Body and representation

A few days ago I came across a video of Grace Jones song “Corporate Cannibal”. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgMn2OJmx3w

It made me think about the notion of “body” once again. (Although this is a music video not a film, I think its worth thinking on.) It distorts the image in such a fashion that the body becomes something else. It is almost liquified. The distortions are quite shocking at first but as we get used to them, it begins to create another effect. As we normalize the distorted body, we begin to see the synchronizations of the distortions with the beats and this alien, liquified body becomes “familiar”. Yet we still keep our distance to it since we cannot predict its actions. Boldly enough, the images gets closer and closer and at some point we only see fractions of Grace Jone’s mouth or eye. We are aware that there is actually a solid body in front of the camera but this feeling withers away after a while. This “liquified body” begins to represent its own distortion. This represents a realm we cannot experience. Still though we experience the effects of this body and its relation to us. From this point of view the distorted body (accompanied by strange and creepy words such as: “pleased to have you on my plate…your meet is sweet to me…”) looks quite annoying. The image of the body turns back to itself: now it only represents itself. The realm put before us is so sterile that our only reference is the distortion and the distorted body itself.

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