Portions of an Immense Lava: Notes on a Film Seminar Designed as an Open Map

In attempting to encircle the potential thesis that inhabits the very nucleus of the curatorial composition for this year’s edition of the Flaherty Seminar, May Adadol Ingawanij proposed a radical act; when pressed to explain their intentions during one of the Seminar’s iconic post-film conversations, she exulted: ‘…hesitation!’ Ingawanij, who worked with programmer and frequent collaborator, Julian Ross, to arrive at an embroidery of 14 programs of films, lectures, installations and other tableaux, has been noted for her encouragement of the uncertain, the amorphous, the inchoate and the liminal within her work. Animistic Apparatus, the earlier program prepared by her, existed almost entirely as a cosmology of stains – as a codex of imprints left upon the skin of Thailand’s landscapes by afloat, nocturnal film projections, designed as an offering to the nation’s abound ancestral spirits. In the case of, ‘To Commune’ (the arbitrary title assigned by Ingawanij and Ross to the 69th edition of the venerated seminar), they attained a coup: to begin, they extracted the Seminar from its conventional locus within upstate college campuses in New York and relocated it to the Thai Film Archive in Salaya; and then, they populated its roster with a tapestry of titles that do not issue a statement as much as they germinate a consciousness. 

Colonialisms and their effects linger after all in no certain terms – these abound as feeble surges within the soma, but which ascend only rarely to the skin to manifest as wet wounds. There is no question more essential to their depiction than that perpetual quandary: how does one illustrate that whose contours are liquid, or whose shape remains unavailable to further assessment? How does one grasp a spectral body, or how does one tell of a haunting? How does one, in summary, outline the sky – a radiant force that is ever-present and generative, but also intangible? What forms can one recruit in the service of capturing a ghost? If Animistic Apparatus and ‘To Commune’ share a quality therefore, it is that the diagram both of them resemble the most is that of a séance. Ingawanij and Ross gather not so much a series of films or artistic gestures as a collection of incantations; rhaita pipes that screech illegible drones into the thick air to transform into a site where dreams, memories, traumas, silences, tears, stories and myths are summoned. 

Birth of the Seanema

With Birth of the Seanema (2004), Sasithorn Ariyavicha posits a possible answer. Her film imagines the sea as an eternal reservoir from which all emerges – the source of supply for the various idioms of existence itself. The film that results is therefore composed as a series of long sequences possessed by tidal rhythm: they rise, fall, appear, disappear – as light as foam. The images that populate this mythology also act as modules of water. Ariyavicha infuses them with a fluidity and lightness so profound that they may evaporate. If colonialism expresses itself through solid indices and rigid graphs, there is a possibility that the cinematic form, shorn of the effects of coloniality, will mimic the flow of lava – liquid, viscous, iridescent, dangerous. Or in the case of Ariyavicha’s film, as monochrome fire. 

In Hotel Aporia (2019), conductor Ho Tzu Nyen renders intergenerational trauma as a many pronged, polyphonic and prismatic flood of intelligences. Originally conceived as a video installation scattered across the different rooms of a Japanese inn that was frequented by the alive embodiments of the many ghosts that roam its images, the film adaptation causes the multiplicities innate within the material to collapse into a drastic heap. As Ho traverses a kaleidoscopic invocation of motifs that reside within Japan’s collective consciousness – anonymised film actors and directors; the embarrassment of the Second World War; the tragic units of young Kamikaze pilots; the aggressive militarism of the Imperial Army; the modernist pondering of a chaotic future – we begin to detect the existential affliction that metastasises through the body of a humiliated nation. In contexts that are besieged thus, the archive flows into the streets and cultural history begins to enact itself as a ghost story. 

In a magnificent gesture embedded within the film but not within the installation version (for obvious reasons), Ho dislocates our vantage point from inside the room within which the footage plays on the screen and places it outside of it, in the corridor, with only a sliver of the screen now visible to us through the open doorway. The sudden awareness imposed upon the viewer of their position embosses for them the dread that radiates through the gathered material. By inducing a brief incision in the gratuitous flow of the film’s images, Ho not only inculcates the values of the installation within the cinema, but also allows for members of the audience to realise the materiality of trauma, to recognise it as an actual object that certain peoples carry in the pockets of their trousers. In this gesture, Ho is enacting an aesthetic signpost he has already set up in an earlier sequence of the film, where Japanese philosophers meditate upon the idea of ‘the void’ in Shinto Buddhism – a field of emptiness (śūnyatā) where nothing remains but awareness. In Hindu temple architecture, the main deity within the shrine is surrounded by circular corridors that punctuate the performance of ritual with somatic contemplation. By cutting away from the room, Ho fossilises the traumatic object within the body of the viewer – they no longer merely know of it, since they can now observe it as a feeling. 

Camp de Thiaroye

Colonisation is akin also to possession – a taxidermic process where the skin is preserved but the interiors are altered. Sergeant Diatta in Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow’s Camp de Thiaroye (1988) is a character who is a grotesque mutant: the film spares no opportunity to mock his aristocratic tastes, his acquired whiteness, his love for classical symphonies, the French language and their pastries. However, like various other films installed within the program by Ingawanij and Ross, Camp de Thiaroye is, too, placed upon the axis of an inhabited conundrum. It is conducted through a remarkable plurality of gazes and toggles through a variety of objects: the French commandant of the platoon is lampooned by Diatta’s forefathers; Diatta is jailed by roving bullies of the American military; the soldiers of the platoon admonish the kitchen staff; the officers of the French Army cast out a dissenter from their own ranks; the platoon mutiny against their colonial paymasters, and finally, this is quelled with a cruelty much too familiar within regimes of an imperial tenor. Sembène and Faty Sow litter the film’s rhizomatic rubric with more such relatively minor acts of dismissal: the sex-workers at the brothel are excited to entertain Diatta when they perceive him to be an African-American GI, but are dejected when they realise he is, in fact, a Senegalese-member of the French Army. Camp de Thiaroye constructs a relational ecology with immense seepages of paranoia, definition, corruption and distrust – a cartography of hatred so pungent that it begins to resemble the pixel-smog that obscures the voluminous digital landscapes we inhabit today. 

The film expands its indictment further by cultivating a clear ontological separation between the soldiers of the platoon who live within the camp and the French Imperial officers who have been anointed their representatives. A crucial scene that will, by the end of the Seminar, come to occupy an essential place within its curated iconography of colonialism, features the officers seated around a table somewhere in the city, meditating upon the demands made by the disgruntled soldiers. As the conference progresses, their befuddlement turns to scorn, which progresses to outright mockery – the sight of the colonised subject attempting to assume agency generates within them an internal confusion that they can then channelise only into oppressive violence. 

Sembène and Faty Sow are aware that colonialism enacts itself through the irrigation of expanses that separate the coloniser and their subject corporeally, but also in perspective, in mind, and thus, in spirit. When the finale of the film approaches, the soldier atop the guard- tower notices bright headlights of armoured vehicles sinder the night and move towards the camp’s boundaries. He quickly descends to warn the other inmates, but by then, the walls of the camp have been impeached by thick mortar and artillery fire. The members of the rogue platoon die without knowing the engineers of their tragic fate: their perpetrators remain faceless and unidentifiable; the centre is, as within the digital strata, occupied by a masquerade. 

al-Yad al-Kadra (Foragers)

These patterns replicate in Jumana Manna’s incredible al-Yad al-Kadra (Foragers, 2022), where Israeli interlocutors are tasked with the truncation of a centuries-old culinary and medicinal tradition as practiced by the Palestinian locals. As the latter forage for artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme) upon disputed tracts of land, enforcement officers descend upon them like desperate scavengers to take them into custody and present them within Israeli court of law. Manna’s film assumes a cubist mode akin to Camp de Thiaroye, as it shuffles through a bricolage of diverse modes: documentary, thriller, procedural, cookery show, vaudeville and political commentary – to relay its thesis on the inherently different epistemological axes along which the occupier and the occupied institute their relationships to land. 

Foragers spends its duration in underlining this significant schism: for the Palestinians, the land is a vector of evocation; of generational wisdom, of filial or familial connection, and of a shared mythology. It is therefore abstract; nothing in and by itself, but resplendent through its associations. For the Israelis, however, it is territory – pure mass that they must delineate in order to guard it, build a fence around it, legislate it, and harness it as resource. Manna’s film becomes the occasion therefore for landscape to emerge as a site of creation: bodies emerge from it, mix into it, become indistinguishable and attain communion with it – until an extractive force arrives at the scene and mines it in order to separate the two. Foragers establishes a paradigm therefore of being ‘taken away’ – of colonialism as a process that enforces upon its subjects a state of perpetual exile; from their lands, their ancestry, their habits, and eventually, from themselves. 

Tongpan

This tendency is recognisable in Isan Film Collective’s co-operatively produced classic, Tongpan (1977), a film that documents the events that surround the construction of one of the many hundred dams that would eventually be built upon the Mekong river, and the immense consequence it wreaks upon the lives of the villagers in the affected region. Tongpan adopts a strategy common to various films of the so-labelled Third Cinema Movement that developed at first in Latin America and then inspired several resonant initiatives across the Global South, in that it results in a film that is functional at multiple scales. It intercuts between the scene of the seminar organised to ‘anticipate and assess’ the future impact of the dam (a re-enactment of an actual, historical gathering; also an aesthetic facsimile of the ceremonial luncheon of the officers in Camp de Thiaroye) and quotidian scenes from the life of the titular protagonist, whose livelihood, tribal bonds and patterns of existence are threatened by the dam’s construction. Tongpan does not stand on ceremony though; it lays its criticism of the canyons that exist between the discourse that echoes about in the seminar room and the actual existence of the farmer with a potent directness typical of the era of its production. 

Around three-quarters into the duration of the film, its makers devise a startling gesture: as volleys and swarms of meaningless words chart invisible trajectories across the volume of the seminar room, they cut to a kindled close-up of Tongpan, consumed by the drastic realisation that within this grand enactment of concern and solidarity, he figures merely as a token – a provisional specimen, and not more. In the scenes that follow, we witness another extraction: Tongpan, whose generations have lived upon the particular tract of land around Mekong, no longer live there. The film asks after him, investigates his whereabouts, but as it draws to a close, we discover that after his wife died of starvation, he left with his children, never to be seen again. 

Tongpan’s exodus from the site of his birth emerges as an occurrence of the leitmotif that lingers through the program accumulated by Ingawanij and Ross; it is an act that typifies a disorientation that can sear a vast tearing across the psyche of those that are subject to colonial occupation. This calls not merely for the recalibration of the body, though that will suffer its own share of indignities, but of the very reservoir of the spirit that may exist within each subject: a storm within the water of all of their wisdom, their habits, their modes of being and their intuition – it is not just the body of Tongpan that is usurped; it is his very consciousness that is subject to annexation. 

having-seen-snake

With having-seen-snake (2016-17), Sriwahana Spong ponders an essential koan: the artist, in order to examine methods by which she may relay the embodied experience of an encounter with a snake in a cemetery – one that left her filled with sensations of terror and glee at the same time – to another, to one outside of her. She asks whether our subjective, somatic experiences are indeed transmissible or whether, in thinking of this question, we arrive at the very limits of language itself. This is not a minor inquiry – it is a site so generative as to have yielded a grand deposit of Aboriginal philosophies and faiths around the world; those that base themselves in a continuous investigation of the mysterious logics that moderate our assigned body at all points in time. The body remains ungovernable after all; by mandates of linear time, jurisprudence, modern industry, territorial law, cultural burden and scientific logic – it is, irreducibly, what it is. Spong accepts this but, in a radical gesture that also extends this, forges an odd amalgam that causes her film to assume a perfect epistemological duotone: sequences of pure sensorial ardour that observe snakes as sinuous and poetic objects doused within a glorious liquid are coupled with others set inside a taxonomical archive where a scientist names, stores and preserves various species of snakes. 

Interestingly, and much like Ho’s approach in Hotel Aporia, these compartments are not placed adjacently to each other, as in the folds of an accordion, but coil around each other in an infinite spiral – there is no comparison to be made, and both systems of perception preserve an endless supply of intensity to the other. Colonial exercise pretends that they are entirely different from each other; the colonialist will entirely undermine the intuitive or ancestral wisdom that flows through their subject in order to impose the tyranny of a regime that can only propagate itself through cold indexation. Spong volunteers the brilliant idea – that Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’ Untitled, and Thai Villagers (2011) and Koreeda Hirokazu’s Mou hitotsu no kyouiku – ina shogakkou haru gumi no kiroku (Lessons from a Calf (1991) consolidate through examples of pedagogical modes set within a classroom – that this separation is in itself false. There is no segregation, after all, of the body from the mind, of the mind from the body; the failure to recognise them as part of an essential continuum is the very basis on which colonial endeavour mounts the dehumanisation of its subjects. 

In their design of ‘To Commune’ thus, Ingawanij and Ross construct a formidable, horizontal matrix of the enduring effects of occupation upon a collection of sentiences. These manifest as imaginations of ancestral wisdom as energy-fields that remain accessible but must not be disturbed (Tellurian Drama, Riar Rizaldi, 2020); the body as the site where archive is churned into resistance (Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat, Yamashiro Chikako, 2009); capitalism as the modern incarnation of colonial operation (A Thousand Fires, Saeed Taji Farouky, 2021), and the individual as an entity forever submersible within the vigour of the collective (No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5, Korakrit Arunanondchai, 2018). It may be that the greatest reward of a program constituted as an open cartograph such as this is not as much as the assistance it may provide to the viewer to locate themselves, but instead, in the expansive field it offers for the initiation of an exploration. Ingawanij and Ross offer an imagination of hesitation as a site of endless generation; molten and malleable, available to all moulding. 

Flaherty Film Seminar
27 June – 2 July 2024
https://theflaherty.org