In the Manner of Smoke

Reverie and observation forge relations among a fire lookout in California and a landscape painter in London. With a concern for how media technology impacts representations of forest fires and the experience of witnessing with one’s own eyes.

“There is reality in the film image, but reality at a remove”, writes Gilberto Perez in The Material Ghost. “While reality contributes impact and conviction, it’s the remove that allows form and meaning to work their artifice on the things represented.” What better place for a film than a watchtower?  Here, Armand Yervant Tufenkian takes inspiration from his own experience as a fire lookout in the Sequoia National Forest in California. Made between 2018 and 2025, In the Manner of Smoke takes the form of one of the smoke reports sent to the emergency communications centres when a potential fire is spotted. Narrated by a voice speaking over a radio, the film intertwines a documentary on a fire lookout, Kathy, who traces the black trails of the devastating 2015 “Rough Fire” on the photos taken from their station known as Delilah; a collaboration with English painter Dan Hays, who reproduces these images in his London studio in a neo-impressionist, pointillist style; and an auto-fiction where the narrator revisits his experience as a lone watchman, his shaky gaze seemingly in turn under observation, caught in a paranoid narrative style to which Hollywood has accustomed us, but also, replacing naked-eye observation with digital fire prevention devices, pointing up the reality of a post-digital world. What led him there is the desire to devote his life to watching a motionless horizon of potentialities. Perhaps, like Kathy, who features in a newspaper article titled “Grieving in the Lookout”, this narrator ends up caught between dread and omens, with a desire for smoke. But smoke is surely what has made it possible to find distance and depth in the flatness of images, since the sfumato of De Vinci?

Antoine Thirion