telephone

In “Telephones,” a short film by Christian Marclay, we are inundated with the repetition of scenes in which characters answer a telephone throughout the course of Hollywood’s cinematic history. The film, like most of Marclay’s work, explores the relationship between the audible and the visible, but also historicizes the development of an object of communication by tracing its aesthetic and functional lineage over an approximately 30 year period.

We watch the form of the phone, as it moves through a sequence of moderations, change from an ornamental object dressed up with the distinguished features of a Victorian household (emphasizing the phones initial function as dramatic, relaying information about the death of loved ones or the arrival of a storm) to the stark Bauhaus aesthetic of rotary telephones in the 80’s.

Corresponding with the deprecation of its beauty as an object, the urgency of information relayed between two telephones, or loci of communication, gradually turned arbitrary (together with the increased facility by which phones were produced, and service providers were provided).

Its essential role, however, as the illusory reduction of the propinquity between two individuals, remained the same.

This is why spoken intercourse (phone sex) successfully stimulates its participants.

The ringing of a telephone produces a tension which finds its resolution in it’s being answered, in it’s closing the space of uncertainty between the caller and the called. Preceding the invention of telephones that identify the caller before we are required to respond, the ring signaled the arrival of a message from amongst a number of possible people: the mother, the stalker, the collection agency, the friend from before. A certain anxiety permeated through the sound of the signal. For, the interlocutor is on our side invisible, but we create an acoustic-image of his presence via the transmission of his voice.

Without an audible response to supplant the invisible with an image, we are left with a phone call from nothing, from no one. It is before the effectiveness of nothing that our attunement of anxiety is affected. With the invention of caller identification however, the telephone, like many post-capitalist products, minimizes our discomfort in relation to the object and, by eliminating the chord anchoring the head in the body, maximizes our illusory idea of space as collapsing into the immediacy of the communicative.