by Jenny Hval
The Pixels
We’re back where we started, in the camcorder universe, in the black metal bonus material. We see spruces, forest floor, grey sky. The camera movement has just made the forest sway and flicker as Nocturno Culto or Fenriz walks along the path, I don’t remember which one. He’s no longer in the frame. I’ve just scribbled something in the film’s overcrowded side panel, and as I did so I briefly paused the video. We’re now watching a still without people, a quarter-of-a-second loop with only nature, swirling trees, blurred tree trunks and vague clouds.
Here, the primitive digital camera technology meets subculture’s low resolution. If we zoom further in on the image we won’t see more detail. We can’t see snowflakes shaken off the blurred branches or the difference between the bark and the wood inside it. We can’t see the actual curves, the elasticity of the branches. The image is flat and pixelated, an unreal representation of reality. The file data doesn’t bother with fidelity to nature, with gravity’s pull or the associations of the treetops’ upward growth. The only thing reproduced of this exaggerated colour contrast is an ambiguous chaos of black and white. The frame lacks nuance, yet deep down in the roots of subculture, in the network and seeding speed between the nerds, the fans and the enthusiasts, sending the file from machine to machine. The only thing we can zoom ourselves into is our own fantasy. Only I can supply these pixels with my own.
We’re in a different image now. It’s almost identical to the still, but this isn’t from the Darkthrone DVD. This is a picture I’ve taken. We’re not in 1993, but in 1998. The photograph is from a practice session with the metal band I’m in; we’ve probably attempted to record a music video late at night, but I’m not the one filming, of course. I’ve just photographed the place we’ve been, that’s why there are no people in this image, only a clearing with a narrow path through the snow and some trees lit up by torches or the front lights of a car. You can just make out footprints next to each other on the dark snow under the trees. Apart from that, the image is coarse and underexposed, the snow is grey and all colours between the trees are erased, all of them black and dark grey. Only the contours of the treetops are visible against the sky.
I have a lot of these pictures of Southern forests, taken when I was in college, and I’ve seen a lot of similar motifs on Terese’s old disks and from other black metal videos and band pictures from the ’90s. In these photos it’s always winter, and there are always the same trees, spruce and pine, the same sections of forest canopy. The pictures are never realistic; there’s always too much movement or too little focus to give the sensation that anything’s been captured. Branches, snow, stones and white-hot sky bleed into each other. I don’t understand why I always take these kinds of pictures, test shots without people, the lighting far too dim, and the resolution too low. I have no interest in learning photography, not while I’m in college. My pitiful images are doomed to end up in the recycling bin on one of the school computers. But for some reason I keep doing it anyway, continue to use my terrible photography skills to document things that seem unnecessary. I continue to be pulled toward something, the bad, the empty and unreal.
A series of these images are emerging now, both stills and unused test-photographs. They are so similar they can almost be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, to form a continuous forest. But only just. Together they form a chaotic landscape, a crushed forest. It’s not nature, or a reproduction of nature, that these images seek. These images want to destroy what we’ve been taught is reality. It’s as if we’re attempting the same thing, in different places, in different times, me and Darkthrone and lots of other teens. As if we’re zooming into the darkness, into the silent letters, looking for a place that doesn’t exist.
Look at this place here … in one of the pictures … and look at it here, in the next one. We’re back in one of my documentation images. It’s impossible to see where it was shot – Fevik, Austre Moland, Nedenes, Groos?
Here, the real place doesn’t exist anymore, just as Nocturno Culto doesn’t exist in the frame of that first still. The only thing left is an impossible place.
We’re in the eye of the camera. This graphic landscape has never been christened. It has no time or history; there was no Middle Ages here, no Reformation. No charismatic movement. There are only digital points, viruses and swirling canopies. The only possible conversion is the one I have done to my documentation photos, from MP4 to MP3, MOV, AVI, PNG, PDF, JPEG.
This place knows nothing of God. It’s a screenshot, a series of moments, frozen and compressed from nature to JPEG. It does not know Holy Scripture. It does not know how to pronounce the ecclesiastical. No Christians see trees fall in this digital forest, and no god sees them, either. This is no man’s land and no god’s land. This is lowbrow, low-quality footage, hidden deep in the undergrowth of the cosmic internet. If this picture had any Christian content, or a parish centre nearby, it has been compressed out in the digitalisation. It’s free, pagan, and it doesn’t care. This is the bonus material of the South.
I want to be in a place like that in 1998, when I overhear recess prayer meetings organised for myself and other lost souls, when I’m in my witch’s den trying not to hear the lyrics on the metal records I’ve borrowed, or when I wonder what the hell black metallers were thinking when they started burning beautiful stave churches instead of working their way through the premises of the Free Church, Betania and Salem and Filadelfia, plastered up and down the town streets with their tiny windows and creaking floors, sort of spying on us as we walk past, gluing shut the Southern spirit and mouth. I’m so sick of being a soul that can be converted or improved or healed, or that’s dangerous and needs to be stopped from contaminating others. Give me a salvation break, I’m exhausted. I want to be in a place where I don’t have anything to hate; I want to be that place, a place that can’t be manipulated, conversed or converted. I want to be a thing, a series of things, things without religious potential. I want to be out of God’s reach.
In school I’m never allowed to be that place. I imagine it’s because I enjoy hating too much. I’m too fond of transgression. But now, twenty years after college, when I turn the screen toward Venke and Terese and we watch the black metal bonus material together, we sink into the undergrowth, and we choose the camera over the trees, or we choose the black and white trees over the real and green ones. We look past and into the patterns. We don’t stop the movement, but let it continue, like an eternal scroll down the black whirling branches. We choose the pixels.
Listen to the MP3 buzz from the fan in the computer. It whispers a heathen psalm.
2
THE FOREST
A film
We open on a long scene from the middle of a film. A group of girls, maybe a school class, are on a forest hike. This is the first time that we join them outdoors. Our initial focus lingers on the girls as they walk through the forest landscape. Some of them are outdoorsy types and focused, and others more skittish and giggly. Everyone has brought typical hiking gear, backpacks, rolled-up mats, water bottles and flasks. They talk about previous hikes, about things they’ve brought and animals they’ve spotted. They wear sensible clothes, a lot of them are in hiking boots, and we watch them step over grass and rocks, pass through thickets and over fences. As the girls go deeper and deeper into the forest, we see less of them; they pop up erratically in between close-ups and long takes of nature, and the forest gradually takes over as the main character in the scene. We realise that the actors playing the girls are changing all the time, and always seem a little unfamiliar to us on reappearance, even though they are still addressed with the same five or six names. The forest pulls everything in and makes everything part of itself.
This forest is all forests. It alternates between heather clinging to rock faces, and tall Sitka spruces North American rainforests, and Eastern Norwegian marshland with fog and tall grass. The forest moulds itself around the girls. More than something inanimate passed through by something living,
the landscapes come to the humans and change their consciousness and form. Forest and humans are made equals: the girls walk through a transformable landscape, but they are also part of the transformation.
The girls always wear the same clothes, even though the people inside them change. There are no constant faces here, only figures, exchangeable frames for the forest content.
Shots of animals, big and small, pausing and breathing rapidly in and out through their nostrils; it’s as if the girls are taking the form of different beasts as they walk through the woods. All living beings are connected and belong together, become each other. Mushrooms and flowers stretch toward the hiking boots, the hooves and the paws that trample the landscape.
We hear individual voices ask each other very banal, mundane questions followed by quite long intervals of silence. For example:
ANNA: Carole, are you coming?
CAROLE: I’ve got a blister, wait up.
It’s impossible to differentiate between the calcified trees and twisted, scorched stone boulders in the dry desert forest they walk through. The sun blinks as it shines through the fossils, and in the next moment it shines through the foliage of huge spider plants clawing into coastal cliffs, before we move to high mountain thickets and after that gradually down to a windswept evergreen forest, and later to cacti and crystalline stone formations, as if the girls have been walking in circles. Dead desert forest curves around them.
IVY: Where did we put the water?
Big, oak trees, green-leaved and eternal, seem to watch the girls. In the next moment the sky drizzles and the leaves have gone yellow and red, falling to the ground.
ANNA (looking at a compass that doesn’t resemble a compass so much as a small digital sundial): In Carole’s backpack.
They stop by a brook and fill their water bottles.
Beyond the brook the landscape opens up into wide plains. The girls walk through grass and wildflowers, and around their feet blood and/or other fluids drip on the flowers and the grass.
Gradually, the forest reveals increasingly vivid bodily formations to us, as if it’s sending a message to the girls or trying to mirror them. A series of trees look like twisted bodies with arms that shake their fists at the sky. A mountain crevice in the distance looks like a vagina. The girls step into it and disappear, as if we can’t follow them in there. Faint noises can be heard from deeper and deeper inside the mountain, while the edges of the crevice seem to twitch almost imperceptibly every time a noise is heard.
Out on the other side of the mountain the sound of running water can be heard. Two of the girls, TERESE and VENKE, squat next to each other, pissing. You see their butts and the piss that streams across dry dirt and flint.
VENKE (TO TERESE): How old were you when you kissed someone for the first time?
TERESE: Um … Thirteen. You?
VENKE: Twelve.
TERESE: Why?
VENKE: I was just wondering.
TERESE: What was the kiss like?
VENKE: Embarrassing.
TERESE: Same. And wet. I didn’t know people were that wet.
VENKE: I remember that I was really keen and just went for it. I remember the sound of teeth against teeth, that bone sound. I’d forgotten about teeth.
TERESE: You think about the lips and dread the tongue, but forget the teeth.
VENKE: It’s kind of like the first time you hear someone get knocked out. That whipping noise that films teach you, it doesn’t exist. Only skeleton.
TERESE: The sound of life and death.
The sound of peeing continues.
TERESE and VENKE grab each other’s hands to pull themselves up to a standing position, and move on in an autumnal landscape with fiery colours and afternoon sun blushing through the canopies. They walk up a hill, help each other carry the backpacks,
then they tumble down again, without the backpacks,
play with stuff they’ve brought with them, a bottle of water, a kerosene stove,
and perhaps something they definitely didn’t bring, a volleyball or a cabbage,
they play, faintly ecstatic,
but underneath this cheerfulness the mood is deeply euphoric in a more mystical way
they are changed by the landscape
they are part of it
they have already disappeared.
The girls take a break.
The colours change from blood-red to Norwegian green-black, that spruce green,
those trees that are always green, but with black, sort of, underneath
like that ’90s hair dye that was red, but with black underneath.
Dusk falls. VENKE and TERESE are seen sleeping in the forest; VENKE sucks on a tuft of her own hair, as if she is administering her own imaginary oxygen or nibbling on herself.
It’s completely dark. Only forest and animal sounds. Some sounds seem real, others more abstract. A spider crawls over a blade of grass, and the little legs trample the blade with a violent and metallic ring, like the sound of an electroacoustic piece of music.
The black and the white whisper in distinct tones (overdub).
The horizon is black and white.
A cosmic but crawling and creeping soundscape is heard alongside this text:
SONG: (Darkthrone, in the distance):
Over peaks and through the thickets
Through this evil murky wood
Die like a warrior, head on a tree
Slash the flesh. Needles skin deep.
SONG: (interpretation of Darkthrone, in the distance)
Over stumps and through the leaves
An evil sea of mist deceives
Hidden words on murky waves
Sink into the moor’s embrace
Lines that stretch horizon-long
Snare insanity through song
Shrouding all in fog of death
Sounds of white bone on the breath
Then it’s pitch-black and sound is all there is.
The sounds come from a tape recorder that plays large expanses of organ notes. The long veil of echo from the notes spreads across the night sky in every direction. These expansive notes are cut off abruptly, crumbling into the ticking sound of a Geiger counter, the way it ticks if it’s placed near a ceramic salt shaker dyed with uranium oxide. Then the sound gets more defined, it verges on the sound of an old- fashioned modem that is connecting to the internet, or maybe an old printer; the sound is dimmed, but in the space between the abstract and the concrete is the possibility of infinity, and through tight hollows between little machines lined up next to each other, even the smallest strange spaces insist on infinity.
Then it’s dawn, first astronomical, then civilian, and finally the common dawn.
As the forest slowly brightens around them, VENKE and TERESE, now played by the same actors all the time, are shown sleeping in formations around different natural objects, as if they have been arranged that way by the forest. The pictures resemble Valie Export’s pictures.
VENKE is seen sleeping wrapped around a spruce.
TERESE sleeps in a hollow in a clearing, her butt nestled deep down, legs and arms stretched out to either side.
VENKE is on a beach by a little pond, legs in the water.
TERESE rests on a big, round stone, belly down and legs and arms dangling on either side.
VENKE is in an oak tree, sleeping with legs and arms embracing a thick branch.
When TERESE wakes up it’s dark again, as though a whole day has passed without them waking. Only the moon lights up the sky. The forest doesn’t look like the one we last saw VENKE asleep in; now it’s a spruce forest near the timberline. TERESE looks around, calls out faintly. We don’t hear her yell for VENKE, but we hear the echoes of the calls.
VENKE isn’t far away, and we hear the echo as she yells back HI, TERESE.
TERESE and VENKE find each other, laugh. Spend a little while packing up their stuff, look around,
VENKE: We’ve lost the others.
TERESE: Yes.
When did we last see them?
VENKE: I don’t remember. Last night?
TERESE: We’ll have to find them again, I suppose.
For an entire day, TERESE and VENKE walk through the forest, from when the sun is still rising till it’s evening again. They keep moving and are calm, not distressed or at a loss for what to do. At first the landscape continues to change, as if they were crossing continents and wandering for months, and the forest opens and closes, becomes big mountains and narrow valleys and then is suddenly completely flat, with red sandy mountains in the distance. Then the forest stabilises in the form of a Norwegian spruce forest, but the images change. We see an increasing number of landscape close-ups. Buzzing insects fly in and out of hollows in tree trunks above the girls, and farther up, birds float with extended wings and limp thin feet. Even farther up you can make out the sky, the moon and the stars, sometimes just a little patch, sometimes a great sea of them.
TERESE and VENKE are sweaty and dirty and sleepy, they wipe their foreheads, panting,
but at the same time the mood becomes more erotically charged.
They snort and moan,
touch different kinds of trees as they walk,
pick berries and mushrooms that they eat, and drink water from streams,
stick their fingers through grass and into openings in tree trunks,
dig out and chew bark and resin,
they see Roosevelt elk and roes cross marshes,
bats flying across the sky,
blue hares and red foxes running across the path.
Coyotes laugh, and wolves howl.
The girls begin to communicate with the animals and with nature,
as if they’ve eaten toadstools and begun to hallucinate.
They call for the hare and the fox,
they lie down in moss and lichen and let the wolf lick their faces,
they roll in plants, red, green, gold, yellow,
they disappear more and more into the landscape