Video clip. October 24, 02:35 P.M. Sabine’s graffiti:
The camera sits a couple of feet off the ground, staring across a city street at the side of a brick building. The view is skewed slightly, tilted a few degrees to the left. It is day out—midmorning or noon or early afternoon—but the street is deserted, and the scene is not very bright; the color is all washed away, lost beneath a ceiling of clouds. In this light, the red brick wall has faded to a pinkish gray.
The camera jostles as the recording starts, and at first the view is nothing but the building wall, standing about twenty feet away. There is paint on the wall—dark lines forming squiggly shapes—but it is not visible for long. A young woman circles around from the camera’s rear, and the wall blurs, the lens focusing in on this new subject. She stops in the middle of the street and turns to face the camera.
Really, she’s not much more than a girl—small and delicate, barely five feet tall. Her skin is white porcelain, smeared with dirt. Her hair is charcoal black, pulled away from her face.
THE WOMAN—SABINE: My name is Sabine Pearl-Grey, and this is my statement.
She smiles slyly.
SABINE: There are some slights I can’t tolerate, some things that are just beggin’ for my response. And this… this is something I can’t turn away from. (Long beat.) I will not be ignored. If you turn your back on me, I’ll turn my fists on you. (She raises her hands into a fighter’s pose and holds it, serious, for a second. Then she lets out a tiny girlish giggle.)
The woman turns and darts offscreen, camera right. She is offscreen for only a handful of seconds, but it is long enough for the camera’s focus to readjust, for the paint on the wall to come clearly into view. It is a swarm of spray-painted spiders, surrounding a two-foot gash that starts about a foot off the ground. It looks like they are crawling out of that dark crevice, each one frozen in a mute acrylic pose.
When the woman returns, she is carrying a ladder twice her height, and there is a sagging messenger bag slung across her back. She carries the ladder to the wall and sets it carefully against the brick. Then she climbs all the way up to its penultimate rung. There is a window frame just about level with the top of her head, a couple of inches below the video’s topmost edge.
She reaches down and back, fumbles with her messenger bag for a moment, and comes up with a can of spray paint. She shakes the can for a couple of seconds, pops off the top, and starts to paint. It is a long and labored process: writing words on the wall—lines of text, starting with the left-hand side of each line—carefully leaning out over the sidewalk, inching down the ladder, rail by rail. She leans out too far at one point, and the ladder shifts beneath her weight, the right-hand foot lifting off the ground for a nerve-racking moment before once again settling back into place. When she is done with the left-hand side of the graffiti, she climbs down, moves the ladder eight feet to the right, and climbs back up to fill in the right-hand side. The entire process takes about five minutes.
The paint is a dark green. Olive and drab. It is a poem, drawn in bold, accusatory letters:
After she finishes writing, the woman moves the ladder a couple more feet to the right. She drops the can of green spray paint to the sidewalk and digs a new one from her bag. This one is bright red. She draws a giant arrow around the right-hand side of the poem, arcing up from the word inside and ending at the window above.
She’s pointing up toward the Poet. Pointing into her home.
When she finishes, the woman pulls back her arm and hurls the can of spray paint far into the distance; after a moment of hang time, there’s a loud clatter offscreen as the can skips across the pavement and collides with something solid—something metal and hollow that rings like a bell. The woman jumps down to the sidewalk, violently grabs hold of the ladder, and sends it crashing flat against the ground. Then she takes a couple of abrupt steps back, and—still facing the wall, still facing her poem and the Poet’s window—she raises her hands and gives the building a double-fisted two-finger salute.
SABINE: Just one more thing. One more thing and my work is done. (She glances back over her shoulder at the camera. The sly smile is once again there, twisting her face, somehow wedded to her anger and not at all incongruous.)
She grabs the top of the ladder and pulls it offscreen. When she returns a couple of seconds later, she is carrying a sledgehammer. Actually, she is dragging a sledgehammer; its massive head trails behind her, filling the air with a loud grating/grinding sound.
Laboring under its weight, the woman lifts the hammer from the ground and squares off in front of the gash in the wall. She swings, and the hammer crashes into the brick with a dull thunk. The left-hand edge of the gash caves in slightly, but the damage is rather unimpressive—just a dent, not a melodramatic burst of destruction. She lifts and swings again. This time a single brick topples through the gash, into the darkness beyond—half a spray-paint spider, disappearing into the void. She pauses and takes a deep breath. Already the effort seems to be taking its toll.
But she doesn’t stop. Over the next five minutes, the woman relentlessly assaults the wall, breaking bricks from the facade, usually one by one but occasionally triggering a miniature avalanche, sending a half dozen or more tumbling down into the darkness, or down to the sidewalk around her feet. By the time the gash is about four feet high and three feet wide, she has slowed down quite a bit. Her arms tremble visibly each time she lifts the hammer.
She hits the wall one final time—weakly, to absolutely no effect—and the sledgehammer drops from her hands, nearly crushing her feet. She collapses back against the wall. Her chest is heaving. Her arms dangle limply.
SABINE, IN A WEAK, BREATHLESS WHISPER: Fuck me, this is harder than I thought. (She smiles at the camera and lets out a single exhausted laugh.)
After about a half minute of rest, she pushes herself off the wall and turns to face the hole. Then she leans forward and peers inside. Her hands are motionless against the wall as she tilts her head down and pauses, her face pressed into the darkness, peering down at… at something. There must be something down there to catch her attention, something hidden away in the dark. She stays perfectly still for another half minute.
Then her right hand starts to move, darting frantically—crawling like a spider—to the messenger bag at her back. Without taking her face from the hole, she manages to dig a pen-size flashlight from her bag. She whips it forward, into the hole next to her face, and immediately points it down into the gap behind the wall.
And she freezes. The scene remains still for nearly a minute. It is a frozen tableau, a static picture stretched across the screen: a woman—a girl—standing, crouched, on the sidewalk, surrounded by bricks from a damaged wall. Spray-paint spiders and words swarming up and out while she peers down and in, into the darkness.
Then she moves. Her left hand slides to the edge of the hole, quivering slightly. She grabs hold, braces herself, and lifts her leg over the litter of bricks, through the gap, and into the wall. She tests her weight on the other side—her foothold isn’t visible, but it looks to be about six inches below street level—then she crouches down and slides all the way in. Her messenger bag catches on the right-hand edge of the gash, and she has to reach back to pull it through. Her hands are moving slowly now, and they are definitely quivering—maybe from all that exertion with the sledgehammer. Or maybe it’s excitement. Maybe fear.
Once inside the hole, she pauses briefly, her back filling up the diamond-shaped gap. Then she starts to inch away, into the space behind the wall. She is moving to the right but also down. Descending beneath the city streets.
Her left shoulder is the last thing we see. It is only about a foot above street level when it disappears from view.
Then she is gone. And there is no one on-screen for a very long time.