6 kontinents on the earth: the two americas, afrika, eurasia, antarctica & australia. Or it could be another way: amerika, afrika, europe, asia, antarctica & australia. Or: afro-eurasia, along with the one amerika & the rest. Of all the variations the two kontinents always included are antarctica & australia. Those countries in power, the 'first world' occidental countries that have chartered the maps and spanned the globe with colonizations, insist on 7 kontinents. It has been settled by a consensus that the 7th continent is nearly always australia; but this is arbitrary. The 7th continent, nameless, could also stand for the vast and icy wastelands of antarctica; in other words, it is not settled at all, it is a phantom occurrence that may or may not take place in the physical world.
A family goes through a series of motions, year in, year out. Nothing changes except the realisation that nothing changes. A husband, a wife, their young daughter.
One day the daughter believes herself to be going blind.
She is lying, but she is also seeing something else unseen. A country in the distance, undiscovered.
The family likes to go for a carwash. In their car they wait motionlessly, silently watch the jets of water and soap, the frightening halfsnuff of light caused by the stready onslaught of rotating brushes. They are not driving, but the car lurches along on the conveyor, slowly onward toward a dream that dies behind them: upon exiting the automatic carwash they drive past a travel ad of australia.
We are not sure whether they see it or not, but two years later they declare to strangers that they're leaving for australia. They liquidate everything they own.
They lived two years of their life onscreen methodically. Their memories are mainly those of the television: pop songs of the 80s, the commonplaces of work and dinner gettogethers, the strange eruption of tears by the visiting uncle.
They remember seeing by the roadside the dead bodies, covered in plastic and raindrops and the red siren lights of the police cars, of a couple that died in a freeway car crash.
Their lives were a series of gestures they were unaware of: the exact placement of objects within the frame - the alarm clock that wakes them promptly at 6am, the toothbrush & toothpaste, the shower, clothes put on, the kitchenware laid out, records put away, newspaper spread out, the fish in the tank that are to be fed daily - their composition and decomposition through a methodology of pure habit. Going to work and returning; sitting in school and standing up. The ineffaceable silence of the car ride.
Their lives were a series of objects placed in a specific order. When they decide to destroy their lives, they do so by 'systematically' destroying their objects; despite this resolve, they do not manage to find liberation, for they destroy the objects that made up their lives in the same precise order that had controlled their lives. It was the emptiness of the order that oppressed their lives, not the emptiness of the objects that filled them.
Elliptical shots that in their monotony produce a rhythm of inventory and despair. Their despair is quiet because they are unaware of it:
'...the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.'
The moviegoer knows this, that when he gazes on the screen that shows a suicided family gazing on the static of the television, they are as ever living as they had been when they were alive - as dead to thought as thought was to them; but staring out from the blank eyes of death they finally see the 7th kontinent.
The 7th kontinent is Hamlet's undiscovered country; it is fleshly Ivan Illyich sunk in an armchair;
The 7th kontinent is death.
...
NOTES: cf. the end of Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point"; shots taken from Bresson's "L'argent"
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