The Otolith Group

I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another captures the intimate reading, by then-87 year old Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, of excerpts from her quietly astonishing book of poetry, Sea and Fog, (2012). Opening with archival film footage of a vine moving in ghostly, grainy, black and white timelapse, the video sets the stage for fresh wonder at the subtle yet vibrant world just beyond conventional perception. Originally filmed for a 1930s BFI film series titled Secrets of Nature, the vine’s slow, searching motion, full of purpose and grace, is a mesmerizing sight to behold.

Cut to 2012, and the blurred abstraction of an interior space, split between darkness and light and framed through a yet-to-be-focused lens. The screen goes momentarily black, then the video camera’s wandering eye opens once more, passing over a wall, a window, to alight, finally, on Adnan’s face. In extreme close-up from the side, her metal eyeglass frames gleam in sharp relief upon the soft and blurry wrinkles of her skin, which then slowly emerge into clear focus for a single second before the camera cuts again. Soon she will begin to read, submerged within this intensely focused field, which reflects the poet’s own intent focus as she carefully enunciates her oceanic words.

Through a meticulously integrated pattern of such cuts between the filmic archive and Adnan on video, the camera returns again and again to this wide open aperture, which paradoxically narrows our focus to what lies at the centre of view, beyond which all else is blurred. The space in which we coexist with the poet is thereby compressed, foregrounding an exquisitely close reading of her gestures, textures, and text. It is through a similar compression, but on the axis of time rather than space, that we had been privy to that ghostly vision of the vine, with its own gestures, textures, and touch, normally invisibilized by the velocities of human life. Glimpsed within this tension between text and touch, as well as between plant and person, past and present, movement and stillness, silence and sound — between intimacy and infinity — are the latent or elusive still points where such distinctions become revealed as collapsible and ultimately illusory.

From behind now, we see the smooth nape of Adnan’s neck, framed by wisps of short silvery hair and the soft, vibrant orange sweater she wears for the occasion. Her slow, searching motion, full of purpose and grace, is a mesmerizing wonder to behold. Her singular voice breaks the silence, revealing it: “I see infinite distance between any point and another. That’s why time has to be eternal….”

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