In The Chittendens we move among two or more time periods. These periods are negotiated technically through costumes and gestures redolent of a bygone era (teens or 20s judging from the costumes), but also through precise uses of editing and lighting. In the Screen Tests video of The Chittendens, the viewer watches an actor dressed in contemporary costume on the set. As soon as they arrive on the set, the backlighting for the shot disappears leaving the actor in darkness, upon which is superimposed an image of the actor sitting at a table, acting out the same gestures as their counterpart, only in a different costume. As Sullivan herself describes the Screen Tests:

The Chittendens Screen Tests were filmed in an executive boardroom. These screen tests present one score per actor in different costumes, filmed in two takes, one in black-and-white, the other in color. The takes are then dissolved over one another, so that any inconsistency in the performance between the takes is revealed: The performer either unifies his action over two disparate moments in time, or fails to ‘self possess’ in the boardroom’s high-stakes ambience.” (Artforum, 176) In these scenes, every name in history is I can be perceived as a non-chronological history of traumatic affect, a history which recurs rather than maintaining continuity or sensory-motor synthesis. The actor displays the same gestures, only at different chronological moments indicated by costume. These two times overlap; they are of the same event of “being” or affect, however distanced in time by costume, and lighting.

In Lebanese writer Jalal Toufic’s work, which repeatedly refers to Nietzsche’s correspondence from Turin as well as many of the philosopher’s concepts, the figure of every name in history is I is one which occupies time and space as “labyrinthine.” In Toufic’s “cult classic,” (Vampires): an Uneasy Essay on the Dead in Film, the labyrinthine time-space of the one who declares every name in history is I is embodied by what Toufic calls “ruins.” The ruins of Toufic’s work are actual: the ruins of Sarajevo, of Auschwitz, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most of all Beirut—the main site of the Lebanese Civil War and occupations by Israel in the late 70s and early 80s of which Toufic is a survivor. Toufic also discerns ruins “virtually” in any number of films, including Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining:

How provincial 1992 Beirut would be were it not for war and civil-war ruins. Through becoming ruins, some buildings that were landmarks of pre-war Beirut are now its labyrinthine zone. What is site-specific about Lebanon? It is the labyrinthine space-time of its ruins, what undoes the date- and site- specific. […] One can preserve a war-damaged or crumbling building, but no one has any control over whether it will remain a ruin. I am fascinated by how and why war-damaged or crumbling buildings turn from ruins, with their idiosyncratic, often labyrinthine temporality, to that of more or less precisely datable structures in chronological time. [(Vampires), 69-70]

I am reminded of Kubrick’s The Shining watching The Chittendens, insofar as that film also negotiates two (or more) time periods through a specific film location and characters (the Overlook hotel then and now, Jack Torrence and his family then and now). Sullivan herself refers to the primary location of The Chittendens—an abandoned office building—as a site of “bad vibes.” And it is clearly such bad vibes that she is “channeling” through her actors. The office building of The Chittendens is a ruin in Toufic’s sense of this term—a space that one negotiates beyond chronological continuities—and as such is the site of that which transcends time and space, as well as singular historical entities.