LET HER GO LET HER GO LET HER GO (LET HER GO INTO THE DARKNESS)
by Stanley Schtinteron Shama Khanna’s Dark Cinema
Far, methinks, is our realm, from the hills of the Rhine.
– Völundarkvitha, Poetic Edda
Respect and beware the worlds he works across. Camilo Restrepo captures the searching disappeared, and no man nor filmmaker can reach out to the in-between state of unremitting blackness, and hope to resume without the bamboo sticks splitting fact from fiction, snapped.
Unknown to Restrepo, his previous masterpiece, Cilaos, ran a malignant parallel with the real-life murder of the daughter of Mohamed Bangoura, protagonist in The Mouth. Where Christine Salem, in Cilaos, sang in search of her father the music of maloya—generally acknowledged to reunite the dead with the living—The Mouth slows, and erupts in real sequel to the film of Réunion. Hands that held her beat. Swallow the production of loss. Seepage, slippage. The domain of Dark Cinema.
“A drummer went out quite alone one evening into the country, and came to a lake on the shore of which he perceived three pieces of white linen lying. “What fine linen,” said he, and put one piece in his pocket.” She may be a selkie, a mermaid or a swan. Let her go.
‘Swan’ is derived from the Proto-Germanic word ‘Swanaz’, meaning singer. Alia Syed’s portrait of the bird mercifully refrains from ‘song’, in its silent anticipation of flight. Her close-up is a gift to the peeping drummer, but it is paralleled by the constant promise of folklore and common sense: possession will land you in a world of shit.
In the room of an old friend, Jaime, there are custom-made shelves stacked with bottles of piss. She thinks that toilets are a conspiracy. Following roughly the principle of earthing a stereo system—to eliminate the hum—she believes that by pissing in the open, on soil or even stone, she earths herself. I think there’s something in this, and wonder if Charlotte Prodger would agree.
Fragments of BBC iPlayer cannibalised, queered: to record and re-record is to find out what the image is really saying. At the edge of the abyss, a female biologist imitates the mating call of the male owl. Cut to sweatpants around ankles. Bracken, steam. Cut to black. “Like somebody else smoking.” An epic of climate-cinema: will the owl be able to penetrate the snow deep enough to reach its prey? Prodger penetrates the cold, thick layer long settled over the quotidian with an unfamiliar warmth. Materials largely recuperated from the image dump are deployed to satisfy the big questions, harnessed by a black, singing screen for the words of Ian White. “The owl, says Hegel, flies out at dusk.”
If Dark Cinema means a place or space for binaries to collide and synthesise, Crossing, by James Richards and Leslie Thornton is the dialectic fault line. Material manipulated from the cutting room floor becomes a definitive patchwork of our time: social media streams of the subconscious; endless Los Angeles traffic jams; the bomb as an expression of identity, markets and resources. Richards and Thornton are confronting the explosion of the image dump, a landscape mapped by removal. Exempt from algorithmic detection, and against the homogenisation of memory, Dan Walwin occupies a not dissimilar perimeter position. Tame is a study, or studies of interior space after the full transferal of our memory faculty to tech. Inner projections in the dark imagine of the Internet: to stand in the bedroom with the potato in your hand not knowing how or why you got there. Screens within screens within screens (control controls for the sake of control).
Find the YouTube channel of Walwin: autoplay and enjoy profoundly the uploads until they’re finished. Expect a redirection then to the channel of Jay Nab (possibly Walwin). Nab is an occult estate agent who breaks in to show-flats and hits record. For the normalised prestige of having a YouTube property portfolio, or a detached critique on the housing crisis, I don’t know. That it might be both is perhaps why Dark Cinema emerges from the margin now, as a damning indictment of the disorientation we’ve come to expect in the light.
The artist, as the biologist, turns to face the abyss. She reads a poem for her grandfather. Eyebrow.“It seemed like he said nothing unnecessary, as if it was impossible to say anything unnecessary with a voice like that.” Could be self-referential, Ulijona Odišarija. Could refer too to the curation of Shama Khanna, who seems to be saying: ’just beyond the darkest hour, just behind the dawn’.
Stanley Schtinter is chief curator of the Museo de la Bomba and keeper of the sacred knowledge at Close-Up Film Centre. He produces cassettes, condoms and pirate DVDs as purge.
an ethnographic archive of digital distribution
Often imagined as a pensive white man, wearing clothes in earthy colors, an odd hat and a rugged leather bag with an infamous notebook, Boris Malinowski fit the description of the ethnographer. Yet, his notebooks offer unexpected insights:
“Today, Monday, 9.20.14, I had a strange dream; homo-sex, with my own double as partner. Strangely autoeurotic feelings; the impression that I’d like to have a mouth just like mine to kiss, a neck that curves just like mine, a forehead just like mine (seen from the side)” 1.
One week after his arrival at Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea in 1914, a day after Malinowski began writing his diaries, a lifelong struggle started: homophily, the radical love of the same. In the face of extreme segregation – being all by himself in the tropics, not speaking the language of the indigenous, overwhelmed by ‘insomnia, overtaxed heart and nervousness,’ – he starts to feel desire for himself. It is this specific form of love for the same enhanced by narcissism that emerges when facing the radically different.
After every ‘jungle’ has been conquered by global capitalism in the last century, referring to Malinowski’s experience of homophily appears unfitting. However, autoeroticism has only shifted in the face of technology: From self-love in the face of the other to self-love without the other. Reality is organized in discrete units – ”digital islands of isolation that are drifting further apart each day.“ In discriminating accurately through their binarity, digits surround us with comfort and uniformity. Malinowski’s feverous jungle of endless depth and extraneousness has turned into seamless surfaces comfortably excluding the unknown. Engaged in this cosy architecture we find ourselves in Gated Communities. Personalized interfaces endure into sameness – we are encircled by ourselves.
Malinowski’s diary is both a space for ethnographic exploration and a documentation of homophilic ‘friction’ in its attempt to overcome his autoerotic segregation. warehouse aims to elaborate on this in changed socio-technical conditions. warehouse explores autoerotic segregation ethnographically and archives practices countering homophilies. From June to October warehouse will publish essays, artists’ moving images, interviews and performances on a weekly basis. Malinowski attempted to regulate and organize his struggles through the means of observing and writing on paper – warehouse will do so in offering a diagram of strategies countering homophily through frictional insertions: [entropy], [pray], [home], [adobe], [soft-fiction], [stranded]. A geometry to map a new normal; a topography for overcoming autoeroticism.
Fußnoten
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Malinowski, Broniwslaw: A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, London: The Athlone Press, London (1967), 12-13 ↩