The Impossibility of Remaining, Dir., Ed.: Paul Gabel 
Digital Video, 18 minutes, 1.33:1 aspect ratio, 2003.
       
When the picture opens, the viewer encounters a scene enveloped in 
darkness with only hints of speckled light to indicate the presence 
of space.  In these first few moments, the viewer is pulled into a 
state of waiting, where one wonders what – if anything – is happening 
or coming.  As the faint illumination forms into the spotlight and 
slowly shifts across the screen, the viewer now has their first 
glimpse of the subject: the detail of a corpse.The Impossibility of 
Remaining draws its interpretation from a selection of critical ideas 
addressed by Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.  
Their complex notions on truth, essence, death and disaster resonate 
here in a reoccurring scene, where a corpse is cryptically unveiled 
and re-veiled by the passing over of a moving spotlight. As the light 
makes its way across the corpse, the viewer will see at one moment, a 
partial wrist; the next, the side of a palm; the next, a combination 
of both; then a knuckle, a finger. When the spotlight exits the picture, 
the viewer is left back in darkness and at a point where the impending 
return of the scene is near. Sitting through the scene replays, the 
passing spotlight, and the incessant return of darkness, our translation, 
recognition and recollection of this corpse, becomes irrevocably disrupted.  
The interplay of these elements - in effect - brings our visual senses to 
their very limit.  
        
Before it is there, no one awaits it: when it is there, no one recognizes it: 
or it is not there – the disaster. 
~  Maurice Blanchot, from The Writing of the Disaster