On the other hand, this is not my voice. It's the voice of Yuri Stepanov, an actor who doesn't have a Siberian accent. But neither do I. I lost mine long ago.¹

In these lines of 336 PEK it seems as if Joao Penalva is about to reveal his true identity as the author of the film's text. Teasingly, he veers back to his fictional persona at the last moment having said just enough to allow us to glimpse the tensions underlying the script. Earlier, the narrator told us that 'To be incognito was to me the noblest of ways to live ... You take precautions not to be discovered ... you can be incognito also if your mission is of the highest order...'

Taken together, all of these statements point to the elusiveness of the artist and to a particular approach to the process of making work. The sense of creative release to be found in anonymity and the deliberate abnegation of the self at first seem to run counter to the western image of the artist as a highly refined persona. Yet, there is a more complex tradition within which Penalva's stance can be understood. Theatrical history from Greek drama onwards posits the mask as a device for speaking the unspeakable and for escaping the limitations of self, a concept that also underpins the very notion of acting - the pretence of being someone else while delivering lines written by an unseen playwright. Within this context, the voice - a symbol of individuality - can become an expressive instrument which transcends personal traits to communicate something more universal. Roland Barthes, attempting to describe this phenomenon in his classic essay, 'The Grain of the Voice' writes

Listen to a Russian bass (a church bass - opera is a genre in which the voice has gone over in its entirety to dramatic expressivity, a voice with a grain which little signifies): something is there, manifest and stubborn (one hears only that), beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form (the litany), the melisma, and even the style of execution: something which is directly the cantor's body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages, and from deep down in the Slavonic language, as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings. The voice is not personal: it expresses nothing of the cantor, of his soul; it is not original (all Russian cantors have roughly the same voice, and at the same time it is individual: it has us hear a body which has no civil separate body. Above all, this voice bears along directly the symbolic, over the intelligible, the expressive: here, thrown in front of us like a packet, is the Father, his phallic stature. The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly significance.²

Barthes acknowledges the physical imprint of the voice and the impact of the individual's body. The personality of the singer, however, disppears beneath the structure of the composer's music. What is audible is the combination of the singer's physical being, the musical composition and the communal traits of the Slavonic language. In 336 PEK the voice of Yuri Stepanov assumes a similar role - particularly for the majority of the audience who do not understand Russian and can only consider the sonority of his voice, the rhythm of his phrasing and the idiosyncrasies of the language.

At the heart of this issue lies the idea of imitation. The template of the composer's music, the rules and general characteristics of a given language, the chosen style of singing all assure an audience of a reasonable facsimile of a song, even as it varies from performer to performer. In Russian church music each singer is judged on their ability to reproduce the essentials of the song and, as they do so, their own individual persona is rendered uncertain, invisible. Exploring this paradox in The Culture of the Copy, Hillel Schwartz concludes that

Telling true spirit from false has never been simple. Our culture of the copy further discourages discernment, unless it be a kind of doubling back. The more we attempt to tell things apart, the more we end up defending our skills at replication. The more intrepid our assertions of individual presence, the more makeshift seem our identities, the less retrievable our origins. There may come a point of no return.³

To illustrate just how makeshift our identities can be, Schwartz recounts an incident in the life of Charlie Chaplin when, in 1921, the comedian discovered that Sanford Productions were distributing a series of movies starring a lookalike known as 'Charlie Aplin'. Chaplin was compelled to sue against the impersonation of his fictional persona rather than against any impersonation of the 'real' Charlie Chaplin. In court, while Chaplin could defend his creation of his costume, the creation of his character was a different matter and he testified that "I'm unconscious while I'm acting. I live the role and I am not myself."⁴

This paradox is not confined to the more glamourous arena of art and performance. It lies at the heart of our fascination with spying, for instance, where the undercover agent entombs his or her personality to assimilate more successfully in the enemy culture. And that fascination itself stems from a more domestic concern that we are all to some degree involved in the practice of disguise. Interviewed about the sources for his espionage plots, John le Carré pointed out that he was only a 'spook' during the writing of the first three of his spy novels and that the subsequent thirteen books were based on everyday realities:

We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dissemble - "Yes, darling, I'm fine." We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another ... So I use the furniture of espionage to amuse the reader, to make the reader listen to me, because most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.⁵

Penalva's allusion to espionage in the phrase 'you can be incognito also if your mission is of the highest order...'⁶plays on our fascination with that arcane underworld and, like le Carré, relates it back to mundane realities by juxtaposing it with the image of an everyday park scene.

Penalva's 'mission of the highest order' in 336 PEK is to create a complex relationship between the primary elements of his film. He has said that

336 PEK was conceived as a film that could provoke four separate, simultaneous perceptions: of that which you see; of what you hear; of what you read; of what you visualise. Each one has its own time.⁷

The simultaneous perception of all of these elements prevents any easy assimilation of the work and seldom allows the audience to concentrate their attention on any one given aspect of the film. At first this causes frustration as the mind cannot settle and must constantly refocus but, on another level, this instability prevents the audience from falling into cosy habits or from becoming passive spectators to a sequence of narrative images.

The denial of complete attention to any one element also brings new possibilities. In his autobiography, the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, describes the potential he discovered when he stopped 'paying attention' to his patients' problems:

Analytic practice brings daily proof of what a hindrance any rigid concentration on a particular idea can be to the heuristic task...Not until I cast off the customary restraint of voluntary attention was I able to get hold of the hidden psychical data...The secret meaning escaped my conscious, active attention, and was not found until I had became 'inattentive' in the popular meaning of the word, that is, until I gave myself up to unconscious ideas of the goal.⁸

Reik discovered that a less focused, 'free-floating' attention to psychical puzzles helped him to come across possible answers and he consciously developed this technique. In 336 PEK, the simultaneous perceptions of all of its elements operates in a similar way, allowing each viewer to unspool their own sequence of images in 'the film projected in the secret cinema of [their] head]'.⁹

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