Cinema: a Reminder to Construct Without Compromise
Part of our But Where Are You Really From? season
I’m intrigued to know whether fellow artist-filmmakers would agree that labouring with the moving image while surrounded by moving images isn’t an easy endeavour. Images swim around me, on buildings, in my home, on my screens, urging me to consume more. The purpose that an image serves seems increasingly to be tied to using or having money, so what would that make me, someone who produces images?
Too often for my own sense of comfort, I go around in cul-de-sacs of thought named ’How much should I hold myself accountable?’ ‘Is it all just an ego drive motivating me to materialise the visions, emotions, and dreams I hold inside to be held witness by beings outside of me?’ ‘Do I “just” want to be seen, albeit literally so?’ An internalised voice operating on logics of scarcity and of capitalist realism hints at the laughability of me wanting to spend my time making movies when the world is falling apart at multiple seams. My ethical weight fluctuates and I search for an anchor point against which to orient my purpose. I take a dip, intentionally submerging myself in moving images crafted by others, as if trying to re-find and re-trace my purpose in the stream might ground my own artistic practice… Do you, too?
I Was Told There’s Freedom Here instantly breaks the illusion of a smooth, objective reality, a pulsating modular synth signalling the arrival of its singular character, a human perpetually perceived as alien. horizontal bars of glitch broadcast them in: clad in a reflective suit, globular headgear, and illuminating neon rucksack, they are both friendly and foreign. The DV camcorder footage is soundtracked solely by a narrator who speaks English with rolled r’s, lilting the syllables in places a native speaker might consider ‘wrong’ but which feels more real, more intimate, more like the English I’ve grown up hearing at home. The handheld graininess makes me think of how this camera could have been used by families in the late 1990s to document their children growing up. The voiceover has plenty of saliva sounds left intact, an act of not-editing-out which whether intentional or unintentional gives the story a confessional tone whilst this human shares with the viewer their feelings around always being a guest. Folded into this tender excavation of what it feels like to be endlessly dismissed as ‘Other’, is a cheeky playfulness. As the camcorder follows the main character in full attire while they roam through the London streetscape, both mockumentary-style reenactions and documentary-style candid reactions are used to emphasise the hypervisibility of consistently being seen with defensive eyes. Paperwork and jeering coalesce into the alienating texture of their everyday despite consistent attempts at feeling human.
Gradually, we circle back to what is central in the experience of any migration — home, or the shifting nature of home. The non-alien human strolls through blocks of council estates and construction sites and reframes the housing crisis as a crisis of homes. At their most inward moments, we see them up close, their face lit by shadows, in the background a swirling of stars, galaxies, and nebulas. When situated alongside this distant non-Earth skyscape, the character seems most at ease, most ‘at home’, and yet it is the most abstract depiction of place in the piece, a place that is in motion, never still, always changing. From the end credits, I learn that this debut film by Awate Abdalla is inspired by their song ‘Displaced’, made under the moniker AWATE and released in 2016 as a collaboration with Turkish Dcyph. A specific lyric resonates clearly in I Was Told There’s Freedom Here: /‘it’s hard living when the place that you’re from ain’t there anymore’./
If I Was Told There’s Freedom Here is the space overlapping the shore and the sea, then Golden Jubilee is the precise line in the horizon where the planet changes from water to sky. It’s a line that is always shifting, bobbing up and down, to-and-fro, never in any linear direction. The opening bells and voiceovers of the film pan right and left, the beginnings of sentences catching on from the ends of the previous ones. Here, 16mm film, drone footage, 3D renders, photogrammetry and coloured, scratched, and collaged archival footage are freely interwoven. I find that the digitally constructed images appeal especially to my fingertips; I want to reach into and behind the flickering, extruding edges to peel them off the image as if it were an animated sticker.
Golden Jubilee is a multilingual film about Goa, a former Portuguese colony in India and also the location of the ancestral home of director Suneil Sanzgiri (the ‘and also’ is particularly important here). The film covers multiple facets of what this mutual coexistence means: What do those who ruled over the colony think versus those who have experienced colonisation? What does leaving a home and making another mean both on earthly soil and on a spiritual plane, when the former governed by nation-state borders and the latter far transcending them? We are guided to dwell on decay and the differing speeds and natures of decay in material and ancestral realms: the decay of language, the decay of narratives, the decay of a world order.
As we enter into the ancestral home, its physical gravitas rendered digitally, in one sweep we become participants of a computerised memorialisation yet witnesses to a pixellating, byte-able reduction. We are thrust into the sensation of experiencing the most encompassing and the most disembodied sliver that could be retained of a space. Layers of history, of smells, of textures escape the omniscient screen-based version. One scene in the middle of the film shows us a render of the living room with a polished wooden chair with sloped arms and a white fabric draped over it before match cutting softly to camera-shot video of the same scene. I notice how I am carried over from one mode of approaching reality to another, each visual tongue teasing out its own perspective, none superior to the other. Is there cinematic vocabulary that defines a match cut between two different media, or more precisely, between the two different kinds of reality they construct? We have ‘audio match cuts’, ‘graphic match cuts’… Is there a term such as ‘real match cuts’? And if so, what would a ‘fake match cut’ be?
“When we analyze images of the past, are we asked to mine the archive?” one of the intertitles in Golden Jubilee ask. I instinctively answer that we enrich the archive by our very interaction with it; that the archive is not there waiting, static, to be depleted, but is also jumping at a chance to be engaged with, to change shape at every turn of your head. I want to argue that the film affirms this response, the distinct visual languages both merge and fragment as the piece progresses. The renders start abandoning a claim to realism as pixels of soil float through the sky, and the camera footage slows down and sharpens, becoming increasingly digitally processed. However, the full depth of my answer only surfaces after the piece has finished and I read the synopsis.
In the film we learn that Curchorem City (in southern Goa) is a mining hub, and in the accompanying paragraph it is explicitly stated that the virtual rendering of the ancestral home is ‘created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region’. This loads the midway reveal of the filmmaker’s father navigating the virtual renders on a computer with fresh weight, placing us in the nuanced ecosystem that the film inhabits alongside its makers and contributors, the ancestral home included. The final minutes of Golden Jubilee refreshes itself in my mind, hemming in this entanglement of technology, memory, and creation-destruction. The concept of liberation is questioned, soundtracked by excerpts of speeches by environmental activists holding the government accountable for the environmental degradation of Goa. My initial answer to the question fleshes itself out, its idealism given a realistic, reckoning underbelly and converts from a straight unidirectional line to a multidirectional spiral. The final intertitle reads “As if pulled back to the earth, an image begins to tremble”, and I note in the credits that four members of the Sanzgiri family have been part of making this film. I wonder if this piece too will become an ancestral mark, to be passed onto descendants and remembered.
I emerge from this double bill alone in my bedroom, and I am led back to the watering hole. The taproot of movies, of films, of video, of moving image is that they are all the same thing — extensions, portals, & wormholes into other realities. Realities that are precious to be invited into, a gift of knowledge, presence, and visualisation. Sometimes it’s easier to accept an invitation than to make the offer. Engaging with these two films has me once again remembering how cinema is the magical process of crafting a porous bubble of space-time to hold another being in for x seconds, x minutes, x hours. It’s a sonic, visual, and tactile cushion that will remove you from what you believe to be true, and I awake feeling grateful for the rest these works of art have afforded me.
I am reminded: ways out of this reality end up being ways to return to it. It is simple, but you can end up transporting someone into a way of seeing that is more real than any objective journalism and so unreal that you can undo the knots ingrained in you by the roles, narratives, and systems. We need to depart from our own realities in order to approach them closer, so rather than making our films digestible and constructing realities that are normal, predictable mainstream protocol, we can and will build complex, nuanced, and uncompromising realities, as we have been doing for millennia. We deserve to be teeming with layers of meaning, not palatable but soulfully delicious. Diasporic peoples, queer peoples, and fellow marginalised peoples who make their home in liminality will know the natural wealth of layers out there. And ultimately — no technology is inherently good nor bad, but it is how it is used that matters. Cinema, a visual technology and an artistic medium, is no less simple and no less complex.
I will carry these reminders with me for the next time I lose myself in relativising thought, and you are most welcome to as well, should you find them useful.
April Lin
Instagram: @babe__lin
This piece is a part of our But Where Are You Really From? season, made possible thanks to the BFI Audience Fund awarding funding from the National Lottery.
