Words: Ethan McGrory (he/him)
A wimpled woman stands to sing whilst others writhe in the salt and silt. I cannot relay to you quite the impact this singing has upon the listener.
Ren Scateni curates an itinerant collection of short films keenly focused on grief and injustice that impresses as often as it distresses. The overwhelming majority of these works communicate their intention through associated images and impassioned narration, rather than through traditional narrative.
Throughout the collection, one notices Scateni’s affection for film aesthetics of the past. Whilst some of the films shown are relics of the twentieth century, most are fairly recent which makes one curious as to why such aesthetics are used. An example of this is Angelo Madsen’s short, The Source Is a Hole which opens on distorted images of the 1982 World’s Fair through the lens of a hand-held camcorder. We soon see a brief video of a few old fellows in a cheap, American restaurant playing a hazy, half-remembrance of Richard Rogers’ ‘Blue Moon’ captured on, what I assume is, an old pre-2007 mobile phone. The narrator then addresses a lover, their father, the audience, and the gods of Greco-Roman antiquity to say that, ‘all we have is an imaginary future of the past’. The film later wisely comments that our grief toward what may have been, what once was very real, and what now only exists in the firing synapses of memory is ‘the lost real thing’.
Another antique image comes from Riar Rizaldi’s Larung (Float). Rizaldi, in attendance at the screening, cuts a relaxed figure, gingerly holding his IKEA glass by the calluses of his fingers as though he has 10 more backstage. Quite comfortably the most visually arresting of the lot, the film is intentionally shot in the same cinematic language as a cheesy music video from the 80s and is as bright and brilliant as one may imagine. Rizaldi has his actors portraying Indonesian fishermen, with a plunging décolletage, luxuriating about as though they were puddles poured onto the ship’s deck. They bury their comrade at sea and their song is a lament for his passing. Artful and determined, though not self-serious, this came as perhaps the most pleasant surprise of the collection.
Pivoting from what was the most enjoyable of the bunch, I would feel remiss to neglect mention of Noor Abed’s Our Songs Were Ready for All Wars to Come. Abed’s song is not that of Rizaldi. Emerging from a long, protracted, black silence, the film flickers into existence. We see figures obscured in long black garb, prostrate, and each staring over the edge into a dark, narrow abyss. A wimpled woman stands to sing whilst others writhe in the salt and silt. I cannot relay to you quite the impact this singing has upon the listener. Penetrating, abrasive to the point where one believes they may have to flee the room; though soon returning to plaintive melody, it is the most pained and sorrowful wail one could produce. The title is right, this song is fashioned for battle upon one’s sensory experience. The scene cuts from the wailing woman to others who crawl and slither about the ground, downed and unable to rise. My knowledge of Palestinian Arabic is exactly nil, and not one syllable of the song was interpretable to me in exact terms, but believe me, the intention was communicated. If overlong and desperate in parts, one does not feel the filmmaker would be particularly aggrieved by an audience having this experience.
A ghostly painted figure, an ancestor perhaps, leads the viewer in Korakrit Arunanondchai’s Songs for Dying, addressing us to scatter our consciousness through ritual. The film proposes constituent parts of itself as songs for: dying, decomposition, order (though this is often mistaken for a love song), and dreaming. As we cross between each of the different songs, we return to this ghostly figure – sometimes amongst others, at other times alone. The film is ambitiously brocaded with wild fantasy, student protest, and the death and burial of a grandfather all told through both cultural and personal histories. Humanity is compared with nature. The ancestors are enshrined in a glowing forest, in meditation and ritual as though seeking the living: ‘People are trees and the mycelium are ghosts.’ If it is said that tradition is the democracy of the dead, one ought to meditate rather carefully on the struggles of our ancestors. The film later compares the downtrodden, arising in political resistance, to the underground root network of a forest, of the trees and the fungi.
When considering how Songs for Dying calls upon ancestors and those who have engaged in struggle before, the film is mordant in its critique of the dragons, the potentate: ‘The ones that didn’t fit the narrative [of the ruling orders] were buried in time.’ It would seem that Arunanondchai calls for us to unearth these ancestors, reinstating their place within the narrative, at the very root and stem. I believe this to be Scateni’s likewise intention – many of these works insist upon the remembrance, however difficult, of the past as a means to a righteous end. Though entitled Grieving Tomorrows, I do not address you now, dear reader, from buried despair.
