Page - 84 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

84 | Alyda Faber www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 he admits later to her personal physician, “If I were there I am not so sure how certain I would be about what I wanted to do” (ND 50). The spare close-up shots of those around the bed, with the medical staff “pushed off” to the edge of the frame, their numbers not revealed until the end of the sequence, are contrasted with the frequent close-up shots of Mrs. Factor in the centre of the frame, her hand gestures and a close-up of her hand covered in tape with tubes running off it, her livid eyes contrasted by the immobility of her body in the bed. The spectator doesn’t see her overcoming the authority of the medical profession, but rather, through her hesitation and deferral, she makes it pause and wait. An intensive effort is made to understand her obscure hand gestures, changing points of view, her mouthed few words: in those pauses and efforts, an unsettled more-than-reciprocity emerges. The way the sequence is shot am- plifies these efforts as efforts as if between equals, despite the actual inequality of power. Davide Panagia’s discussion of democratic noise in his book The Political Life of Sensation amplifies what may be in play in Wiseman’s lyric portraiture that constitutes his vision of more-than-reciprocity. Panagia contends that political theory’s “common sense” is a “narratocracy” of turning everything into read- ing, similar to the deliberative forms of narrative sense making discussed above as myth (the “abstract”). Such common sense has political effects of compro- mising reciprocity: it classifies people into those who can speak and those who cannot, those who have the official authority of word (speech) and those who are “just making noise”42 – the scene of Wiseman’s more-than-reciprocity. Pa- nagia attends to the interruptions of declarative, authoritative speech by the noise of democracy, which requires attention not only to what is said, but also to the “aurality of an utterance” (46), its vocal qualities (49), its duration, its pauses, its interruptions, its babble and “democratic non-sense” (73). In other words, “sensation interrupts common sense” with its disrupting effects of “the experience of unrepresentability” elicited through a “heterology of impulses that register on our bodies without determining a body’s nature or residing in one organ of perception” (2). He wants us to listen for “the noises people make when saying before stating, when enunciating before making sense” (73, italics added) which shifts our perception concerning those who can take part in dem- ocratic conversation. Wiseman’s filmic strategies allow the viewer to experience “democratic noise” visually and aurally, which may be the reason that he isn’t polemical about political discourse as “narratocracy”. His films quietly juxtapose delib- erative, explanatory speech with so much that resists explanation and control, leaving a felt impression of the vastness of the unknown, the attempts to ex- 42 Panagia 2009, 53. Further page references will be cited in the text.