Small Death for a Small Hour: The Hollow Bind
Succeeding a title card of a quote from Henri-Georges Clouzot, The Hollow Bind opens from a voyeuristic camera angle, positioned at the corner of a room. Its gaze is fixed upon a young artist, played by Ted Walliker. His back is turned. The room feels make-shift, temporary. A chest of drawers houses a palette, some withering flowers, brushes. A sheet overhangs the only source of light: a window toward which the artist is faced. Bathed in chiaroscuro, the room is emptier than one would expect—cut up into objects black or white. There is potential in absence, room for creation. A blank canvas begets an undaunted mind. And yet, emptiness can be hostile. A shouting, serrated nothing.
At its surface, The Hollow Bind is a portrait of an isolated artist stymied by despair, particularly towards their inevitable mortality. Holding relevance to the lockdown context in which it was produced, and as a testament to Wallicker’s intricate performance, Thacker’s short encourages audiences to feel the hostility this studio has come to represent for the artist. The aesthetic attests to this: the camerawork drifts between disorder and fluidity, the editing sows images together without restraint. Comparable to Pedro Almodovar’s quarantine-made The Human Voice, it is the visual execution of The Hollow Bind that carries its punch and yields an analgesic quality.
Global lockdowns gave rise to films void of copious settings and multiple actors. Indeed, social conditions ostensibly separate from cinema sank their teeth into the discipline of filmmaking. Directors had to acclimate to a newfangled, far smaller blueprint of production. Inside, distant, figuratively accompanied with only half the tools. Distinct from the long-established and rather theatrical trope of using one setting and one actor, quarantine films emerge from an inseparable context of near-impossibility. They are the category equivalent of a Buster Keaton stunt—we balance our curiosity atop a series of floating questions regarding its conceivability.
Some quarantine films are less contextually referential than others, take the momentous production of The Batman or Mission: Impossible 7. Some discovered human connection in lockdown, such as Alice Rohrwacher’s Four Roads. Others unearthed the volatility of domestic quarantine, take Sam Levinson's divisive Malcolm & Marie. Irrespective of their subject matter, the external milieu lingers at the peripheries of contemporary film. The same context has infected our engagement with pre-quarantine films, a generous description for nearly all titles. For the contemporary viewer, encountering cinema from any decade has become a nostalgic confrontation with crowded rooms and now-alien tactility. It has meant exposure to images incompatible with the present. Reliant on aesthetics and performance, and either resisting or embracing the context of quarantine, several working directors elected for narratives suffused with perspective, for style as its own substance.
It is a captivating experience to witness a character lost in creation, as they linger, hand and foot, about a studio and before an easel. Notwithstanding its longevity as a genre, creating and consuming films about artists seems to be an increasingly modern sensibility. Tempted to resist social chaos and to look towards moments of individuality, we relish in texture. We breathe the liberty of a brush to canvas. Amidst a global pandemic, this act becomes sacred. We savor the body’s ability to create—its vigor.
Throughout The Hollow Bind, images of the artist’s hands and feet crop up rather sequentially, steering our gaze. Hands can be read symbolically as either an extension of the body or their own agents, unencumbered and guided by intuition. Thacker allows for either reading. Shouldered between these visuals of hands and feet, the artist’s face memorably overlays his painting. Thacker’s short fluctuates between metaphors: the artist as a body, the artist as his art. Taken together, these metaphors deepen the caverns of isolation. Quarantine becomes a vessel of personal collapse, a moment of transformation.
Our aural engagement with Thacker’s short is directed by voice-over narration that muses on entrapment and the role of art. Speculation loudly cuts into images of reflections and surfaces. They jolt the inanimate to life. Thacker’s writing feels akin to poetry, sliced into extravagant, philosophical stanzas. This dramatic monologue is succeeded by a dialogue between the artist and his painting as it materializes into a physical skull. Be it internal projection or an element of the surreal, one does not exclude the other, this transformation is certainly one of the most noticeable allusions to Cocteau. Movement drives Cocteau’s narrative—the titular poet breathes life into his sculpture, he dances through highly artificial set designs akin to Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari before spectating, through a keyhole, bodies as visual art. Thacker’s work is far less choreographed. Stripped back and confined to one space, the artist stirs back and forth against violent prophecies. Internal transformation resides in language. Succumb to this torment, and beneath a subverted gaze, the artist becomes the scrutinized subject. Their feelings paint the walls.
If the artistic process is boldly deconstructed in The Blood of Poet, it is more aesthetically disentangled in The Hollow Bind. Bending towards moments of placidity, isolation is framed through melancholic, rather individual images: the scarcity of objects, canvases, an unmade bed. These images remain throughout the crescendo of dialogue, though language lifts them out of stasis. Words alter their significance. As the skull’s affronting words lay to rest, a return to individuality arouses a moment of clarity for the artist. There is a sense of catharsis in holding a hand to a mirror, in choosing to open the door.