Prelude

It begins with a blow to the head. 

Well, no, that’s not quite true. Sophie Cundale’s The Near Room begins with a shot of several people poised for action in the Lynn Athletic Club, a boxing venue in Camberwell, London. They stand still beside punch bags and other fitness equipment, the sound of heavy breathing suggesting previous exertions. In lieu of a clapperboard, a bell rings and the trainees leap into action.

There will be a blow to the head. 

But before that, another boxing technique comes into play, the clinch, which for Cundale is a key motif in the film[i]. On a jazzily patterned platform suspended against a black background, two boxers clinch in mid-fight, their arms wrapped around one another in what looks like a bear hug. A strategic respite, the clinch is both a restful support and a means of feeling the other out: have they the strength to go the extra mile or are they nearing the end of their game and so can be taken advantage of? As the camera closes in on the fight, we hear no thuds, only a resounding musical score. The slow-motion choreography of silent hits and misses is hypnotic, the boxers’ elegant motion belying the strains of impact until the blow to the head that decides the match. 

Two characters and their idioms.

The Boxer, one of Sophie Cundale’s two main protagonists, played by professional boxer John Harding Jnr., falls to the ground. Concussed, he ends up in a hospital bed surrounded by a group of hysterically concerned people – a doctor, his manager, his trainer. Shot in close-up, the cool lighting and bleached colouration of this scene as well as the slightly askew dialogue alerts us to a sur-reality that gets accentuated in The Boxer’s alternating hallucinatory dream world. There, as well as the characters we have already met, who reappear in different roles wearing early Renaissance costumes, we encounter The Queen, Cundale’s other, main protagonist. Regally played by artist Penny Goring, her character is loosely based on Joanna of Castille (Joanna the Mad), the nominal queen of Castile from 1504 who was declared insane and confined to the royal palace on her father’s orders. In The Queen’s cloisters, The Boxer appears as her dead husband, his corpse laid out in princely black period dress while she stands over him, veiled in mourning. Marking his demise, she will later instigate his new beginning outside the dream by giving herself up to death within it.

In the early stages of planning Cundale had imagined these two characters as one, which is probably why they seem to be locked in an imaginary clinch as The Near Room’s allegory of the porous borders between life and death spins itself out. Both characters are informed by respective ‘idioms’, an idiom being a psychoanalytic term for the core modalities of being that determine our attachments to objects[ii]. In life, these objects can be as much damaging as they are nourishing. In The Near Room, they err on the side of the destructive. The Queen’s idiom is Cotard’s Delusion, a neurological disorder in which the sufferer believes they are already dead or do not exist, or that their body is rotting from within. Surrounded by corpuscular-like painted walls, The Queen reports on her smell of putrefaction as do her aides, the Sisters Agony and Fuori, who converse in arch syntax, as they light candles in a red-hued seemingly cavernous interior that is actually staged on the same floor space as the fight. 

The Boxer’s idiom is propped on ‘the near room’, which was Mohammed Ali’s term for a nightmarish vision of a place that would arise in his imagination if he was under pressure in a fight. It was a place he had to stay out of if he was going to survive (and win). As described in George Plimpton’s Shadow Box (1977), Ali imagined a door:

swung half open and inside he could see neon, orange and green lights blinking, and bats blowing trumpets and alligators playing trombones, and where he could see snakes screaming. Weird masks and actors’ clothes hung on the wall, and if he stepped across the sill and reached for them, he knew that he was committing himself to his own destruction.[iii]

In Cundale’s titular film, The Boxer has entered his own version of ‘the near room’, one inhabited by a sickly Queen and a menacing entourage who oversee her ills, and his death. But in the oscillation between The Boxer’s ‘real’ and dream worlds, a cure is put in motion. In the dream, the unconscious takes over and the machinations of dreaming - distortion and displacement - go into overdrive to work-through the fears that got him into his traumatised state in the first place: anxiety about his body’s vulnerability, his failing muscle strength, and his loss of bodily prowess. In boxing - an intensely contracted microcosm of the ‘beauty, fragility, despair and transience’ of life – mastery of the body is writ large as is its demise.[iv] 

The Near Room is a lesson in living with loss.

A trilogy of grief.

Cundale’s films often draw on autobiographical details to explore psychological states such as grief and loss, and The Near Room is no exception. In Prologue, 2013, Cundale staged feelings of jealousy and impending abandonment in her romantic relationship by casting an actress to play alongside her then real-life boyfriend. As well as being an off-screen directorial presence, Cundale also appeared within the frame to direct an especially poignant scene in the couple’s campervan – confined spaces being a feature of her films - in which the surrogate girlfriend, an actress, rehearses a fragment from Shakespeare’s Othello that mimics the tensions in their relationship. (Interestingly, The Near Room’s script has a Shakespearean-ring to it, especially the bawdier lines that play out in The Queen’s world.) In After Picasso, God, 2016, Cundale stars as a woman who attends a hypnotist with the ostensible goal of giving up smoking but, becoming embroiled in the hypnotist’s monologue about Dora Maar’s undying love for Picasso regardless of his mistreatment of her, the therapeutic scenario turns performatively sexual. The film ends with a close-up of Cundale’s character’s face riven with tears, a cigarette dangling precariously from her trembling fingers, as if on a cusp between breakdown and repulsion.

Cundale thinks of these three films as a kind of trilogy. Stylistically different, they could all be said to treat psychologically disturbing states of being with a dose of the same substance. Whether documentary and/or theatrical, the disordering effects of extreme emotions such as pain, loss and grief are mimicked by equally disturbing and disorienting images, sounds and sense. As if like could cure like. This filmic methodology is reminiscent of the unscientific medicinal mode of homeopathy. As 17th century poet John Milton phrased it, in language not unlike that in Cundale’s script, ‘for so in Physic things of melancholic hue and quality are us’d against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours’.[v] 

While the dreamwork is an automatic process, making a film (about a dream) involves many conscious and practical decisions. Nonetheless, common to both film and dream are visual techniques of metaphor and allegorical displacement which trick the mind into unwittingly engaging with the deep-seated emotions and fears we usually keep at a distance. The function of dreams, according to Freud, is to protect the sleep required for the vitality of waking life, a vitality that can be sucked dry by fear or grief: ‘It’s all dried up,’ says The Queen. Perhaps the filmic staging of a dream world might also have a protective function for the psyche. Might it act as a homeopathic remedy for extreme emotional states by allegorically mimicking these states? 

Abjection in film as homeopathic medicine.

Film theorist Barbara Creed used the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, i.e., the psycho-social boundary between the disgusting and the proper civilised body, to argue that horror film allows us to deal with our fears of bodily abjection, i.e., to imaginatively transgress the taboos around bodily fluids and decay, from the safe space of viewing. This can be considered as an instance of filmic homeopathy, i.e., the treating of fears of bodily dissolution with carefully crafted, amped-up moving images and sounds that mimetically allude to them. The Near Room is not a horror film per se, but its genre-bending coalescence of melodrama, tragedy, comedy and farce also includes body horror, relayed as schlock, shock, and repulsion, respectively. 

At one point, The Queen seduces her jailor the Marquis of Denia, played by Chris New, and while he lies on her lap feigning arousal, she slashes his throat, blood gushing everywhere. Its unexpectedness makes you jump out of your skin. You laugh, yet look away, partly unable to watch though you know ‘it’s not blood, it’s red’.[vi] Here, body horror’s visceral slashing of the skin acts like a surrogate object in relation to which fears around bodily wastes and the dissolution of the flesh can be entertained, not only without danger, but with enjoyment. It acts as a catharsis of destructive impulses we otherwise fear. In a further comedically squeamish turn, the Marquis later reappears wearing a blood-soaked rag around his neck beneath which big fat maggots consume his flesh to heal his wound, or perhaps hasten its putrefaction. 

While abjection is premised on the expulsion of the maternal body and fluids such as blood and urine – both of which feature in The Queen’s world, for Kristeva, the most abject body is the corpse as it occupies the border between life and death, the most feared boundary of all. The Boxer enters The Queen’s world as a corpse, and she later becomes a blood-bathed cadaver as she succumbs to her death in a ritual which releases The Boxer from the dream. In her visibly abject state, The Queen also inversely symbolises the bodily abjection that underlies boxing and that is otherwise unseen in the film, i.e., the battered broken bodies that are paradoxically elevated by the public into a sublime transcendence of the mortality of flesh. The abject, Kristeva tells us, is tinged with the sublime. 

More banal than sublime, the most disgusting scene of abjection, the one that gets under my skin, takes place in The Boxer’s ‘real’ professional world. In his hotel room, he is shot in close-up pouring water he has ingested and then spat into a glass over his steak dinner to destroy his appetite for it[vii]. He is mentally turning himself inside out. ‘I spit myself out’, says Kristeva, ‘I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself. […] that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that “I” am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death’[viii]. The camera’s proximity to his open mouth and the sounds of the ingested fluid mixing with spittle embody the fearful emptiness at the heart of abjection. The Boxer’s liquid expulsion harks back to the bodily starvation that is theatricalised in The Queen’s disease. Both characters are starving themselves, The Boxer to make weight, The Queen to deny her bodily existence. Both are attached to emptiness at the cost of life. How can they exit their imaginary clinch? 

Detaching from the clinch

While both protagonists are autonomous in their respective worlds, The Queen also seems to function as an object of projective identification for The Boxer, her character becoming a surrogate object that allows him to delve into the states of bodily vulnerability and dissolution that he disavows in his waking life. This is reminiscent of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s notion of the transitional object which the infant uses to test out and renegotiate its psycho-social boundaries. This object is both real and unreal, and, most importantly, when it is discarded, its survival of the infant’s use of it enables the infant to accept loss and find new objects of pleasure[ix]. Needless to say, this process is also part of adult life in which letting go or giving up has to be reckoned with for the sake of a healthier (psychic) life.

The Queen gives herself up to the death she was psychologically living out. The Boxer, now raised from the dead, stands over her funeral pyre: ‘You haven’t got the stomach for me’, she says, banishing him from her world. Having used and survived his ‘near room’, i.e., the transitional space of the dream world, The Boxer chooses a new life. Exiting the Lynn changing room, he walks towards a door ‘swung half open’ but now bathed in the promise of daylight. He seems both sad about the loss of his Queen and accepting of the loss of prowess of his, relatively speaking, ageing body. Do we as viewers also undergo a cathartic shift in perspective? I cannot say, but one thing for sure is that, on the other side of the near room, the vitality of waking life beckons. 

All it took was a blow to the head….

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Maria Walsh is Reader in Artists' Moving Image at Chelsea College of Arts. She is a writer and art critic, publishing books, peer-reviewed articles and magazine reviews on interrelations between moving image practices and feminist, psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of subjectivity.

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[i] See https://www.fvu.co.uk/read/fvu-frames-sophie-cundale/ Accessed 19 Sep 2024.

[ii] According to the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, to become a character is to release the unconscious idiom of oneself into being. See Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience, Hove and New York, Routledge, 1993.

[iii] Cited at https://www.thefightcity.com/shadow-box-george-plimpton-muhammad-ali-norman-mailer-george-foreman-ernest-hemingway/ Accessed 4 Oct 2024.

[iv] Belgian art curator Jan Hoet cited at https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/blood-or-flowers-boxing-in-the-visual-arts/ Accessed 4 Oct 2024.

[v] Cited in Christopher, Georgia. “Homeopathic Physic and Natural Renovation in Samson Agonistes.” ELH 37, no. 3 (1970): 361–73. p.361. 

[vi]  Godard cited in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: The Athlone Press, 1989, p.182.

[vii] This scene can be usefully contrasted with a later more theatrical staging of abjection in which The Boxer takes the lid off his dinner to reveal a teeming mass of maggots.

[viii] Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p.3.

[ix] In his essay ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identification’ (1968), Winnicott describes the transitional object as a container of the infant’s frustration with reality. In allowing itself to be ‘used’ by the infant, the transitional object facilitates a shift from attachment to separation without being overwhelmed by feelings of loss (of the m/other). This is the basis of a creative attitude to life.