On Labor of Love (Sylvia Schedelbauer, 2020)

A yellowish-brown spot rests in the upper corner of a black frame. With a vibration, the mottle expands; meanwhile, the color black compresses and becomes a circle: it is a pupil enclosed by an amber iris. Is it an eye? Or is it a dark tunnel without exit, illuminated by LED light bars? Labor of Love (2020) begins with these glimpses that establish the principle of indeterminacy or, more precisely, of multiple figurative associations that structure the ten minutes of Sylvia Schedelbauer’s last picture. The short film is a stream of permanent mutations, built by animated entities, colors, vibrations and stroboscopic lights. In the movie, a voice utters a text, which is not comprehensible at all, at least in a first watch. Perhaps, the colors black and amber were not an eye, but a group of celestial bodies seen from afar or a dandelion in extreme close-up. Or maybe they are the four possibilities I traced, all at once. 

Labor

There is a moment in Labor of Love where a polychromatic butterfly overlays upon a human brain, whose texture blends with the hind wings of the insect, making a movement like a flutter. In its flight, the lepidopteran transports to a forest where the wind shakes the trees (or are they hair follicles seen through a magnifying lens?). Then, there is an instant where a bee pollinates a flower; its buzz mixes with the breathing of a woman, whose face denotes a deep sleep. All these entities are laboring. The lilac sea waves that break on the shore and the astonishing sunset with its yellow, red, and black are laboring, although they are not living beings. Films have never done anything else than animating the whole world’s matter. 

Hannah Arendt differentiates between “labor” and “work”, which are words that we usually employ indistinctly. She defines the first one as “the activity which corresponds to the process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced into the life process by labor”.[1] In other words, without labor, life would be impossible and, therefore, it is something shared between every living being. Schedelbauer’s film exemplifies this in two senses. The first one is evident in the discernible labors within the stream of glimpses in the movie. Those glimpses create the sensation of a shared vital unity among entities. The second one is that, although creating a film is something in the realm of what Arendt understands as “work”, Labor of Love suggests that the act of making a film—and the experience of watching it­­—is an act of life preservation, just as breathing or sleeping. 

Of

The word “of” in the title opens a prepositional phrase that qualifies “labor”; as a semantic unit, it indicates a place of belonging. Labor of Love is constituted by—or at least it refers to—other sources and works. In her website, Sylvia Schedelbauer mentions that the process of making this film came from her readings of All about Love, by bel hooks, and of The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson.[2] Besides, the text that is heard in Labor borrows words from the forester Peter Wohlleben in a conversation for the BBC that he had with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia and the photographer Marion Sidebottom. The text is complemented with ideas from the ecologist Suzanne Simard, in her talk How Trees Talk to Each Other. Two essays, a podcast, and a lecture: diverse preexistent creations that operate as roots for arising a movie. Without being explicit in the short, these sources unclose “portals, portals within portals, each opening up new spaces, new avenues, new perspectives”,[3] as the voice over says. 

From all these links between diverse artifacts, the most heartfelt and noteworthy is that to Paul Clipson’s Love’s Refrain, a film that, in the credits, Schedelbauer acknowledges as an inspiration source. In the movie’s eight minutes, Clipson fuses crystalline drops on the leave’s architecture, in close-ups, with long shots of sun glimpses in the back of a forest. His loving prayer ends in a succession between aquatic lights and oceanic trees. Clipson died in 2018 and Sylvia Schedelbauer couldn’t go to the funeral. Her mourning rite was to revisit his friend’s filmography. Therefore, her last short film is a colorful elegy of lights: a labor of love. 

Love

Is this small and beautiful altar not enough to experience love fully? Is devotion not enough to pay some sort of debt with the elements of the world, rearranging them in such a way that they induce to this emotional state? It is, but the associations are not straightforward, though they can be felt intuitively. Love in the short film is experienced physically too, as a mysterious thrill. While watching this movie, it is possible to feel the circulatory and the nervous systems. Is it because the voice over narrates that there are signals travelling through them? Can the pure sound of words, detached from their meaning, invoke the organs alluded? For doing so, the use of stroboscopic lights is a complement and not a cause. (The only flaw of the film is its lack of warning about the presence of a resource that can be a torment for some people, even if for others it can lead to experience an internal illumination). Love is a meditation that contributes to the recognition of the universe inside us; it is, as well, the knowledge of being integrated to an immense world outside. Labor of Love roots together a diversity of millenary life forms, by means of images and sounds combined in a vital and harmonical unity. Cinema is no more than this organic system. 

^[1] Arendt, Hannah. (1998[1958]). The Human Condition. Chicago: The Chicago University Press, p. 7.

^[2] http://www.sylviaschedelbauer.com/films/labor_of_love/index.html

^[3] Ídem.