Having just seen Alla Kovgan’s documentary about the monolithic figurehead of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, it is now my job to interpret what I saw for you. This is difficult. Cunningham doesn’t explain its eponymous artist’s indifference toward explication but replicates it, faithful to Cunningham’s conception of his work as a means of expression rather than as an expression of a particular mood or ideology. Philosophising about his work would frame it as a mode of reference, not release, and Cunningham’s choreography didn’t have a point to make. Or, if there was one, it could only be movement – the possibility of it. In Cunningham’s words, “We do something.” A commitment to action, to moving even through the immobilising cold of a poorly insulated apartment, was manifesto enough; the body was no messenger, but an agent.
In his collaborations Cunningham would protect his art from over-interpretation through spontaneity; his romantic and artistic partner John Cage provided his compositions, meant to be played in conjunction with Cunningham’s choreography, only on the day of the performance. The two pieces could not, therefore, clarify each other, only complicate. By refusing premeditated cooperation, Cunningham effectively excised artistic hierarchy, placing the artists on the same plane and ensuring that one form was never in the service of the other. Kovgan’s film reiterates this kind of free symbiosis, presenting the dancer, teacher, film producer, and choreographer through his own explication-resistant principles. It’s an interesting challenge. A traditional documentary promises to make sense of, to cohere its subject: Kovgan circumvents a war between form and intent by rupturing the documentary much in the way that Cunningham himself obsessively challenged his mediums. Just as he searched for new modes of experimentation (including drawing, motion capture technology, and textile creation), Cunningham cannot seem to settle on a language, employing fish-eye and extreme close-ups in one moment and a standard lens in the next, or flitting from industrial to edenic settings for its filmed, posthumous performances of Cunningham’s choreography. Kovgan’s filmic restlessness tacitly endorses Cunningham’s struggle against personal taste – why settle for one style? – while her experimental editing techniques and embedded statements from the dancer (“I have nothing to say and I am saying it”) refuse to subjugate expression to communication. Poetry, dance, filmmaking – the languages of life – must rejoice in their own spontaneity, cleave themselves from purpose. Complying with Cunningham’s insistence that his work exist on the edge of its own form, Kovgan joins him in a frenetic duet.
Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child is a lot more obvious, using the familiar but fruitful metaphor of the undead to tie past colonialism to current invasion. In the final scene, Clairvius Narcisse, the subject of a mythologised historical case in which a Haitian man appeared alive a decade after his burial, makes it back to his wife and declares, “It’s all over. I’m not a slave. And I never will be again.” The film is so explicitly argumentative that this line bites with dramatic irony – Zombi Child mocks the idea that the enslavement of the Black body belongs to history.
Early on in the film, Fanny, a Parisian highschooler with a pale, cherubic face, sits in her history class. “France”, her professor says, “is guilty”, “condemned” by its colonial past. He describes a history marked by uneasy alliances – examples include Touissant d’Louverture’s allegiance to his French colonisers post-abolition and the African forces who bolstered the Free France campaign during World War II – between France and her colonies. What Haiti has experienced is particularly perverted. The late 19th and early 20th century have seen their government hand what would today be $21 billion dollars to the French government in ‘reparations’ for the capital lost by the slave owners banished during the Haitian revolution, a diversion of resources that is still felt. France forced Haiti to apologise annually for its own liberation.
Fanny forms her own tenuous bond with a Haitian girl, Melissa, recently orphaned by the 2010 earthquake.1 Fanny’s circle follows her lead after a period of deliberation in which they decide whether or not Melissa is ‘cool’ – or perhaps white – enough. They demand that she win their trust and group membership with a secret, and their blithe entitlement evokes what is likely the intended parallel: France and Haiti, Melissa and the French schoolgirls, a nation siphoning money from a people who only wanted to be left damn well alone. Melissa, in response, recites René Depestre’s ‘Cap’tain Zombi’ (“Listen white world”, it begins), which the friends find alluring. Melissa joins them in cuddle puddle selfies, the modern image of girlhood, and late night library gin-sipping sessions where the girls rap along to lyrics about hating the police and selling drugs. Through the film Bonello flits back and forth between present-day Paris and 1962 Haiti. In the latter scenes, a Clairvius Narcisse, who is Melissa’s grandfather, toils away in the plantation fields, zombified and vacant. Every so often he turns his face to the sky, as though he feels he belongs elsewhere but can’t remember where.
Fanny’s heart gets broken around the same time as her friends start noticing that Melissa makes strange, “animal” noises. To soothe her world-ending pain, Fanny tracks down Melissa’s aunt Katy who is a mambo, or Vodou priestess. (The others watch YouTube videos about Vodou with the same rapt attention they paid to Melissa’s recitation of “listen white world”). After buying the aunt’s agreement, Fanny is suddenly enmeshed in a ritual in whose mother culture she is a complete tourist. The ecstatic sequence that follows damns everybody: the summoned god Baron Samedi scorns the mambo for channeling Vodou in order to cure a white schoolgirl’s inconsequential romantic misery, possessing Fanny and wounding the mambo as vengeance. It’s unclear to me why Bonello thinks that Katy should be punished too: Fanny’s cash means little to her but a lot for Katy, who cares for Melissa by way of gig jobs. Katy’s punishment creates a false equivalence between hers and Fanny’s sins. If the “white world” damns and is damned by callous racial tourism, it’s well worth noting that Bertrand Bonello, the man recreating passionate, vibrant portrayals of Haitian tradition for his camera, comes from this world himself.
Like Bonello, Kōji Fukada is interested in lives that infringe on each other: in his A Girl Missing, told via dual timelines, live-in nurse Ichiko is surrounded by claustrophobic, obsessive relationships. Ichiko is a caretaker not only by profession but by nature, who brings joy to both those whom she officially assists and those whom she doesn’t. She nurses Toko Oishi, a visual artist, and helps his granddaughters Motoko and Saki study in sunlit cafés. All this is relayed via flashbacks – in the film’s unhappy present, Ichiko, now ‘Risa’, sits on a mattress underneath her window and spies on her neighbors. The two timelines are meant to showcase a woman’s devolution – from what Ichiko was to what Risa is – but by cutting between Ichiko’s gentleness and Risa’s disheveled voyeurism so subtly (her haircut is our only chronological marker) Fukada warps how we perceive even Ichiko’s behaviour. The tangled narrative sheds doubt on all versions of Ichiko, even the one we are meant to trust.
Fukada is interested in hyper attention – care that is “too much”, to use a phrase of Ichiko’s coworkers when they discover just how much off-the-clock time she spends with the Oishi family. Risa’s attention, as her present aberrant behaviour hints, is noxiously bloated, its motives dubious. But the faltering reactions of those around Ichiko draw this thread into her past life, too. In one flashback, her fiancé wonders disconcertedly why Ichiko would search for a birthday gift for his son so far before the event; Risa entertains nocturnal, bestial fantasies in which she assumes the territorial behaviour of a dog, barking and asserting herself by rubbing against a street sign on all fours. Depending on spectatorial inclination, the relationship between present and past imbues the whole film with uncertainty: the proximity of Risa to Ichiko implying that the former was always there in the latter, lying latent.
Watching the film, my reactions to this slippage came from within the American canon. Fukada’s treatment of Risa and Ichiko, I thought, backed the composite woman into obsessive territory; the scorched earth of the ‘crazy ex-girlfriend.’ A woman who expresses an inconvenient amount of emotion is often seen as a bullet to be dodged. We eventually discover that Ichiko’s transformation into Risa is due to the social and psychiatric consequences of a crime committed by her nephew, Tatsuko, who kidnaps Saki Oishi (for reasons never discussed). The film purports to empathise with Ichiko. But to me its compassion rang false. Tatsuko, not Ichiko, kidnaps Saki Oishi. And Motoko Oishi, not Ichiko, makes the decision that they should conceal Ichiko and Tatsuko’s relation from Motoko and Saki’s mother, which has ruinous consequences. So Ichiko bears no responsibility: how could she have denied her, given how she and Motoko cared for each other? Fukada corrupts this care too: Motoko wants to be like and be with Ichiko, fantasising about living together in domestic harmony (“I’d do the cooking”) and imitating her by training to be a home-aide. When she discovered that Ichiko is engaged, a slighted Motoko goes out of her way to publicly implicate Ichiko in the kidnapping, affection curdling to hatred. When applied to same-sex attraction, Fukada’s portrayal of violent desire seemed doubly insidious, drawing as it does from a tradition of villainising queer desire.
Insofar as the facts of her culpability are presented to the viewer, Ichiko is a victim of proximity. But after Fukada’s foregrounding, would-be-moving scenes like Ichiko convulsing in a crippling panic attack after losing her job following the scandal seem to suggest righteous punishment. “I’m all you have,” she tells Tatsuko in the detention center, and in the face of her muddled characterization, it would be understandable to think that perhaps utter dependency is all Ichiko has ever wanted. Be careful what you wish for, the narrative seems to sneer.
The Kurdish documentary Who’s Afraid of Ideology? was the last film I saw, and this scrutinised coexistence too – coexistence that has since been undermined by Trump’s withdrawal of American military forces in the area, which has triggered a Turkish invasion and led to multiple deaths.
Dislocation presides over the opening shots of Marwa Arsanios’s film as she walks down a frosty dirt path and speaks, but when her words become audible they do not match the movement of her lips. As she talks us through an epistemology of nature, the camera floats away. She favours Vicki Kirby’s post-humanist idea of nature as an ecological performance to be understood dialogically with human thought rather than as secondary to it. We are anchored in a growing, wintry mountainscape, hyper-aware of her and our place in the world’s relentless ‘intra-activity’ – as she calls it. Our relationship to nature is more than as a subject to be studied – far from incidental, it informs dual liberations, ethnic and female. Ecology, Kurdish independence, and feminism are intertwined; Arsanias moves through three distinct efforts within the greater struggle towards Kurdish independence which reflect different balances of these politics and ideologies.
Later, Arsanios reads a female guerrilla fighter’s words while sitting in the backseat of a car. “My mother was my first ecological teacher,” the statement reads. The independence fighter’s inherited philosophy is that she has “the right to exist like all other species, at the same time, in the same place.” Arsanios repeats the latter half of the phrase: the right to exist alongside, in the same time and same place, underpins centuries of Kurdish strife. Testimonies from other women in the autonomist movement are similarly read over shots of enmeshed landscapes (rocks puncture snow; a stratum of ice melts to feed the rushing water below), and testify to a tradition of Kurdish self-defense nourished and inspired by an intimate relationship with nature. In 1991 the Kurds fled to the mountains from Saddam Hussein’s brutal revenge for a failed uprising, drawing on knowledge of the complex terrain for survival. Now, too, they cooperate with nature for preservation; Arsanios shows us a town of Kurdish refugees in Syria who redistribute and recover land damaged by the Islamic State’s practice of neutering agricultural possibility by forcing farmers to cultivate only grains and cotton. For an ethnic group who has not had an uncontested claim to their own land for the whole of their history, ecological connections are vital: without them, “psychological disease”, as one farmer labels the outcome of the regime’s estranging tactics, prevails.
In another one of the movements explored by Who’s Afraid of Ideology?, women have found self-sufficiency in a separatist feminism; their community is appropriately named the ‘Women Only’ village. This coming together highlights the areas of knowledge that are lacking, the skills and practices not taught to women (like proper ax-handling) the learning of which is part of acquiring the autonomy which equality requires. And so the Kurdish women apply practices of ecological liberation to their intraliberation; like the aggregate clusters of leaves and blossoms in the drawings of many-stemmed plants that follow Arsanios’ introduction to the film, feminism interacts alongside and with Kurdish independence, nourished by the same ecologies.
1 This crisis incidentally compelled France to finally cancel Haiti’s “debt”
Bessie Rubinstein is a writer based in New York.
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