Speaking in the Breath You Gave Me: Place Belonging and Creation through Kogonada’s Columbus (2017)

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras Master en Estudios Ingleses Avanzados Speaking in the Breath You Gave Me: Place Belonging and Creation through Kogonada’s Columbus (2017) Cristina Suárez-Zarracina Sánchez Tutor: Jesús Benito Sánchez Departamento de Filología Inglesa 2022-2023 The work presented in this MA thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original and my own work, except as acknowledged in the text. The work in this thesis has not been submitted, either in whole or in part, for a degree at this or any other university. This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Advanced English Studies: Languages and Cultures in Contact to Universidad de Valladolid by Cristina Suárez-Zarracina Sánchez September 2023 Approved Dr. Jesús Benito Sánchez Resumen ¿Cómo pertenecemos a los lugares y cómo los creamos? Esta tesis es la respuesta a estas preguntas en un intento de hacer teoría. Es, a través de los prolongados planos de cámara fija, diálogos mínimos y silencio(s) de Columbus (2017) de Kogonada, la creación de un mythos del lugar (marco teórico) impregnado de la terminología espacial de de Certeau y Augé en el que definir las edades del ser (pertenecer al) del lugar y el lenguaje de su épica: cómo canta la creación del lugar en los código(s) del contexto cultural. Una epopeya de la existencia (del / en el lugar) y de la inexistencia: trazada en el aire con la punta de los dedos, grabada en la piel, tragada y escupida en silencio —en no-lugar(es), en aliento(s) entregado(s) a otros, al extranjero, al forastero, que los utilizará para escribir una mitología propia del lugar (códigos de creación de (no)lugar) para que resuene en la ausencia que hay detrás de su (no)pertenencia. Columbus (2017) es la respuesta audiovisual, como esta tesis es la textual, de que vivimos (pertenecemos a) y creamos lugares en el aliento que se nos da. Palabras clave: Lugar, No-lugar, Espacio, De Certeau, Augé, Teoría espacial, Infancia del lugar, Ser del lugar, Mythos del lugar, Columbus, Kogonada Abstract How do we belong to place(s), and how do we create them? This thesis is the answering of those questions in an attempt of theory making. It is, through the lingering, still-camera shots, minimal dialogues and silence(s) of Kogonada’s Columbus (2017), the creation of a place mythos (theoretical framework) permeated by de Certeau and Augé’s spatial terminology in which to define the ages of placer being (belonging) and the language of its epic: how it sings place creation in the code(s) of cultural contextuality. An epic of (place) existence, and inexistence: fingertip-traced in air, stuck into skin, swallowed and spat out in silence —in non-place(s), in breath(es) given to others, to the foreigner, to the stranger, who will use them to write a place self-mythology ((non)place creation codes) to echo in the absence behind their (non)belonging. Columbus (2017) is the audio-visual answer, as this thesis is the textual, that we live (belong) and create places in the breath that is given to us. Keywords: Place, Non-place, Space, De Certeau, Augé, Space theory, Place childhood, Place being, Place mythos, Columbus, Kogonada Acknowledgements This thesis owes its existence to many I would like to express my sincere gratitude to. To my supervisor, Dr. Jesús Benito Sánchez. Not only did he initiate me in the theories of space that permeate this humble attempt of theory making, but extended to it unconditional support, despite my academic unconventionality, my poetic prose, and my risky choices. Words cannot express my gratitude for his advice and guidance. To the University of Valladolid, institution that welcomed me to the Master to which this dissertation is ascribed. I will be forever in debt with your academics and staff. To Francisco José Borge López and Javier García Rodríguez back in my BA university, Oviedo, who introduced me to their great loves, literature and cinema, and made me fall for them too. This academic journey started with them. And to my parents, the ones who gave me the ‘breath’ I hope I am speaking right. Table of contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Chapter overview............................................................................................................ 2 2. Literature survey: De Certeau and Augé ............................................................................. 3 2.1 De Certeau. Walking Rethorics..................................................................................... 3 2.2 Augé. From Places to Non-Places................................................................................. 5 3. Contesting Spaces & (Non)Places ......................................................................................... 9 4. ‘Place childhood’, placers and the edge of ‘placer being’ ................................................ 12 4.1 The edge of ‘place childhood’.......................................................................................13 4.2 The edge of ‘place being’..............................................................................................14 4.3 Non-placers: failure of ‘place becoming’.....................................................................15 5. ‘Non-places’, ‘non-gods’ and ‘non-place initiation' .......................................................... 17 5.1 Non-places: finding/founding forbidden gods’ temples.............................................. 18 5.2 In-(non)place possession vs Carried-temple transportation....................................... 20 5.3 Speaking in the breath you gave me: (non-)places initiation...................................... 24 6. Conclusion............................................................................................................................. 29 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 30 Suárez-Zarracina 1 1. Introduction “You grow up around something, and it feels like nothing” (26:41-43, p. 16). That phrase stuck with me the first time I saw Kogonada’s Columbus (2017). It made me feel a pang of sadness, as absurd as it was when nothing about the character who said it, how he said it or when served to explain why I was feeling like mourning. There was nothing of mine in that phrase, in that movie set in a town of Indiana. A movie traversing the monumental Columbus of Saarinen, Polshek, Eames, Meier, Berke and the “messily beautiful, everyday” Columbus unimpressed by what surrounds it. Between a quirky, “architecture nerd” young woman, Casey, working in a library, looking after her recovering meth addict mother, avoiding the question of when she’s going to leave for college; a guarded and cynic middle-aged man, Jin, coming back from Korea to be with his ailing architect scholar father and yet never being by his bedside; and their walks around a city to which they are both tied: Casey in self-imposition by her loyalty (love) to her mother; Jin in inhibition by his coma-induced father’s expectations (Cooper, Leigh-Phippard, Leahey, Kapodaco). I did barely more than write down the phrase when that movie ended, as a kind of obituary to that unknown, and moved on. Whatever it was, it felt like a “knowledge that was going to remain silent”, “a story held in reserve” 1 because whatever took to invoke it, I did not know. That ‘whatever’ turned out to be ‘spaces’, ‘places’ in the terminology of Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984) and Marc Augé (Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1995). Their books gave me a language to shape the ‘nothing’ —of the lingering, still-camera shots that had felt “distorted, seemingly meaningless (albeit [beautiful])”; of the “minimal dialogues” that were as fleeting and ephemeral as the cigarettes 1 De Certeau 108 Suárez-Zarracina 2 fuelling them; of the “ambience, accompanied every so often by soft hums of technological echoes” (Kapodaco); of it all that seemed to hide what it spoke, the unknown I had to mourn, in ‘silence’— and make it ‘something’(see footnote12, p. 23): how we belong to place(s), and how we create (breathe/sing) them. 1.1 Chapter overview This subchapter acts as a guide to that place belonging and creation how. Chapter 2 (Literature survey: De Certeau and Augé) is devoted to introducing the statements of the ‘space/place forefathers’ that so strongly resonate in this : stories marking, opening places, haunting them as they haunt us, as they live encysted in our bodies, in our gestures, in the names we give them (de Certeau); contracts possessing, conferring anonymity, marking places where one exists without the burden of past existence(s) (Augé). Chapter 3 (Contesting Spaces & (Non)Places) is a contesting those statements and the first steps in my attempting of theory making. It is asking questions in/to de Certeaunian and Augéan terms and answering them in mine (that still are much of theirs). Answering that encysted knowledge (stories) does not authorize us; that what haunts places are not spirits but people; that not all place occupations are myth makers. Chapter 4 (‘Place childhood’, placers and the edge of ‘placer being’) is Columbus (2017) permeating (to never stop doing so) my own ‘place’ mythos. It is about place creation (breathing) and belonging, and the ages that permit or cancel those states. It is about placer being (placers), or its (n)ever existence: non-placers. Chapter 5 (‘Non-places’, ‘non-gods’ and ‘non-place initiation') is the continuation of the non-placer(s) epic, the (non)places where it is composed —temples that they have found, or rather that they have possessed, that they have carved in the absence they shape (see footnote 10, p. 20)— , and the language in which it is sang, in the ‘breath’ that it gives to those who want to sing it. Suárez-Zarracina 3 2. Literature survey: De Certeau and Augé 2.1 De Certeau. Walking Rethorics The city is the blank pages we fill with our footsteps. Where we walk in a poem we will never be able to read. Our paths moving, intersecting writings that compose “a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator” (De Certeau 93), shaped out like a fragment of the trajectories and alterations of space that is made by us, blind walkers. Made as we would do language. And it is that “[t]he act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language” (97), making it possible to draw from language’s theoretical apparatus concerning the speech act to start defining what the act of walking is to the urban system: At the most elementary level [the act of walking] has a triple “enunciative” function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the [walker] (just as the speaker appropriates [...] language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among (...) differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic "contracts" in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an "allocution," "posits another opposite" the speaker and puts contracts between interlocutors into action) (97-98). Language might be able to exist in isolation, but it is not until the speaker speaks it that it comes alive. The same happens to the city. Unless the blind walker, the down-below philosopher decides to walk, it does not exist. It is all about making possibilities exist as well as emerge. As we affirm, suspect, try out, transgress, respect (99) the language we actualize in secret (98) so we cross, drift away, improvise (98) in constant conjunctive loci ellipsis (101) our blind city making poetry. The city is a traffic pattern of self-mythology. It is mythos spelled out in disposed constellations that hierarchize and systematically order its surface (104), “operating chronological Suárez-Zarracina 4 arrangements and historical justifications” (104). “Meanings held in suspension” (104) — the believable, the memorable, the primitive: legend, memory, dream (105)— authorizing spatial appropriation from a silent and withdrawn memory. Its worn-like-coins star proper names emptying themselves in their directing itinerary (104) classifying power to make habitable or believable the place they word-clothe (105), recalling the phantoms concealed in gestures, in bodies, in motion (105), “creating in the place itself the nowhere that the law of the other carves out within” (105). “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits” (108), “broken into pieces” (108), not speaking any more than they see (105), their secrets embedded in the city places. Stories held in reserve (108). Silent knowledge to our blind poetry. Or rather, our blind poetry turned into unrevealed mysteries, “wordless stories” (106) that echo in our footsteps because we are walking the paths of past walkers. We walk the pasts of others until we too become past ourselves, until our city-making trajectories become breaths of urban odyssey. We move in stories. Their narrative structures, spatial syntaxes producing action geographies, making the journey before our feet perform it, creating the spaces about which we would tell in our travel epics (123-125). And places. In de Certeau’s walking mythos there is distinction between them: space (espace) and place (lieu): [P]lace is the order in accord with which elements are distributed in relationship of coexistence, […] thus exclud[ing] the possibility of two things being in the same location. […] [T]he elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own “proper” and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is an instantaneous configuration of positions, […] [and] indication of stability […] Space exists in the “intersections of mobile elements”. [It] occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function. [...] [S]pace is like the word it is spoken, [...] when it is caught in the ambiguity of actualization, Suárez-Zarracina 11 second geography that is not based on history —this sort of not-driven-by–intellectualfacts, mouth-to-mouth knowledge— is built in the present. In the “local legends”, in today’s “superstitions”, in what people tell other people (106): in fingers and mouth stained of raspberries in the secret meadow; in wet hair in the lake where someone almost drowned; in bloody knees in the euphoria after a test of courage; in swollen lips in the empty class(es) that smells of chalk and lemons; in the places where the most remarkable unremarkable things happened. “I exist(ed) here” someone says, and they are corporeal, there, your best friend covered in sweat and dirt; your older sister smelling of forbidden cigarettes and defiance; a stranger drunk on cheap wine and love. They tell you, and they become minor gods and you their priest(est): they confide to you their stories 6 so they can become myths. And there is this sort of ‘critical period’, whose duration I would not be able to truly define, when those people’s voices leave the places and it is all built anew. And sometimes it all defies that ‘critical period’. We keep echoing them, because we are stubborn, because we refuse to let them become silent —let them become ghosts. Ghosts we all carry the potentiality of becoming. As we can become priest(es)s of legends and superstitions, so can we become their birthing gods —because not all places have someone to initiate us. They stand there, empty (105), open for us to leave behind an epic with a built-in ending, a never-promised-to-be-followed be interchangeable) was due to the already existent Augéan place/non-place dichotomy, and the importance it has in my theoretical framework development. 6 Stories that can be left behind in more than voices: in handprints —hand stencils— and crimson dots in cave walls; in graffities in (Roman) wall plaster; in carvings of initials in tree bark; in writings in book margins. But the fact still remains that it is about living, breathing people. They are entitled to their present, and it will pass, and when it does, they will fade. Because they will cease to be understood, and when that is to happen, those carvings, those offerings left behind, will become ghosts —pasts that others are not capable of reading (108). Suárez-Zarracina 12 mythology. We can breathe our entire existence in place odysseys —suspecting, trying out, transgressing (99). But so can we breathe it in nothing givings —in keeping in line, going where we are told, checking our appearance (Augé 101). Not all place occupations are myth makers. Not when you do not want to play or threaten, challenge places (De Certeau 130). Not when you do not want to be place poet, down-below philosopher, blind walker. There are times when you want to be unimportant —to actualize in secret or not at all (98). To be subjected to a gentle form of possession, loose identity, role-play (Augé 103-105) as failure of a Wandersmänner (walker) rebel (De Certeau 93) —how can my walking be a revolution if my footsteps carry no defiance? If they are happy to follow the places’ 'instructions for use'? (Augé 96) To not run in the hallways, to not stay after dark, to not astray from the path, to wait, to listen: to be told what to do when nothing else seems to. It is those instructions, those make-upfor-narratives that have told me more on how to use places than my supposed encysted knowledge —than my supposed shared language/rethorics with my home people (Augé 77, 108)— has ever had (De Certeau 108) 4. ‘Place childhood’, placers and the edge of ‘placer being’ I never felt my encysted knowledge passing on its hints “just between [it] and me” (108); my home people engendering a social where I was present (Augé 111). It is easy to ignore — to hide— when you are a ‘non-initiated’, when it is okay for you to move as a mother’s child (De Certeau 109), a place child: gambolling, on all four, dancing, walking about, with a light or heavy step, like a series of “hellos” in an echoing labyrinth, anterior or parallel to place singing (99). Place children are not expected to sing places, they are sung to/for them: in familiar hands guiding tiny ones in the right one(s) of the thousand place possibilities; in paternal Suárez-Zarracina 13 arms picking up bleeding-in-dirt-and-blood knees from wrong place usages; in motherly digits brushing sand, and saltwater and sunscreen to write place codes in tanned skin; in palm reprimands to place instruct blushing cheeks and painting-from-running bodies; in freckled fingers peppering place cues in lips that would speak them with no air —no place child air. 4.1 The edge of ‘place childhood’ And then there is the edge of place childhood, when those arms, those hands, those digits stop leaving marks on the place child’s body in a rite of passage 7 —“the inscription of the body in the order’s text” (De Certeau 130). One from which the place child is to come out wiser, knowing their elders’ place passwords: they will breathe, they will sing ‘place(s)’ in their “symbolic outlets and expectations of [places]” —they have been inscribed in the place codes and those codes have been inscribed on them (130). They will leave behind their place child existence and become placers. And placers know that at fourteen their world are the shortcuts from home to school, the back of cars, the seats of public buses; that at fifteen words taste like smuggled cigarettes, dark coffee, messy kisses; that at sixteen bodies move in pleasure (130), loud and unapologetic, in parties and one-night runaways; that at seventeen existence is in unfinished 7 “According to [Van Gennep’s] system, any rite of passage has three basic moments: first, separation (from the old state), next, a marginal phase during which the individual's status hangs between the old and new, finally, a period of admission (to the new status) and of reintegration” (Calame 33). The “old state” finds its analogous in that of place childhood, of place child, but the marginal phase and “new status” overlap, if not reverse order, in placer initiation. There is no ‘marginal phase’ after the rite of passage: the individual wholly joins the new order of its elders, already holder of their “sacred gestures and words” (35) —already holder of place breathing (creation) and understanding. It is the fully fledged placer that undergoes their “uprooting” from “life within the family”, their being pushed “outside the home” (33) that defines the ‘marginal phase’ (see 4.2 The edge of ‘place being’). Suárez-Zarracina 14 assignments, in 24/7 open markets, in energy drinks; that at eighteen, the “expectations of [places]” (130) is leaving (Fig. 1) 4.2 The edge of ‘place being’ Eighteen is the edge of placer being. Is the age of packing boxes, of leaving home(towns), of going to college 8 . Of feeling ‘nothing’ about everything you have grown up around because there is ‘nothing’ in the (home) order’s text for placers at the edge of eighteen (130). The elders’ place passwords stop working and all that can be gotten from the place song(s) is static: the symbolic outlets and expectation(s) become a “suspended symbolic order” (106). And it pushes, pushes placers out (“I mean, I can't imagine coming back here”, 20:20-22, emphasis added). Placers that cannot breathe places ‘here’, ‘home’ anymore —no more than the short stays windows, only-for-a-week-time beings (19:45) in which they are allowed the place children’s indulgence(s): to exist in the not-by-them created places, to pretend placeness. Placers breathed places are ‘out there’ (“I'll probably end up staying out there”, 20:17-19, emphasis added) (Fig. 1). 8 This speaks in an American (United States) context. The edge of placer being, or its (n)ever existence, originates in cultural contextuality. Suárez-Zarracina 15 [EMMA] Hi. I was hoping to see you. [CASEY] Yeah, when did you get back? [EMMA] Oh, just a few days ago. I'm only here for a week. (...) My roommates and I, we're getting an apartment this year. It's gonna be so fun. We're all flying in early to set it up. [CASEY] Wow, it sounds great. [EMMA] Yeah, I can't wait. (...) [CASEY] Yeah. Um, and school, how is that going? [EMMA] I love it. Sophomore year was even better. LA is amazing. It already feels like home. I'll probably end up staying out there. [CASEY] Yeah. [EMMA] I mean, I can't imagine coming back here. Maybe Chicago. What about you? When are you leaving? [CASEY] Uh, to where? [EMMA] To school. To anywhere. [CASEY] Oh, I like Columbus. [EMMA] C'mon, Casey. [CASEY] No, I do. Fig. 1· Columbus (2017) · 19:28 - 20:37 script’s pp. 10-11 [emphasis added] 4.3 Non-placers: failure of ‘place becoming’ But there are placers who have never been able to breathe places ‘here’, ‘home’: because instead of coming out wiser of the edge of place childhood —their body inscripted in the order’s text (De Certeau 130)— they come out ‘deaf’, ‘broken’: they cannot place hear nor sing anything. They are a “failure of presence” (of place becoming): they are nothing when they should be something (Fisher 27) —non placers: placers who come out of the edge of place childhood already at the edge of place being. And they turn fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, but they never stop knowing anything more than they did at two, at five, twelve, fourteen years old —and the thing about places is that they are tied to ‘age’ (acting one’s place age), and physically they never stop existing but in placeness, in placeness they do: there is no longer place for them (see Ponto). Suárez-Zarracina 16 So, the non-placers go to placers’ places and they drink and dance and party and kiss and smoke to be breathed their (right) place possibilities, their placing usages, their place codes, their place cues; to carry them in bruised knuckles, in smudged eyeliner, in love bites, in bloody noses, in cigarette burns, in swollen lips, in cheap piercings, in nasty tattoos. In memorized facts (Fig. 2, Fig. 3). Non-placers sing in a language they do not understand: they carry the codes, and might be able to ‘speak’ in places, but those places are lost in translation —they are conceived by it— and they will never be places. But without place words of their own (non-placers speak in non-words) all they have is repeating, memorizing the words of placers. They become arbiters of titbit facts, verbal performers of impressively long inventories of self-same language, place mythologists, story keepers, applied historians (Cooper). Because if they cannot sing place(s), they will (mindlessly) echo them, familiar spiel practiced and/or given to the point of it background-noisebecoming (Fig. 2, Fig. 3). Fig. 2“First Christian is considered… one of the first modernist churches in America… … In the United States. Designed by Eliel Saarinen, and Christians consider… Notice how the cross and the doors… and the clock are all off-center. This design, Saarinen's design, is asy… Saarinen's design is asymmetrical… yet still remains balanced” Columbus (2017) · 02:25 - 03:18 · script p. 1 Suárez-Zarracina 17 Fig. 3 Placer (Eleanor) speaking place words | Non-placer (Casey) speaking memorized facts Columbus (2017) · 1:10:53-59 (p.39) | 1:31:29-36 (p.51) [emphasis added] [ELEANOR] The table that mimics the one outside. [JIN] Where's the fountain... [ELEANOR] Inside. [JIN] On the table… [CASEY] And there's a fountain that shoots up... in the middle of the dining table... and it sort of mimics the fountain out in the backyard. [JIN] Oh, yeah. [CASEY] Yeah. 5. ‘Non-places’, ‘non-gods’ and ‘non-place initiation' Background noise they too end up becoming. In their impossibility of place breathing, in being repeating their only place creating capacity, there is so much they can sing before their voices become unimportant, forgettable. After all they are just lost-in-translation imitations that would not make up for the places they cannot create, in whose singer would choke on before they give them placer being. Non-placers pray in altars dedicated to gods that would never Suárez-Zarracina 18 answer them —they might call on the mythos to the point of screaming, and there would be nothing but silence. Non-placers inhabit in temples (places) that will never be theirs (but of their elders, of those initiated that would extend their possession/creation as done to place children), as would never be placeness. Non-placers live borrowed placer existences made from the echoes of others. Echoes that fill the silence where their place(s) are, their god(s) are: the non-places. 5.1 Non-places: finding/founding forbidden gods’ temples Fig. 4“In the middle of all the mess, in this fucking strip mall... there was this…” Columbus (2017) · 50:03 - 50:09 · script p. 29 “I want to show you something” (43:40-43, p. 26). I want to show you the glow of fluorescents at not-even-midnight; the straight lines of channel glass perpendicular to brick (Benson); the thing that made me jump back in the car and drive up here; the number 3 on my list; my Deborah Berke (and architecture)’s obsession igniter; the building that “was the beginning for me” (44:12-13, p. 26). Suárez-Zarracina 19 This scene, right in the middle of the film, is vulnerability shivering around cigarette smoke (Ingman). It is a girl wanting to show someone the building where, “[i]n the middle of all the mess” (50:03, p. 29), she found her secret, forbidden god(s): her non-place(s), her “this…” (Fig. 4). And they speak in feel; in lines traced with burning cigarettes; in shaping the air (Benson, Ingman); in silence. Silence that is the emptying of the ‘rhetorical’ territory (Augé 77): (44:22) [JIN] And you didn't know anything about it? (44:24) [CASEY] Nothing. (45:07) [JIN] What was it? (45:11) [CASEY] Not sure. All Casey can give Jin is diffuseness. She does not really want to talk about it, she just wanted him to see (46:25-28, p. 26) —I want to ‘show’ you, because I cannot ‘tell’ you: telling needs words, and words are of place(s). The place would ask for the “lost stories and opaque acts” (De Certeau 107), for the “suspended symbolic” (106) of the fleeting glimmers of its silent knowledge and “pasts that others are not allowed to read” (108). The non-place asks for “nothing” (44:24). Because it is so fleetingly, temporarily and ephemerally unconcerned with the precedential (78): with “story-spirit[s]”, with buried-founding fragments 9 (125), with completing language/word(s), with conniving passwords (Augé 77). Those mean nothing in the nothing of the non-place “prophetic” abyss (87). The mythos, the space narratives, the “ancient rhythms” (77) pushed so there is only you. As if the non-place(s) (gods) eerily cooed “[t]he only face to be seen, 9 Stories found —authorize— spaces/places. Like in reverse, they paint, in the invisible, mystic word, the echoes of footsteps that would follow in the world of man. “[A] (...) repetition before the actual representation” (De Certeau 124), an ancient ritual (125) that creates the walking (rethorics) fields. But I reject this. How can stories that would forever be “silent”, “that others are not allowed to read” be the stage directions “encysted” in the bodies of knowledge-blind walkers? (97, 93) How can I be authorized when I would never be told what I am ‘authorized to'? Suárez-Zarracina 20 the only voice to be heard, in [our] silent dialogue” (90) is yours. And it is so “weirdly comforting” (49:58-9, p. 29). The non-place becomes this baring emptiness, raw and unassuming; this “gentle form of possession” to exist, “somewhere else”, “in the silence of form and moment of structure” (Ingman), without “determinants” (Augé 103) —“[s]uddenly the place I'd lived my whole life felt different... like I had been transported somewhere else” (50:47-52, p. 30) [emphasis added] (Fig. 5) —; this space to talk to your god(s) in hands, in gestures (Ingman). It becomes these (invisible, modern-architecture) temples that you find, or rather that you possess, that you carve in the absence they shape 10 . 5.2 In-(non)place possession vs Carried-temple transportation Casey carries the temples she possesses. As she carved their lines in air (Benson, Ingman), they transferred their existence into her fingertips, into her hands, sticking to her skin like the smell of nicotine. Her temples will follow her. Ready to, “[w]hen the world becomes too much — when words become too much” (Benson), when she brings them back home (Goldberg), imprint themselves in the emptiness, and transport her back to her forbidden god(s), to her non-place(s) (Fig. 5) The messiness of her relationship with her mother (...) [informs her response] to architecture. And this particular kind of architecture, which is minimal and which is about empty spaces, resonates with her in a way that she doesn’t [understand]. (...) She knows she’s responding to it in many ways, that it’s creating a space for her to process. [And in] 10 “If you deal with presence and absence, the thing about architecture is it shapes absence,” says Kogonada. “It shapes space. Without it, those spaces are invisible. They’re always there, but we can’t feel them.” (Feldberg) Suárez-Zarracina 27 Jin stands in the front of the building, and he asks Casey’s permission (“Can I tell you something?”, 36:47-8, p. 21) to show her what she has shown him: “this is what your “silent dialogues” look like, Casey. This is how they sound like”. He is so eager to prove himself Fig. 9 Casey speaks in her god(s)’s silence in hands, in gestures, “tracing in the air the lines of the form of the building, caressing the imaginary slopes” (Ingman); “miming the [shapes] of the structure in front of her” (Leigh-Phippard); “replicat[ing] the feel of the form in the imaginary space” (Ingman) Fig. 8 Jin carrying Casey’s non-god(s) talking signature Suárez-Zarracina 28 to her, to speak right in the breath she gave him. She lets him. She lets him tentatively carve/possess his first temple, shape his own breath, choose the sound of his silence (water) — talk to/about one of her non-gods/non-places in a voice that is not hers: “He had this idea, Polshek did, of architecture being this sort of healing art,” Jin comments. Polshek believed that architecture “had the power to restore. And that architects should be responsible.” “All the details of this building are mindful of that responsibility,” he continues, “especially since it was a structure for mental health. This building was meant to be both a literal and metaphoric bridge.” (Cooper) In a self-mythology different to the one she wrote to echo in the absence (behind their nonplacer becoming that) her architecture (her temples) shape. Hers is of a loyal daughter who cannot save her mother; of a young woman who drives in the middle of the night to cry in strip malls; of a girl who could never be sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen that is so angry and so lonely. His, of an architecture scholar’s son expected to stay until his father dies; of a man who convinces himself he hates the buildings that move him; of a boy whose father never paused his life for him. The (non)place is handed over to the foreigner, the stranger, to Jin (De Certeau 129). He who was never guided by familiar hands, picked up by paternal arms, written passwords on by maternal digits, palm reprimanded, clue peppered in fingers in the place codes of Columbus. Codes in which he would never be inscribed, which he would never have in him inscribed — there would never be a place rite of passage for him (see Chapter 4). And yet he would breathe places because Columbus is his placer ‘out there’. But those places will taste of the cigarettes, of the words spoken to non-gods, of the silence of his place elders substitute, of the priestess of his initiation: they will carry the breath Casey gave him —as she will carry his. Casey was not the only one dragging cigarette smoke (breath) to be swallowed, leaving imprints in skin. Jin was too, giving her the place words of the ‘out there’ (where he comes from) through all their Suárez-Zarracina 29 conversations: if we could hear Casey, if her talking had ‘words’ as opposed to the no(n) words when she was alone in her non-places, the silence in the bank scene was because she had started speaking in ‘out there’ places —in Jin’s. Like they were trading existences. They do. Casey leaves and Jin stays. She, occupying the space he leaves outside Columbus; him, taking possession of hers inside it. 6. Conclusion We start with borrowed (place) existences, (place) children, with belonging in places and creating them being done for us, arms, hands, digits leaving marks in our bodies as we gambol, on all four, dance, walk about the places of our elders. Places we will fully understand and breathe (create) at the edge of our place childhood, as we exist as placers in the back of cars, in parties, in the places we can act our place age until we run out of them. Because we will stop being able to breathe them, our place mythos useless, at the edge of ‘place being’: we will stop belonging ‘home’, in ‘here’; and start belonging ‘out there’ —we trade place(r) existences. But sometimes there is no place(r) existence to trade. Sometimes there are placers who have never been so, that the only place creating capacity they have ever had is repeating. Repeating the place words, the words of placers, in lost-in-translation imitations that would not make up for the places they-cannot create, in whose singer would choke on before they give them placer being. Their place existence is in the echoes of others, echoes that fill the silence where their place(s) are: the non-places. Places where they speak their own (non)words (silences, gestures), where they breathe (create). They breathe a breath that can be given to others, to the foreigner, to the stranger. To those they will initiate where placers would not, to those with whom they would trade existences to occupy their places in their respective ‘out theres’. Suárez-Zarracina 30 Works Cited Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. 1995. Benson, Hannah. “Looking up: Architecture’S Ability to Soothe the Spirit in Kogonada’s ‘Columbus’” Film Daze, 25 July 2020, filmdaze.net/looking-up-architectures-ability-to-soothe-the-spirit-in-kogonadascolumbus. Bowen, Chuck. “Review: Columbus.” Slant Magazine, Oct. 2020, www.slantmagazine.com/film/columbus. Calame, Claude. “Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Roles, and Social Functions - the Center for Hellenic Studies.” The Center for Hellenic Studies, 7 Mar. 2021, nrs.harvard.edu/urn3:hul.ebook:CHS_Calame.Choruses_of_Young_Women_in_Ancient_Greece.2001. Chen, Nick. “Columbus Is a Movie About Architecture That Is, Somehow, Mesmerising.” Dazed, Oct. 2018, www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/41707/1/columbus-kogonadafilm-john-cho-interview. Columbus. Directed by Kogonada, Depth of Field, Nonetheless Productions and Superlative Films, 2017. Cooper, Travis Warren. “Kogonada’s Urban Neorealism.” Film Criticism, vol. 44, no. 1, Michigan Publishing, Mar. 2020, https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0044.105. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Univ of California Press, 1984. Dunham, Brent. “Match Cuts & Creative Transitions With Examples – Editing Techniques.” StudioBinder, Jan. 2021, www.studiobinder.com/blog/match-cuts-creativetransitions-examples. Suárez-Zarracina 31 Elsaesser, Thomas, and Warren Buckland. Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis. Bloomsbury Academic, 2002. Fandor. “SFX Secrets: The Graphic Match Cut.” YouTube, 18 June 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2ixDyItm04. Feldberg, Isaac. “Nothing Doing: Kogonada on the Space Between • Journal.” Letterboxd, 29 Sept. 2022, letterboxd.com/journal/nothing-doing-kogonada-after-yang. Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. 2017, my-blackout.com/2018/06/08/mark-fisher-theweird-and-the-eerie. Goldberg, Peter. “Interview: Kogonada Talks Columbus, Formalism, Ozu, & More.” Slant Magazine, Aug. 2017, www.slantmagazine.com/film/interview-kogonada-talkscolumbus-formalism-ozu-more. Guy, John. “What Is the Chorus in Greek Tragedy?” Great Books Guy, 18 Oct. 2022, greatbooksguy.com/2019/03/28/what-is-the-chorus-in-greek-tragedy. Ingman, Bethan. “In the Middle of All This Mess - Bethan Ingman - Medium.” Medium, 19 Feb. 2022, bethaningman.medium.com/in-the-middle-of-all-this-mess-8db9f0a0d22a. Kapodaco. “A Real Review of Columbus (2017).” The Visualist’s Veranda, 10 Apr. 2021, kapodaco.blog/2021/04/09/a-real-review-of-columbus-2017. Laird, Emily E. “Everything Goes on During ‘Alive Time’s’; the Influence of Michelangelo Antonioni on Emotional Representation in Cinema.” Medium, 15 Apr. 2018, medium.com/@TheFilmJournal/everything-goes-on-during-alive-times-the-influence-ofmichelangelo-antonioni-on-emotional-274b49fe438e. Leahey, Ryan, and Ryan Leahey. “Columbus Movie Spotlights Indiana City’s ‘Modernism With a Soul.’” Dezeen, 8 July 2020, www.dezeen.com/2017/09/01/columbus-moviespotlights-indiana-city-modernism-kogonada. Suárez-Zarracina 32 Leigh-Phippard, Daisy. “The Shape of Space: Architecture and the Observer in Columbus.” Screen Queens, 23 Apr. 2019, screen-queens.com/2019/04/23/architecture-and-theobserver-in-columbus. Mercer, Nick. “Michelangelo Antonioni: Looking Into the Void.” Suss-sg, May 2014, www.academia.edu/4960570/Michelangelo_Antonioni_Looking_into_the_Void. Mythos - Wiktionary, the Free Dictionary. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mythos#:~:text=Borrowed%20from%20Late%20Latin%20m%C 8%B3thos,from%20mythos%20%2B%E2%80%8E%20-es. Ponto, Heli Johanna and University of Helsinki. Young People’s Everyday Lives in the City: Living and Experiencing Daily Places. 2017, researchportal.helsinki.fi/fi/publications/young-peoples-everyday-lives-in-the-cityliving-and-experiencing-. Rohdie, Sam. Antonioni. British Film Inst, 1990. Sandin, Gunnar. “Dealing With Non-place in Exploitation, Belonging and Drifting.” Nordic Journal of Architectural Research / Nordisk Arkitekturforskning, vol. 12, no. 2, Jan. 2003, pp. 67–85. arkitekturforskning.net/na/article/view/275. Suárez-Zarracina Sánchez, Cristina, editor. “Columbus Movie Script.” scripts.com, docs.google.com/document/d/1VXcSQ9jguT4Ie7IcF3t1ZjPb0DWb8dNog94rUOj8ntY/e dit?usp=drive_link. unedited script url: https://www.scripts.com/script/columbus_5779