Anthony Aguiar | Cypress / 2013

the camera often sees what the eye cannot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Aguiar (screenwriter and director) Cypress / 2013 [8 minutes]

 

The logic of supernatural cinema usually argues that although ghosts might be visible to the human eye, they do not appear on camera. Clearly late 19th and early 20th photographers dealing with the spiritual didn’t get that message. But most filmmakers did, representing objects being lifted into mid-air, spectral hues looming in the distance, but seldom depicting ghostly images. American director Anthony Aguiar also doesn’t subscribe to that logic. In his film, an amateur photographer, using a Super 8mm camera discovers his ghost only in the viewfinder when the camera is whirling.

    Our cameraman (Kyle Glasow) of this almost silent film (we do hear ambient sounds including the camera accompanied by a lovely score by Red Bennett), visiting the views of Millard’s Peak in October 1979, decides to explore on camera the nearby stand of trees, what appears to be a birch forest. 

     Suddenly he spots a man standing in small clearing between the trees. Pulling the camera away, the vision disappears. He reappears when he returns to filming. He looks around him, as if searching for someone else to verify the strange occurrence. There is no one there.

      The vision smiles and gestures for him to follow. Almost like playing a game, the ghostly figure runs forward a bit before turning back to make sure the man and his camera are following.

      Although there is nothing outward sexual about the situation, the ghost is a cute man and his constant luring the other on, the looking back to make sure he’s following, etc. all have the appearance for any gay man who has met up with another in the woods of being a sexual invitation to what the other seems to know about a special “place” where they might engage in sex. Mostly vacant public parks were (and perhaps remain) a natural spot for gays to meet up in a world that had too few places for gathering, particularly rural males.

     But here, the chase ends at fallen tree, where the ghost turns back, looking sadly, moving directly toward to photographer and suddenly putting his hands up to his eyes representing great sadness or even tears.

     Quickly looking around, the photograph discovers a white flower nearby and picks it, handing it to our ghost whose face now produces a smile. The ghost takes it and smells it, a moment of seemingly impossible transition between the present and past, the living and the dead. The cameraman reaches out with a hand to touch the specter’s head and does so, proving as the flower appeared to that the other is not fully imaginary but a tangible being in space.

 

     But eventually, the boy turns back and walks straight over to the fallen tree and crosses under it, the camera apparently running out of film at the very moment or perhaps simply unable to continue for other inexplicable reasons.

     The photographer crosses under the tree as well to see the boy now dead, half buried in dirt. The living man turns away in horror. When he turns back to look again he sees the boy is still holding his white flower in his hand.

     Is this a vision of his own past, of a relationship wherein his partner has died? Or is this a vision of a future in which he has already killed by refusing to permit himself to fully follow his impulses which the ghost has able to engage him? Was this simply an accident where the ghost of the body appeared to him in order to help a stranger find it and put it to rest in a coffin? Perhaps it was the ghost seeking love that he could not find in his life, but now satisfied by the gift of the white flower, the flower itself in many cultures being associated with death and phantoms, is free to return to his body.

     The ending, obviously, is meant to be ambiguous. As the director has expressed in an interview with MarBelle on the internet site Director’s Notes: “The short’s ending was always supposed to be ambiguous – I’ve always felt that an ambiguous ending is really a gift from the director to the audience, in a way like saying ‘I trust in you to complete the story.”

     And, of course, there is no way of knowing whether or not this is truly a gay story. It allows the viewer to read the work in his or her own manner.

 

Los Angeles, July 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).