by Sarah Treadwell and Paul Veart

Feral processes flourish in the haunted house in Beyond. Yoko discovers a dog ravenously eating and as it eats colour surges through its body. The drawing contours of the dog that indicate both animation and the fabricated aspect of the creature will be obliterated by a colour that becomes coded as evidence of life; food malevolently flushes the body with blackness. The linear drawing that signals drawing-as-animated, and drawing coded as not real, in this scene, becomes invested with drives, with temperament. The dog stares at Yoko who backs away. Its eyes are red, filled with the blood that will later leak from Yoko.

Hélène Cixous' story 'Stigmata, or Job the dog'¹⁸ is sited in Algeria after her father died, between the abject misery of an Arab quarter and a French neighbourhood. The dog Fips that she 'loved by force, according to the laws of captivity'¹⁹ is turned mad by stone throwing attacks on the house that occurred after the loss of her father's protection. 'We put the dog on a leash and tied the leash to a wire and the wire to an iron posts so he would not kill, we ourselves chained up our own incarceration, we ourselves put my father's heir in irons.'²⁰

The situation worsens with the child Cixous being bitten and the dog eventually dying. Cixous writes: 'I should have spoken to him, I should have, if I had been able to understand him but I thought him perhaps incapable of understanding for I was not then capable of understanding the profound animal humanity...'.²¹

In her story Cixous suggests that time was the problem; time, disjunctions and anachronisms; there was no time. The starving dog that wolfs down some undesirable food (drawn but barely there) seems to be making up for lost time, in its desperation evidence of some sort of failure in sustenance. Cixous asks, "What remains of a sheet of paper becomes a field of battle on which we, writing, drawing, have killed each other ourselves. A flagstone of paper under which a carnage effaces itself."²²

animated house, surface and ground

While the dog flushes with blackness the sound of crackling electricity indicates an anomaly in the house. A broken light bulb completes itself momentarily and the filament glows. As the electrical pulse fades the light dims and the broken bulb reappears. Electricity, as a form of nerve-signal, pulses intermittently through the body of the house, the same electrical current that Cixous finds between the viewer and drawings that seek the living of life.²³

Yoko goes into a dark corridor and, hearing a noise behind her, turns and sees the walls of the corridor delaminate. The pieces of wall (paper) hit her like bats. The unnerving effect extends to the floor on which Yoko sits. Both Yoko and the pieces of wall are made with the same drawing processes; they share the space of house and screen. The screen itself seems to digitally break down and pixilate as the papers sweep along. The sharp speed of the disintegrating walls is confirmation of Cixous' suggestion that 'acceleration is one of the tricks of intimidation'.²⁴

Conventional haunted house movies rely on a readily acceptable belief that spaces are emotionally charged by events that might be explained by a projection of memories and feelings. But in Beyond, rather than being simply alive or subject to projection, the house is undoing, shredding. Walls as rendered background (familiar, rounded) have become delineated, sharp pieces of drawing that move as a 'death passing'.²⁵

Ground that, in the dark corridor, was unstable with earthquake effects is, in the next sequence, doubled; an old pavement marked with an arrow is repeated and rotated. On this surface Yoko picks up and cuddles Yuki who unexpectedly growls like a very large tiger. On the doubled ground the cat plays with Yoko's detached shadow and a small girl, who may be Yoko herself at another time, plays alongside. Shadows may be dark death marks that cannot be illuminated but here carry the human/inhuman interface lightly, playfully. An interface that outlaws categorical purity for Cixous who leaves 'nothing of ...pre-classifications intact.'²⁶

Children in the haunted house play with gravity, making and unmaking a glass bottle. They dive towards the ground and stop poised above it as the tracking camera plunges with them. Despite the apparent lack of impact a nose bleeds. Yoko joins the children, as does a white dove. A feather hypnotically rotates before Yoko; she holds it briefly. At the same moment the cat chases the dove which flies up in front of Yoko. Time suddenly slows down and the bird is pictured as it laboriously climbs into the air. Whiteness descends and touches Yoko who falls sideways. Slowly and gently she lands, blissful pleasure evident; the viewer shares her spatial alignment.

In the story 'Writing Blind', Cixous writes; 'We all like to be to touch - to be touched. ... It is with emotion and nostalgia that I touch the soft and ferocious touch of my cat [mon chat ma chatte], the cat whose cat I am, and between us no appropriation only moments of grace, without guarantee, without security without a glance thrown towards the following moment. This is jouissance. All now.'²⁷

For Cixous drawing is not necessarily a visual act; 'The drawing wants to draw what is invisible to the naked eye.'²⁸ Rather than proposing drawing as simply haptic it seems that, like the touch of cat's fur on the back of the legs, drawing is an internal blind exploration - a moment of sympathetic felicity. Cixous draws in darkness and sees what is drawn in the light of day but the white fog in Beyond is a palpable light that touches but doesn't reveal.

Yoko knocks gently on the earth, 'Is anyone home?' To knock on the earth is to be a stranger who imagines the possibilities of homeliness. To be shut out, to live for the moment, is, however, pleasurable. 'All now', Yoko smiles. Jouissance is often figured as a sort of speed, an 'ecstatic flash of new meaning.'²⁹ But for Cixous speed is the antithesis of non-dominative thinking; Yoko falls slowly into pleasure. Speed returns in the film with the arrival of an extermination truck.