As someone whose most aesthetically impressionable age coincided with the early 00s, I was schooled in the poeticality of close-up images of the human body through the MTV channel. Two instances of these early encounters with the body-as-art immediately come to mind: Björk’s “Hidden Place” and D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel).”

In the former, the camera zooms in on Björk’s makeup-free face, its movements repeatedly tracing the infinity loop, as an array of vibrantly colored organic fluids, quirky graphics, and digital animations ooze out of her eyes, nose, and mouth to then reenter her interior through these same orifices. In the latter, the camera begins its journey from the back of D’Angelo’s head before it slowly turns around to his naked front and proceeds to capture the grooves of his muscled torso, slowly descending along a very prominent Adonis belt.

Against the backdrop of engrossing music and suggestive lyrics, the imagery in these videos offers its viewers an intimate look at their subjects’ bodies, a look that treads a perilously thin line between the beautiful and the abject in the first case, and between an eroticizing exploration and an objectifying gaze in the second. This tantalizing proximity exhibits the body in a manner that one’s own body can never see itself through its own eyes, without technological mediation. The probing close look, therefore, remains the reserved privilege of the external viewer, who is instantaneously mesmerized, responding with a mix of utter enthrallment and ever so slight discomfort. Yet, this proximity is also an enticing invitation for the viewer to share with the body’s owner their innermost desire for their respective lover, a desire that now has been unabashedly laid bare. It is an intimacy that surges to the surface of the body, that becomes registered in its variegated structures and textures, that reveals itself in the minutest of external details (the light fuzz above Björk’s upper lip or the beads of sweat surrounding D’Angelo’s navel), which have become unexpectedly, wondrously consonant with the deeply buried sensual core.

In these two videos, the integrity of the body remains inviolate––we know we are watching bodies; it is bodies that are generously offering themselves to the viewer. Not so in poet and director Maya Wuytack’s 2017 short film Beyond the Body. As the title already intimates, this piece offers a very different kind of body close-ups while sacrificing none of the poetics of beauty and unease mentioned earlier. Against a throbbing, almost eerie bassline, the camera slides across dancer Mileen Borgonjon’s body in the three minutes of the film’s duration. So close is the lens to the surface of the body, and so strategically choreographed are the body’s movements, that the viewer’s confidence that they are indeed witnessing a human body becomes obscured. The recognition of the human form is intermittent, in the broad strokes, but rarely in the particulars. We sense that it is a human body that we are watching but can rarely pinpoint exactly where in its vast and complex anatomy we are located. At moments, the sensation we get is close to that of absolute, empty space, where a notion of direction is impossible for there is nothing that can serve as an orienting point. We discern the muscles that are at work underneath the skin, but the movements they execute and the shapes they create are not tethered to any ordinary physiological functionalism. They obey their own idiosyncratic, strictly non-utilitarian logic. The closeness is thus in the service of denaturalizing our presumed familiarity with the body, and this liminal space between recognition and obfuscation re-instills in us the awe for the human form. Despite our wish to orient ourselves, our failure to do so is no source of frustration, for a vertiginously new universe emerges from the uncanny materiality of the body that unfolds and moves in front of our eyes. The precise morphology of the body eludes us, giving way to a novel and vast topography of possibility. Here, the body presents itself not as an entity wholly sufficient unto itself but rather as an access point to a different domain, one that transcends the limits drawn up by the familiar human shape. The imagery of the film beckons to a dimension that surpasses the somatic, all the while being anchored and inscribed in it. What the director has called “skinespheres” presents us with a topography made up of elements we may liken to tectonic plates, lunar craters, fields on unknown planets, astral depressions, galactic protuberances; or, in a Rorschach-test fashion, with whatever pattern each individual viewer is uniquely able to discern. In one specific moment, at the 58-second mark, two folds of flesh assume the form of a living creature yet undiscovered. The body thus becomes an uncharted terrain that defies any categorization on the basis of our conventional terms, concepts, images.

This is what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has identified as “the monstrous”: the monstrous as the transgressive force that is at once alarming and alluring precisely because it operates outside the reassuring logic of custom and law; the monstrous as the formidable promise of freedom from our mundane everyday lives that are policed by what is known, classified, ordered; the monstrous as the moment when the triteness of empirical reality succumbs to the force of imagination, to our ability to invent forms and entities not previously seen in nature; the monstrous as the conjuring into existence of the new by sheer force of fantasy, often by combining various familiar elements into surprising configurations; in other worlds, the monstrous as the capacity to create myths.

And it is corporeal mythmaking that Beyond the Body is invested in, fusing as it does visuals, sounds, words, and movement into a syncretic unity. The film begins its mythogenesis with a declaration of birth: “I was born in the heaving surf.” The I-subject––enunciated by a voice that we can unambiguously recognize as belonging to our species––rejects standard human origin based on filiation. The born self exists in this primordial form for a long time, the voice announces, and then “the world dumped itself on me.” With this declaration, the subject then begins to unfold the non-linear trajectory of their existence, a complex oneiric narrative of gleaming bodies, suctioning blackness, rubber throat, red lips, skinned roses, blooming skulls, stampeding horses, weeping thunders. This is a narrative that comes into existence when the external reality assaults the elemental matter of the body with its various culturally-created and socially-fortified claims, which seek to categorize the body and confer upon it an immutable identity. But the legend that such categorization seeks to create, one that promises us easy and systematic decoding of the map of the body in all its manifestations and peculiarities, ultimately fails to capture its manifold reality, its occult complexity that something as simple as a close-up camera shot begins to make visible. And the body possesses an inherent capacity to resist and challenge this stifling categorization: “I rip into the gum beneath the upper lip of civilization,” the voice asserts menacingly. This insidious, cathartic violence against civilizational conventions is an exhortation for us to see the body anew (the way the film presents it being an example thereof) and to detect the infinite possibilities offered by its folds, furrows, pits, grooves, and surfaces that still contain unresolved mysteries as old as time itself.

Beyond the Body ends with a close-up of an eye, one that blinks, rolls upward, then downward, searching. Its cornea is the outer transparent surface of the body as a mythmaking machine, as the crucible for the new. In the reciprocity of our eyes observing an eye (and here another example comes to mind of the close-up obsessed early 00s: Moby’s music video for “Porcelain”), we detect a universe that has yet to be seen properly––that is, a universe that has to be created anew. And seeing is only the starting point––the entire body is enmeshed in fashioning this universe. The intimate proximity to the body becomes the ritual whereby an alternate story is generated; whereby novel ways to associate words and sensations, sounds and visuals, poetry and movement can come into existence; whereby the new pulses with irreducible intensity. Offering its viewers the chance to observe a body very closely for three transfixing minutes, Beyond the Body asks them to invent their own transcendental corporeal myth.

E.R.