Expressive Content and Mise-en-Scene: Desire and Lack in Bill Viola’s Ascension

The story of persistent memory and a futile chase for a freedom long lost.

Bill Viola’s visual text Ascension, at just under 2 minutes long, is a poignant testament to his desire for a time past, and his knowing that such experience cannot be manufactured. In a text so purposefully crafted, from its lighting and shot; what it uses and does not; from subject matter to sound, context is key to understanding. In order to interpret Bill Viola’s Ascension as a story of desire to relive a memory he knows cannot be recreated, I utilize context to gain a deeper understanding of its expressive content and subsequently deconstruct his mise-en-scene.

Context and Expressive Content

When Bill Viola was six years old, in the mountains on a family camping trip, he jumped in a lake and nearly drowned (Kidell 20:08-21:13). This experience was not fear-engendering to Viola, and rather was experienced as a unique and existential calm:

I saw the most beautiful world I had ever seen in my life….

It was like paradise….

One of the most peaceful moments of my whole life….

I didn’t want to come up

(Kidell 20:08-21:13)

Key to our interpretation of Viola’s Ascension is how pivotal a moment his near-death experience was, and how due to this he seemingly desires a return to its’ peaceful nature.

Expressive content is the aesthetic or atmosphere of the image: the “combined effect of subject matter and visual form” (Taylor 1957: 43-44). Knowing what we know now about the context surrounding this text, the subject matter of Ascension is Viola’s vain attempt to recreate his drowning– a return to his moment of ultimate peace. The visual form as video of physically submerging himself underwater reinforces the claim by showing in the explicit a (albeit drastically contextually different) physical recreation of the experience.

Mise-en-Scene

Viola’s mise-en-scene and its many components illuminate our interpretation of Ascension. Mise-en-Scene, “a result of decisions about what to shoot and how to shoot it” (Rose 2001: 73), will now be deconstructed through light, lack, and sound.

Ascension demonstrates chiaroscuro, an artistic practice of stark contrast between light and dark, often illuminating foreground to create a focal point and dramatic effect (Chiaroscuro 2024). In the placement of spotlight directly above and solely illuminating Viola we are shown overtly that he is the focal polemic. This focus is underscored by a full shot distance and a closed frame, refusing to allow for influence from outside the physical shot.

The background is a black monochrome, a lack of. What does this lack mean? Given Viola’s descriptions of plants, animals, and vibrant marine life during his drowning, one would expect a recreation as such to include the same. However it is telling that Viola chose not to include manufactured recreation of marine life. He is letting us know from the lack of props, of alternative light sources, of any focus but himself, that this is not the same as that peace-in-water he has been romanticizing for decades. This is a remedial attempt to feel the same peace, whilst knowing that experience cannot be manufactured, and art cannot mirror memory.

Tertiarily, we examine sound. Ascension has only one sound: a reverberating crash of breaking water surface. Viola uses parallel, environmental sound; from the real recording and kept in time (Monaco 2009: 238). His non-inclusion of music and speech sound forms cements there is no intent for artificial recreation, and that the essence of this shot is the action itself.

From the expressive content, which viewed through a contextual lens shows Viola’s nostalgic desire of his childhood drowning to the mise-en-scene which shows a focus on Viola, a tragic story is told. Viola shows us that he is the only focus of the story– the sole and centrally-framed object of enlightenment. Behind him lies a void where once lived fish; plants; thriving foreign ecosystems. And far from the stillness of his childhood lake, there is one booming noise– Viola’s crash into the water, which leads not to drowning but inevitable flotation. With his non-inclusion of external elements, Viola is showing us that Ascension, as the title suggests, is a story of his ascending, regardless of desire to remain. It is a story of a man in water who has to go up despite the boy who remains descended. This boy exists only in memory which Viola can chase but never recreate. It is precisely this desire to realize memory where Viola finds lack. It is in desire’s lack where Viola finds ascension.

Works Cited

Monaco, James. How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond (4th Edition). Oxford University Press, 2009.

“Chiaroscuro: Art Technique”. The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, 2024. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/chiaroscuro

Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. SAGE Publications, 2001.

Taylor, Joshua. Learning to Look: A Handbook for the Visual Arts. Phoenix Books, 1957.

The Eye of The Heart. Directed by Mark Kidell, performance by Bill Viola. Calliope Media; British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); ARTE France, 2003.