Cris Derek Van | Your Face in December / 2023

ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cris Derek Van (screenwriter and director) Your Face in December / 2023 [11 minutes]

 

Again appropriating images from many sources, this time including photos by Robert Mapplethorpe and others, Chicago based Asian artist Cris Derek Van tells a story in Your Face in December about gay a love between Fabio and Sebastian.

    In this work, except for lovely homoerotic gay photos of men, the director does away almost entirely with images, using many of his cinematic frames for words only, this time spoken in Spanish and translated on screen into English.

    The language is again highly romantic and poetic, with phrases such as: “Your voice, your eyes, your hands, your lips. Our silences, our words.”

    The two obviously cannot keep their minds off of one another, talking, we soon realize, after at least one of the deaths. The love is retained in the mind, the body—both of which strangely in this cold storage romance, not longer exist. They are ghosts.

     And despite their romantic declarations, with many statements of silence and eternity such as— “Like an eternity of coming to understand myself and my budding desires, when I look at your face in December, I come to understand. Alone, but not sad, smiling, but not happy, walking but not moving somewhere.”—we quickly realize that these figures in space no longer exist together.

     Nothing is explained about their coming together or what happened between them except love. But by the final frame 11 minutes into the film we hear a gunshot, forcing us to realize that either one or both of them have been killed, either by suicide or mutual sacrifice.

     Loss is again the center of Derek Van’s film. Yet, strangely this time we feel only the loss, no significant nostalgia or sorrow since these were ghosts—their now empty language dominating the screen and their existence—before the film even began.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).