Daria Martin’s “At The Threshold”

Two images resonate after I leave Daria Martin’s exhibition at Maureen Paley. A pair of scissors spins on a ribbon, an idle motion until the camera pans down to reveal the palm upstretched to receive corkscrewing blades. There is also the plunge of a breakfast knife into a grapefruit, an innocent action invested by the camera’s focus with significant intent. These small but intense incisions—sharp-edged light between the slats of venetian blinds, patterned paper artfully ripped, a fork pushed through cake—deploy a careful violence across the dim luminescence of Daria Martin’s frames. They are part of how she conveys the sensitized intensities of shared pain between dislocated bodies, which is the condition of mirror-touch synesthesia, when a person experiences the sensate in another. As one of the protagonists in the film, Myles, says to his mother, “everything you saw I saw too,” and this extends to sensations of touch and pain.

Martin has already been drawn to explore the condition of mirror-touch synesthesia in the first of a planned trilogy on the subject, Sensorium Tests, and while it takes a very different approach from its predecessor, At The Threshold deepens and builds upon Martin’s enquiry into a condition still little explored outside science. As images and framings hint throughout both films, Martin’s interest exceeds straightforward scientific curiosity, to find in mirror-touch synesthesia a compelling metaphor for the experience of cinema. Martin, of course, is not the first to explore the possibilities of an affective reciprocity between bodies onscreen and off. In his 1948 essay “Le Cinéma du Diable,” for example, Jean Epstein recognized the profundity of cinema’s synesthetic properties, writing of “knowledge gained directly through feelings, one that is immediate, practical, and supple—a kind of poetry that we acquire above all through what we see.”1 Cinema’s sensorial potential is played out in Martin’s tactile close ups on objects, surfaces, and costumes, imbuing them with the significant singularity that Epstein notes as the photogénie uniquely conferred upon things by the cinematic gaze: pregnant with undecipherable meanings and wayward energies.

I am also arrested by a further image in the opening scene of At The Threshold, when the camera zooms in on a scene depicting an exotic location of lush vegetation and blue skies. I remember an image similar to this in Sensorium Tests, except in that earlier film the palm trees and blue sky function, like the crumpled cutouts of waterfalls and beaches familiar from the ceilings of dentist’s surgeries or hospital operating rooms, to calm nervous patients undergoing the first tests into this little known condition. But the blue skies and palm trees in At The Threshold’s opening scene are designed as a plane of projection for the viewer rather than that of the anxious patient, functioning as a threshold into the drama of the film about to unfold. At The Threshold is distinctive from Martin’s earlier works for its more explicit concentration on the dialogue, characterization, and plot development used by cinematic fictions, as it relays the story of an intense relationship between mother, son, and stepmother. The story enables Martin to introduce a new dimension to her study of mirror-touch synesthesia, asserting in the complex symbiosis of fictional mother and son the “queer place” of the mother-infant bond described by D. W. Winnicott, “where nothing has yet been separated out as not-me.”2 Martin posits this familial symbiosis as an equivalent to the profound connection that a synesthete might have when they experience another’s sensations.

The palm tree image acts as a hinge between these first two films of Martin’s trilogy, showing two different faces of synesthesia: the first represented through the objective register of scientific re-enactment, and the second drawing out in cinematic drama the research Martin has undertaken into the real-life intensities of the synesthete’s experience. The heightened attention to tactile surface detail, suggestive lighting, and musical accompaniment characteristic of earlier works such as Harpstrings and Lava (2007) here effectively renders the emotional tone of the narrative in a higher key, revealing latent associations to cinema’s melodramatic traditions in Martin’s work which have been there all along. One might trace Douglas Sirk or Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the lush metaphors of her set pieces, but I find in At The Threshold a telenovela intimacy. Like those deft low-budget productions, Martin orchestrates and amplifies emotional range through the abbreviations of lingering close up, stripped-back sets, and washes of colored light, exerting the uncanny of familial bond and sensate connection through the telenovela’s heightened artificialities. In a memorable closing scene, this “queer place” of porous identities encounters an instance of photogénie, when the set asserts independent agency, and freestanding screens glide around the stationary stepmother, in a dance of revelation and concealment which speaks beyond the emotional vulnerabilities of Martin’s protagonist to a wider human condition, and in particular those of a sensitized affective nature, who feel as others do.

3 Jean Epstein, “Le Cinéma du diable,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univer-sity Press, 2012), 326.