I am developing a new short film, which is part of a series which includes Self-isolation Dinner (2020) and Zoom Deep Beauty (2021). These films explore the relationship between vision and hearing on one hand, and our proximity senses (smell, taste and touch) on the other. What happens to these senses when we communicate by various video platforms? How can touch, taste and smell be evoked, if not shared, across the screen?
This creative pursuit is part of an ongoing concern of mine, which began in 2008 with my PhD into tactility and film (can be accessed HERE), and continues through my artistic research to this day.
Because I am very interested in all aspects of the creative process, as well as the idea of a collaborative cross-disciplinary dialogue, I am sharing here the initial stages of my explorations in a form of …
A working script/manual:
A small scent theatre is laid out: light box + petri dishes.
Small drawers and containers. Everything volatile is contained.
And the whole set is covered by a layer of cellophane. Everything looks ordered and sterile.
The lights, the electric flower. The diffuser. It’s all electricity.
The computer monitor is black.
A hand appears and turns it on.
A face of a woman appears.
She too is electricity.
We see hands in white rubber gloves appear. They take the layer of cellophane off…ceremoniously.
The hands set out to explore various abstract smells in the theatre:
They add various substances into the petri dish: turmeric, sour beads, moss.
Things merge and combine.
The face watches wistfully.
She is Ophelia. A disembodied woman. She lost access to a multi-sensory world. She is only a face.
From time to time the hands offer her a sniff.
The digital face breathes in deeply and becomes immersed in the odour. Lost temporarily. She travels far.
We see her face close up – dreaming.
Cut: the woman’s face is replaced by abstract texture of smell brewing. Strange abstract landscapes.
Back to the hands mixing and brewing.
The face watches on…She encourages the hands, wills them on with her expression.
The scene repeats two more times with new smells/experience being shared.
The face looks wilder. The hands get wilder too.
They take off the gloves.
They add moss, bark.
Then soil.
They stop respecting the boundaries and spreads soil outside petri dishes.
Smoke rises both inside and outside the screen (incense)
The face looks more excited, deranged. Her hair becomes unruly. Her face sparkles.
She is so close to the screen now that we only catch fragments of her.
We see her eye. Her mouth. Her nostrils.
Her face is now covered by soil.
She is Earthed now.
The hands spreads soil over the screen.
END.
IMAGES: Tereza Stehlikova, 2024 featuring Tereza Kamenicka
Notes:
How is smell communicated in the film and across the screen?
By mimesis and imagination – Ophelia imagines herself into the scents. The aromatherapist picks up subtle hints from Ophelia’s face…either way there is a strange mirroring going on. Ophelia wills the aromatherapist on to get wilder.
How does the narrative progress?
From solidity to fluidity
From order to disorder (entropy, chaos)
From sterility to richness/dirt
From distance to closeness/rawness
From electricity to earth.
Cinesthetic feasts 
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