Featured Contributors to date

Ben Russell – Filmmaker, artist and curator |What Distinguishes the Past (2020, S16MM to HD video, sound, 3:54)

Ruanne Abou-Rahme & Basel Abbas – Artist duo | Title To Be Announced

Introduction

Jay Weissberg – Film critic, Variety

Take me back. Take me back. Take me back. But back where? How far back? What good is going back to the lives we led before COVID-19 if time will catch up and we go through it all over again? Don’t we instead want to leap forward, to a world made whole, even though that concept seems more impossible than going back? We use images to capture time, to stop time like a painter who captures that specific moment, perched between action and stasis. The still lifes where cornucopia brim with ripeness yet are haunted by decay: that lifelike fly is a corrupting influence, that drooping stem a sign of floral exhaustion. Cinema – film, movies, cinema, I refuse to snobbify it with a hierarchy of terminology – has been our way to hold on to time and control its progress, so how do we use it now? How do we approach whole-ness, or perhaps a more reasonable question to ask now is: can our cinephilia help salve the pain of isolation, can it comfort us when what we want most are the arms of our friends, because isn’t it the collective strength of our emotional circles that allows us to activate the ideals that art (photography, cinema, fiction, sculpture…) inspires in us?

 What films can’t do however, at least not for me, is ward off the way death closed in on us during this pandemic. Movies alter time – they may capture loved ones in moments which we’ll forever recall, imprinting the filmed moment over an actual memory not as a palimpsest but a mask. It solders time to a tangible specificity, but the awareness of what comes after is always there, just outside the frame, inhabiting the coda like the fly in the still life. The moving image is no superhero stopping the four walls of Thanatos from edging closer and closer; if we let it, cinema may even achieve the opposite. I watch a great deal of actualities, the short precursors of documentaries and newsreels that proliferated in the earliest days of the medium, and I’m always staring at the casual passersby in the streets, not just the ones gaping at the camera but the chance strollers unaware they’re being filmed, and while looking into their faces I ask myself, “what happened to you? And you?” Did that matron holding her daughter’s hand in her Sunday best live to attend the girl’s wedding? Did that five-year-old turning back, seemingly looking us in the eye, survive the trenches of the First World War fifteen years later, and if so, was he cut down by the 1918 Flu pandemic?

 When I was a child, my parents were convinced my obsession with films was a way to escape from reality, and to a certain degree throughout my entire professional life I’ve sought ways to expose the fraudulence of that diagnosis while embracing the transformative and transportive nature of the medium. Film soothes and cajoles, it rips off scabs to expose the festering mess underneath just as it puts us into a reverie of communality that makes us feel connected. During the current pandemic watching movies has become like reading poetry: we do it alone, and while we might talk afterwards on the phone or a videoconferencing platform about what we felt, in the end those images and sounds we’re experiencing sit inside us, the emotional tendrils they generate unable to connect and flourish with others due to the viral vacuum. 

And yet they continue to link us, fusing thoughts together, concretizing our hopes while shoring up our flagging spirits. In Équipée, Victor Segalen asked, “is the Imagination weakened or reinforced when it comes face to face with the Real?” Reinforced, yes, reinforced. Because the liminal space between Imagination and Reality is where cinema thrives, where the inexpressible takes shape. Its physical manifestation is that darkened room where an audience sits enthralled, bathed in the flattering glow of the screen where attention is fixed whilst an invisible spirit weaves together our unconscious and strengthens the bond we’ve developed with the moving image and each other. While the industry wrings their hands expressing fear that the post-pandemic world will have gotten used to watching movies alone, I reject that scenario. I’m no optimist, but we are a society hungry for that which connects us, and the experience of separation has made us famished.