Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Steven Eastwood's Island, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on MUBI, is showing from October 16 – November 14, 2019.
What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
Film as thinking and feeling; film as reflection; film as meditation: in the history of the medium many works have engaged with these concerns as subject matter, but considerably fewer have embodied them, have taken these priorities so deeply into their process of conception, production, and delivery that, outside of ostensible focus or theme, the work itself has provided a contemplative form with its own unfolding.
We might think of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre or that of Ozu, Claire Denis, and Pedro Costa. We might call up a handful of pioneering artist filmmakers (Brakhage, Deren, Dorsky, Tait). The role call is perhaps personal to each informed viewer. However, what must be central—foundational even—is that something is at stake in the making, something hugely significant, at once personal and collective, singular and shared, unrepeatable and mundane (which is to say daily, not trivial).
Mortality is the ground zero, the measure of all of this: it finds us on the threshold, brief dwellers and occupants, without choice or favor, of all the above positions.
There is in our times now a notable turn towards this. In First World terms, it might be motivated by the fact that we are living longer, that the manifestations of elder conditions previously rare are now much more widespread and so require cultural as well as social, economic, and political consideration. It might also be underpinned by a wider sense of something fatal in our dealings as societies, as a civilization, in relation to each other, to non-human species, and to the ecology of the earth.
Grieving in all its stations has become pivotal to our working through of these challenges. But mourning is only one point on a broad spectrum of responses. Regardless of the artistic medium, and whether in fiction or memoir, confessional diary, a (chosen) termination dispatch or survivor testimony, professional report, procedural analysis or philosophical account, more and more makers are finding that engaging with aspects of ending, whether of person or planet, is not only creatively rewarding but also increasingly necessary.
This end of things has always given the fact of things their core of meaning, but this has now accelerated. There is urgency to this witness, to the one experience that is genuinely common (while the journey towards it might be anything but).
In light of this, what is first of all remarkable about Steven Eastwood’s Island is its tone, its mood of calm. For those who know the artist’s previous work—in experimental film and video, in documentary essay, installation, curation and education—there is recognizably an abiding concern with ethical positions and human vulnerability, but little to prepare the viewer for the sheer realization of this extended investigation.
From the outset, we know—and don’t know—what will happen. The film stays with and follows four individuals over many months as they experience palliative care in a hospice on the Isle of Wight. Such a description suggests the staple material of broadcast non-fiction. Eastwood’s authored take could not be further from this televisual template. By saying nothing, simply watching, listening, being present—patient, tenacious, committed, acutely attentive to details, to images, objects, gestures and sounds that are both resolutely real and highly suggestive—Eastwood steadily develops a way of filming, and a way of being with those he films that is astonishingly powerful, and precisely because of its understatement.
There is a dramatic tension in his attention, of course. This self-initiated project, making an approach to an island with a strong hospice identity, and responsive patients, staff and families, required the utmost sensitivity. Steady as a hospital monitor, equipped with grace notes not grief notes, Eastwood’s attendance in the scenarios of hospice care becomes one of the most consistent in the last phase of these lives.
We need no reminding about the prohibitions in operation here. And yet, on one reading, it’s surprising. We can routinely view births, invasive operations, sex, and violent death (real and staged). What have we constructed around our leaving this life, in this society, that privileges it as one of the last silences, the almost never seen? Might it not be more healthy to draw back the curtain instead, to share in the most shared act, as so many older and wiser cultures do?
Responsibility: the film’s choices reveal and imprint its manifesto of priority. Over time, and in time, the distance between the looking and the object of the looking is radically reduced. This is a person looking, not a camera recording. There is a profound solidarity with presence, an empathy with absence, and a startling affirmation to the transition. Eastwood’s gaze resides dynamically between the observational and subjective, the implicit and complicit, at once the stranger and one most intimately involved.
So we might move, if we are lucky, arguably, from a home to a home, from a career to a carer, from welfare in its widest sense to a gentle, warm farewell. Our hours are measured by visits and meals; the medicine trolley like an island in the room, a mobile stability. The bonds of the social are at their finest here: one body cares for another body.
And subtly, without any false flourish, traces of reference to moments in the lineage of existential expression are offered. Does the framing of the back of the head suggest a protagonist out of a Caspar David Friedrich canvas, staring not into a sublime void but onto the blinds of a window? Does the microscope’s tracking of malignant cells, their teeming like the volatile eruptions of a hostile planet we cannot live on, remind us of either abstract art or a sci-fi landing sequence?
And does the ferry’s drawing in to the shore, to the terminal, call to mind a famous painted island? No man (sic) is an…, as they say. On the passage, brief or extended, to the “Isle of the Dead” we know so well thanks to Arnold Böcklin’s own imagining, one is solitary andsurrounded, accompanied by a host of all who come and have come before, visible or not, heavenly or otherwise.1
The fact of the seas around the Isle of Wight, ebbing and flowing, rising and falling like a chest beyond the frame, the room, the hospice, is a defining element of the film’s potency. We are both at the heart of existence and in a manner removed. We might think of Bruegel’s Icarus, of Auden’s Icarus, falling unobserved into the waves. What differs here, however, is that these passings are noticed.
Images of death itself are inevitably elusive, impossible even. Chicago collector Richard Harris has amassed an extensive self-portrait of the humanized “figure” from across time and place but the event itself cannot be seen, can it? When does it start? When one is exposed to a harmful chemical? When cells start to divide? When the car that will knock you down leaves the domestic garage on its lethal journey towards you? Death is not a moment but a process. The long now of this dying continues for centuries after death, as the woodland, water, and housebound audio autopsies of artist duo French and Mottershead reveal. Just as our resource footprints while alive pace the globe, so our body’s dispersal is similarly extensive.
Perhaps the closest, most distinct register of this unfolding is what Eastwood delivers: the absolute darkness of a mouth (cave entrance to the underworld) or the space between breaths, so long that time becomes entirely relative, experiential, and normal clocks are wholly inadequate.
Island is a single screen feature length work, and the most readily viewable manifestation of this material, but it is not the only one. While it provides a window, the installation The Interval and the Instant (using footage from Eastwood's filming in different configurations, it was commissioned by Fabrica in Brighton, and subsequently shown in Canada and France) created a room, a surrounding space, a multi-planed immersion at scale in the diverse approaches of the project across a number of projections. The wording of its title skilfully concentrates many of the intentions identified here. That Fabrica was formerly a Regency Church also contributed a holding and perceptual framework that, believer or not, underpinned the exhibition.
Travelling back to London after visiting it one Friday evening in late November 2017, as young people packed the wet, narrow lanes near the venue with an exuberantly physical aliveness, was memorable. The sea just meters away washed the shingle, its melancholy low and ceaseless roar a sound one could be lost within. The same channel could carry me to the isle, over there, not so far. From the rain-smeared window of the train carriage, the lighting of houses and streets appeared almost as marine lanterns, little lamps out on the great night waters. I realized I could stay on the train and, without changing, return to my hometown and the hospice where my mother died, comparably treated, twenty-five years earlier.
Similarly, a first viewing of Island conjured a mood indivisible for me now from the film itself. Shown in a long low room in an empty after-hours wing of Barts’ hospital near Smithfield, the work was reached up and down stairs, through winding corridors of closed offices and labs. It was a suitably insular experience, occurring somewhere in a different, normally inaccessible dimension of the city.
At the point in the film when a nurse stepped in front of the camera and confirmed a death, the picture was fully dark for a brief moment but the screen had several small holes and it looked like a night sky come to earth with its own stars in the piercings. It was as if the protagonist had become their own constellation—their own bright and lasting story.
Wherever Island is seen, it will likely provoke strong reactions, partly dependent perhaps on the time in one’s life (and that of those closest) when the encounter takes place. The space given to the audience is, however, constant, generous and cares not for age. In all the roles it shows, it asks us what we would do—we are in it, whether we like it or not. How would we come to our end? Would we continue with our known, or veer into late new pastures; panic or accept?
Countering the given, theorist Laura Mulvey has written of film as marking death twenty-four times a second. All moving image is of course mortal; it makes the past present on every occasion it is shown, opens various coffins (canister, tape box, memory stick, or file) and disinters the gone, exhumes the once expressed, once felt. Ghosts live in cinema, not the living.
But Island is not about specters or phantoms. It is about the act and art of being alive. In this way, the film is enormously restorative. We are not alone. We all carry our death like a child waiting to be born, across the fields of these days, through fenced, bare winters and bright summer yards. Island gives hospitality to both these bodies. It offers a quietly undeniable and enduring tribute to the patients and the structures that support them, showing them not at their weakest but at their strongest, their most full because most human, independent of energy or speech or mobility.
Eastwood here is now also a carer, no longer only a filmmaker. He stands alongside those he has filmed, not before or behind them. As reliable and reassuring as a nurse, he gifts them the unmatched: the truly being seen, truly being heard.
We cannot but be moved. Island takes us to another place; but it also brings us back, to our lives, our losses and our fierce, faithful loves.
Film as quest; film as voyage; film as change, return:
and Film as prayer.
1. Strange and synchronous to note that an Israeli film on the same themes is also called The Island: https://www.adamweingrod.com/blank