#THE BODY AND THE ARCHIVE SKIN#

Henri Bergson postulated the body as a set of images inscribed in a system of representation: I’m looking at the body as a record written by life experiences – and interpreted through the complex sets of meaning imposed from the outside. I am not really trying to say that you can read a person’s character from his or her face. As Alan Sekula describes in The Body and the Archive, the mid-nineteenth century saw the rise of physiognomy and phrenology, which “shared the belief that the surface of the body, and especially the face and head, bore the outward signs of inner character.” On the basis of this idea, police departments and courts thought they could identify members of the “dangerous classes.” Of course, this kind of thinking can enter dangerous territory. Having left China at age eight, my mother surely had a much easier life – and I can see it in her face. And yet their facial expressions were completely different – formed, perhaps, from 26 years of exile in Inner Mongolia, or from persecution during the Cultural Revolution. I was struck by how much my mother’s first cousins resembled her physically. I went to China in 1995 to meet my mother’s relatives, whom she had left behind 50 years earlier. And of course it leaves its indelible mark or its stamp on you.”ĭo one’s life experiences mark one’s body – beyond the obvious scars and tattoos? Is the body somehow imprinted, like a passport getting stamped, by the place where one lives? Can the body be read as a record of all that transpired to the soul inside? “You know, there’s the wear and tear on so many levels on your body and of your psyche. “I suppose that is the whole process of living,” she says, after learning that her breast cancer has recurred. My concept for this film – and the two-channel installation version of it – grew out of Lalita’s own description of the seemingly causal relationships between her geographical location, her emotional state, and her physical health. A radiant, charismatic woman, Lalita finds strength in her Hindu spirituality and her strong relationship with her husband Pierre. Now 60, Lalita is fighting breast cancer and heart disease, as her mother faces the end of life in India. But the cold air of Montréal accelerated her pigment loss within a year of arriving to Canada, Lalita had become totally white.

Luckily, her mother’s visit from India – and her mother’s spicy food – helped Lalita recover from the hysterectomy. Her solitude was compounded when ovarian cancer left her unable to bear children. She and Pierre decided to leave Paris and settle in Montréal.ĭespite a happy marriage, Lalita found North American life lonely.

#THE BODY AND THE ARCHIVE SKIN#

Lalita believes this prejudice affected her health, causing the skin pigment to begin disappearing from her face. But when they married and moved to a working-class suburb of Paris, neighbors mistook Lalita for an Arab and discriminated accordingly. There she fell in love with a French Canadian man. Lalita’s childhood shame is part of what pushed her to leave India to study in Paris. Her mother worried that this “defect” would prevent Lalita from finding a good husband. Lalita’s life provides an interesting vehicle to explore these themes, because her body has gone through remarkable transformations that often seem triggered by where she lives and how she feels.Īs a child in Bombay in the early 1950s, Lalita began to develop white patches on her leg, caused by a skin condition called vitiligo. I have been filming Lalita since 2008 for a documentary film that explores the idea of the body as an archive: that our experiences write themselves on our bodies as we grow and age, and that our bodies in turn imprint the world with immigration papers, medical records, photographs, and other documents. In any case, it’s Lalita and the surgeon who have the biggest task at hand. But it is a major event in my subject’s life, and probably the closing scene of my film, so I’ll have to find a way (hello, tripod!). I’m not 100% sure I can handle the sight of doctors sawing open the chest of someone I care about, and performing delicate surgery on her most vital organ. My documentary film subject, Lalita Bharvani, is having open-heart surgery, and the hospital has surprisingly granted me permission to film in the operating room. This week I’m driving up to Montréal to film the most bloody scene I’ve ever shot.

The body and the archive