Crawford Art Gallery
2 May – 30 June 2024
Martin Healy’s film, A Moment Twice Lived (2016), is being shown in Crawford Art Gallery’s screening room as part of a programme to present moving image works from the gallery collection. Healy’s film has a further Crawford connection in that the gallery’s elegant wood panelled library provides the location for its opening scenes. It is a room from another era, where time feels suspended, especially in contrast to the modern bustle of Cork city centre, which it overlooks. This makes it the perfect setting for Healy to begin his delicate and haunting exploration of subjective understandings of time, as experienced through ageing, memory, and dreaming.
Running throughout A Moment Twice Lived is a voiceover, based on extracts from J.W. Dunne’s 1927 book, An Experiment with Time, narrating the inner musings of the lead character, an older woman, played by Anne Marie Kelly in a compellingly sensitive performance. Starting with a ‘dodge’ to remember fading dreams, the voiceover suggests bringing to mind a single incident and focusing on it, rather than trying to recall its context, and then collecting these remembered incidents.
From there, the narration leads the listener to a concept of time as circular, a condition in which past, present and future are all equally present and recurring in an instant, as the ‘curtain of time’ is lifted. Everything has already happened and will happen again. Along the way, the narrator describes how she first came to link these dream images with time, the powerful sense of déjà-vu that accompanied her first childhood experience of one of these incidents, and her urge to tell everyone that everything will be alright because it has already happened – though this is also mingled with a sense of helplessness that nothing can be changed.
This heady trajectory is carefully described in terms that clearly link it to the relationship of a spectator to an image. The dream incident is described as a faded and indistinct image that can become vivid and spontaneously appear in the mind like a photograph developed from a memory. These images are described as bright but without depth. Later, the past is pictured cinematically as an opaque and rolling band with slow pulsating rhythms between lightness and darkness, always in the same dimensions, “like a film perfectly staged for the perfect spot in the cinema.” Time unfolds as an act staged in a cinema, with each performance the same as the one before. Her final musing evokes one of cinema’s unique qualities: to make time stop. This experience is described as simultaneously detached and powerfully physical, as her “whole body and head were open and full of light” while “not in my own body, as if above it, spinning round and round outside myself and yet not moving.”
Healy creates painterly and graceful images to interact with this remarkable text, which intelligently avoid the temptation to replicate these cinematic descriptions of the narrator’s experience. Instead, he focuses on the lead character’s reactions to the sensations described, as she slips between three scenes. These start in the Crawford library, where the physical touch of old wood moves to the contemplation of a painting depicting a shadowy figure in front of a fire. Her focus is on an image that itself suggests both contemplation and reaction, in which the dark figure gazes into the bright flames but also raises his arms as a physical response to them.
The film then moves to a spacious storeroom that feels like a film set or empty stage, full of film lights and discarded wooden boxes. The character, eyes closed, faces a blank wall while completely wrapped up in her inner experience of time. She is joined by a row of similarly aged people, all equally trained on their experiences. Healy has set a scene in which the pure potential of memory can play out – a place without images but suggestive of an apparatus for creating them. What is moving about this scene are the reactions and gestures of the characters, trembling at the intensity of their inner experiences. Rather than attempt to create an image of time, Healy allows it to remain tantalisingly elsewhere – a realm left for viewers to explore for themselves.
Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and critic based in Cork City.
maximilianlecain.com
