgrims themselves, driven, above all, by the stately motion of the cable car, which is in some sense the main character of Spray and Verez’s vision as well. As it glides from vista to vista, a series of beautiful, expansive landscapes unfold before our eyes, but they’re a little too disrupted and dishevelled whenever we jerk through a pylon to ever quite settle into a digital glide, as smooth and seamless as the interim might seem. In fact, the more attuned you become to the meditative lilt of the car, the visual mantras of vista after vista, the more sensitive you become to all the little imperfections as well, not least because Spray and Verez introduce a little more visual or aural stimuli with each new occupant of the car. However, because the entire film is set within the car, the film never loses that substrate of meditative movement either, as much as the occupants might talk over, distract us from or remediate it themselves, such that the glide is never quite diluted but never quite perfected either, existing more in a hypothetical state, a state of pure possibility that is also peculiarly and poetically present as a sensual and sensory experience. Not only does that beautifully match the passage of the pilgrims themselves to Manakamana – a shrine renowned for wish-fulfilment – but it captures, in some sense, the ethnographic enterprise itself, which sets out to hypothesise some state between objective detachment and subjective immersion and keep it open, alive, provocative as an aesthetic experience. The genius and beauty of Manakamana is to fold both those pilgrimages into the experience of analog cinema, the piligrimage of the analog cinephile, which is here reimagined in terms of a digital potentiality that accrues its power precisely from never actually become digital. And if the result can’t quite be described as digital cinema, then perhaps it doesn’t quite make sense to call it analog cinema either, since it’s more like an effort to capture the digital horizon of the analog experience as a horizon. To watch it is to witness analog dream of digital, as we permeate ever deeper into a membrane that we never quite cross, in an act of devotion, a kind of threshold-magic, that confounds viewer and subject in the most remarkable and resonant ways.