Video installation honors grandmother

“The Vigil”

Doug DuBois

April 4th

Pittsburgh Filmmakers Galleries

477 Melwood Ave

(412)… “The Vigil”

Doug DuBois

April 4th

Pittsburgh Filmmakers Galleries

477 Melwood Ave

(412) 681-5449

On the eve of her 92nd birthday, Doug Dubois’s grandmother sits on her back porch in a denim dress, playfully objecting to being videotaped. Behind her toothy smile, she’s all wrinkled skin. Filming, Dubois tells his grandmother that she has to look at the camera for a full 30 seconds without looking away. He gently teases her each time she forgets. She giggles, her face a wonderful mass of folds when she replies, “That’s long hours,” in a thick, Western Pennsylvania accent.

Meanwhile, on the two walls to the left and right of the one on which this video is being shown are corresponding shots of the woman’s knees in a polka-dotted dress as she flips through a photo album on the table in front of her. She points to photos and says who is who and what is what. Dubois periodically asks her to turn the page.

In “The Vigil,” a three-channel video installation, with an accompanying six-channel audio mix, Doug Dubois introduces his grandmother during the last pages of her life. Different views and focuses of the same scene, often in extreme close-up, with overlapping and interfering sound, create an overwhelmingly involved emotional experience. Dubois captures a sense of his grandmother’s spunky personality and his loving interest in her long life. But he also makes manifest a sense of the extreme longing and sorrow when he shows abstract footage of her last days in the hospital.

For what is probably only three minutes but what feels like an eternity, Dubois confronts us with a close-up of a hospital blanket on the main wall — the other walls display two analogous, yet out-of-focus shots from different angles. Something moves slowly back and forth under the covers as a rhythmic wheeze-moan sound is heard at an invasive volume. It’s like we’re hearing his grandmother’s assisted moaning/gasping breaths from inside her chest. It goes on and on with disturbing regularity and difficulty. It’s eerie, ominous and shockingly real.

The process of juxtaposing scenes like this, where we barely see Dubois’s grandmother but rather hear her labored breathing, with scenes where she smiles with liveliness and converses with her grandson, conveys the disquieting effects that looming death has on even our most beloved and seemingly unconquerable family members. There is a sense of cool detachment about the abstracted hospital scenes. They seem to point to the idea of one quietly resigning to grief and separating oneself from the harshness of inevitability, even before the book is closed.

Dubois frames his looping video with two photographs. In “My Grandmother points to her old house,” from 1990, we barely see the blurred side of the old woman’s face as she extends a fleshy arm and curled hand toward the rain-soaked passenger window of a vehicle. Beyond the sharp, central diagonal of the windshield’s frame stands a modest white house. The ideas of “passenger” and “old house” speak to the video installation’s emotionally stirring look at the digression of life’s vitality, and the perseverance of memory and love, in death.