I don’t want to say there’s anything symbolic about this, and I don’t want to say there isn’t. It was a moment of attention, a flow between me and the world in which boundaries disappeared, surfaces and depths interchanging like a four-dimensional Möbius strip. It was brief and ridiculous, and included shouting across the street at neighbours and strangers to look up, and a happy new year. Falling back into calendar time, social time, marked out like a chess board of fixed movements and conquests. And perhaps that’s fitting because, haunting the rainbow like its prismatic double is its symbolic double, or two of them. There’s the hopeful one where there’s gold at the end, in Irish folklore (and reality, as Celtic tribes of the La Tène culture appear to have made bowl-shaped gold coins that, from the Middle Ages onwards, could be washed to the surface of fields in heavy rain, catching both water and the light). Both promise and wishful thinking, it speaks to the ambivalent feelings that ends, and the journeys to them, offer, the balance of hope and doubt expressed in some people’s pressing need to make new year’s resolutions. No gold without getting to the end of the rainbow; getting to the end of the rainbow often means no gold.

And perhaps that’s because in Eurowestern culture, the rainbow is also the symbol of a specific promise, one that has been kept or broken according to your theological stance – because it’s God’s promise, to Noah, of no more floods. Dove with an olive branch, etc. As the genocide in Gaza and climate chaos intertwine at the end of 2023, it’s hard to look up at a rainbow and believe in anything at all, except ends.

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This is my final tinyletter, thanks to Mailchimp “sunsetting” (their word) the tiny, inexpensive platform that they acquired in 2011, and which has remained free to use and free to read throughout its existence – free, too, of data-scraping, with no analytics for users or grabby forms for readers. A platform that was neither monetised nor datafied could hardly survive when users could instead be leveraging themselves and their users’ info on the ‘chimp or similar. As a newsletter service with limited archival visibility, Tinyletter was a modest enterprise – and unsurprisingly could not compete in a world where platforms thrive by monetising Nazi content.

So into the sunset I go, fading like a rainbow. I started writing these essays just over eight years ago, in response to an acceptance for publication in early 2016 that (and this is an overused phrase) changed my life, from the writer, editor and legend Roxane Gay, for the anthology Not that Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, which was published in 2018. The deadline for submission was Christmas Day, 2015, and I remember seeing the call for submissions on Facebook in the middle of an events-related meltdown month and thinking, “Yes, sure, that sounds relaxing, I’ll write a long essay about being a sexual abuse survivor and give it a title I can’t pronounce, all in the week leading up to Xmas.” I wrote it behind my own back, bit by bit in exhausted snatches, fractured with the tiredness of two precarious teaching gigs, a book tour of largely unpaid events and delayed trains, poorly-paid freelance writing and unpaid feminist film organising. I submitted it probably minutes before the deadline. And then, with cPTSD non-functional memory that is both blessing and curse, I forgot it existed.

So when I got the acceptance, it was a startlement. I also knew, at that point in early 2016, that I had to leave academia (not that I was exactly in academia, after ten years of hourly-paid jobs across nearly a dozen institutions) or I would kill myself, whether slowly or immediately. The acceptance was an “oh fuck” moment, a realisation that I couldn’t keep writing behind my own back and disclaiming it. Either I was a writer, one about to be published in a high-profile transatlantic anthology by a writer I desperately admired, or I was not. Being a writer meant doing two things: writing, and being honest – about writing, and in what I was writing. It was bound up with being a survivor, with piecing a way through the world on a path of broken words that hopefully some others could, or might, follow.

So the tinyletter was a deep breath, a way to make space for myself to write that honesty: to come out as an abuse survivor before the essay in Not that Bad did it for me. To work at scale and at my own pace, to practice, to share. It took more than a year and nearly the whole alphabet to write the letter (trigger) where I did just that. Because I’m as bad at beginnings as I am at endings. I hate threshold moments, abrupt changes of state (sleep/wake, for example). I will resist starting a piece of writing until it feels more nauseating to be holding back the ideas and phrases than to just get them down. I can panic myself into pretzels for months rather than start a simple task or conversation. I hate taking — that — step —

So I could claim that I’m migrating this letter to a new platform or a blog on my website or something, because I love this form of speaking directly, unadorned, unillustrated, unmonetized, but it means crossing a threshold. Another one, after putting off this final letter for over a month. What was I waiting for? An end to ends? It feels as hopeless to expect capitalist tech bros to have a change of heart as it is to expect genocidal colonisers to end a war. A ridiculous comparison and yet I think the end of tinyletter is a micro-micro-microcosm of the power of corporate colonial capitalism and its extractivist ends, its illogic of destruction, its enclosures and exclusions and refusals. Its love, in fact, of ends.

*

I like that the OED knows its user base well enough to define end (noun, intransitive) as ‘Of a period of time, action, continuous state, series, book, chapter, etc.’ Not a life, but a series, book, chapter, etc. A readerly, writerly definition that does get at how the end of a project feels magnified as a finality, echoing melodramatically with larger endings. That seems weirdly fitting as the OED suggests that end derives from andjo-z the Old Germanic word for, er, forehead. From brow to bow, head to death, a hard bodily limit to the absolute apocalypse: for eight years I have been amazed, over and over, as I write these essays by the English language’s willingness to abstract into catastrophising, to take a body part and make it military or monetary or mortality, to think that the world ends where its mind or skeleton or skin does. Language defined not as mindedness, but as what I beat my forehead against: the wall of colonial capitalist resource extraction, homogenisation and utilitarianism.

So end is end: an uncrossable boundary, bonewall, essence of Eurowesternism, the Christian obsession with death, judgement, heaven and hell which has its own -ology, eschatology, the study of ends: of ends as final, of ends as the settlement of bills, as payments, really. A capitalist logic in which an invoice filed is game over: no after-effects, no aftermath, no consequences and so no accountability. Done. Land appropriated and strip-mined, people and other beings murdered and displaced: end of. Capitalism works by such cold equations, by full stops, no run-on sentences or piled-up clauses, no conjunctions or connective tissues. No relations.

Perhaps the most capitalist of all sentences is “the ends justify the means,” the circular logic that rests on the hidden fact that the ends are means, in the sense not of strategies, but of extractable material resources. That’s evident by the way that the phrase applies to nuclear-like bombing deployed by Israel and the US against Gaza, but not to armed resistance to the occupation. Because the ends of the former are dual, a shell game in which the ends are ends, that is genocide, necropolitics; and grosser still, the ends of genocide are not just extermination but access to land, fossil fuels like offshore gas reserves, and other material resources for exploitation. The ends of Zionism and its backers are really ends: total absolute destruction of people and planet for profit.

*

Soil poisoned, like so many living bodies, with white phosphorus. Sewage treatment and water desalination plants non-operational without fuel. Olive and citrus trees uprooted and burned. Cemeteries bulldozed. Access tunnels flooded with seawater, increasing desertification, salinating soil, and risking overwhelming Gaza’s only freshwater aquifer.

As many commentators have pointed out, these are the destructive actions of colonisers, literally salting the earth. They demonstrate Zionism’s additional fatal alignment with its eschatological Christian form, for which the land is an abstract staging ground for the Final Days. Who needs clean water when you have infantile fantasies of theological mastery?

These disgusting acts are part and parcel of genocide, because the people are the land and the land is the people. They are not the actions of anyone with a relationship to land, to – in London-via-Jamaican slang – ends: where you end a journey; that is, home. Ends, in this sense (unrecognised by the OED), are not finalities but familiarities, openings not closures. They are not boundaries, although the older use of “end” to mean a place (like East End) relates to taking direction from the centre by naming something seen as marginal.

Ends instead entangles community and place, so that land is palpable not as resource or site of conquest, but sustaining relationship. In the face of devastation, ends remakes meaning by linking, by refusing rules and limits, by being at home beyond where or what’s supposed to be. It is exactly topian rather than dystopian, finding hope in being-in-place. Like the beautiful anthology Love at the End of the World: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree from Peguis First Nation on Treaty 1 territory), ends uses ‘end’ to its own gathering ends.

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And end shares its roots with ‘and’: and as a boundary marker, a holder of contradictions, cumulative and carrier baggy. I remember being told not to start a sentence with ‘And,’ and not to tell stories using ‘and’ as a conjunction, known as parataxis and opposed to syntaxis, which uses other ‘more sophisticated’ conjunctions such as ‘because’ that imply linearity and causality, whereas ‘and’ “keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” like the “single catastrophe” perceived by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History (from the ninth thesis of his essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” as translated by Harry Zohn).

The Angel of History does not perceive discrete boundaries between events that render them narratable, debatable; rather, a constant and singular storm, an originary catastrophe – which Benjamin calls progress – that shatters all meaning. The insistence on a future orientation, on linear movement forward is an eschatology, a belief in endings and only endings.

The ends of resistance are resisted, whatever their means, because they are not an end but a beginning: liberation. Those who cling to power perceive liberation as an end because it is the end of their exclusive grasp on authority, including their say-so on what is an, or the, end. Liberation says that ends are beginnings, again. That it’s OK to begin again, rather than grip to the linear narrative of progress, of reification and institutionalisation, of history as something always behind us, done and dusted rather than alive in the present as both trauma and possibility.

January holds a reminder of this in its name, taken from Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways (ianua: door), frames, and endings – including the beginning and end of war. The gates of a building in Rome dedicated to him were opened during times of conflict, and closed to mark peace. Janus is two-faced: a reminder of possibility and transition; but also that peace, so-called, is also war by other means. When Rishi Sunak’s government took umbrage at a peace march happening on Armistice Day, it was a stark reminder that, for the Allied Nations, the Armistice of World War I marked not the end of hostilities but their continuation through vicious territorial acquisition by the victors, including Mandate Palestine. Power calls an end in order to pursue its own ends, its own continuity.

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In “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” an essay published in Protean Magazine, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi names the continuity and, precisely, the true endpoint that counters it:

Between 1936 and 1939, Palestinian fellahin revolted against the economic deprivations imposed by the British Mandate and a growing Zionist movement in Palestine. Their revolt involved coordinated general strikes and violent resistance to the beginnings of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement. In response, the British instituted a set of policies which would become the 1945 “Defence (Emergency) Regulations”, which allowed British officers to bring about the full repressive strength of empire to bear on Palestinian peasantry to brutally destroy the revolt. After the Nakba, these regulations served as the basis for much of the state of Israel’s legal governmental structure.

For seventy-five years, then, Palestinians have existed—violent or not, political or not, active or not—in a state of revolt. We are legally defined as such; the law and its human enforcers across the globe act accordingly. This means that as long as Palestinians have lived under the colonization of the Zionist state, and until Palestinians are no longer subject to a state whose definitional contours are premised on their existence as essentially threatening others, the revolt has been, and is, in progress. It is a daily lived thing, and Palestinians have always labored to define its shape for themselves: the Great Revolt, the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, the March of Return, the Unity Intifada, the myriad forms of resistance both minute and maximal, spontaneous and organized, armed and unarmed—these are part of the long and ongoing essential Intifada, a long and ongoing revolution that has taken many forms and will continue to evolve, and whose endpoint is liberation.

Existence and persistence are resistance. Palestinian life is a ‘state of revolt… whose endpoint is liberation.’ That life is emplaced, people and life entwined, as Tbakhi writes in the subsequent (and my favourite) section of the essay, in which liberation is land: a location not a date.

The long middle is not a condition of time; we might be nearer to the end of revolution than the beginning, we might be nearer liberation than defeat, but our experience and our actions exist within the frame we can see, the frame of the long middle. Liberation is the end, but it is a geographical end rather than a temporal one, a soil and not an hour. We move towards it— sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always. It is the location by which we orient our movement. We know it because it gets closer, not necessarily because it comes sooner.

(And liberation moves too, it has its own sort of agency, it can dance a little, as you stare through the hole in the fence you’ve just cut you might feel a hand on your shoulder, someone standing by your side like a friend, liberation letting you know what it feels like, that you’re going the right way.)

End appears three times in the first paragraph; within the parentheses, it becomes ‘friend’: a being who resists the dominant dictum of linear time. Here is another kind of angel, an angel of agency, an angel who exists in the continuity of place, a true continuity where fences are holes because soil is the ends. Sniff it.

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On Twitter (proof, perhaps, that users can defy the world-conquering tech bros’ illusion that they can ‘control’ any space or platform that is used by the public), poet Alina Pleskova posts the last two pages of a long poem by June Jordan, one of her best-loved, “On A New Year’s Eve.” You can hear Jordan read it on KPOO San Francisco in May 1977 here, or read it here. In The Paris Review, Claire Schwartz describes it as “a poem, that refuses the overwhelmingness of enormity, calling us back to the possibility of our life-size actions,” a poem that opens up into presentness and precarity as an antidote to totalising narratives.

These words from the gathering end of the poem, piling un-wreckage upon un-wreckage, found me immediately, heart-filling with oxygen and evergreens:

I read the papers preaching on
that oil and oxygen
that redwoods and the evergreens

that trees the waters and the atmosphere
compile a final listing of the world in
short supply

but all alive and all the lives
persist perpetual
in jeopardy
persist
as scarce as every one of us
as difficult to find
or keep
as irreplaceable
as frail
as every one of us

Feel how “short supply” constricts your breath after that unreeling list of living that com-piles, that is turned into piles and lists linked by the word “final.” To say that something only ends is a form of the final solution, an arrogant and hard-headed belief in finality. Don’t let those alliterative ‘l’s lull you into listless manufactured consent – take a deep breath with the vowels of “all alive” as ‘l’ is relit into a living force “perpetual,” even if “frail.” Jordan replaces listing with lives, compile with frail, a fiercely gentle dismantling of the seemingly totalising power of colonial capital.

It’s difficult to give up the power of endings, entrenched as they are in dominant narrative schema; to believe in ends as a home, a place we can come to and sit with, a place of jeopardy that therefore calls on our persistence, our going on after the end: not the end as a fantasised destination, a wished-for pot of fairy gold, but – cut your hole in the fence and feel it – the ends we hold in our hands, the breathed-in-and-out real.

Here is my top ten films of all time: the first gives, among other things, the game away that these are all imagined films, what Girish Shambu has termed a ‘speculative cinephilia’. #2 emerges from my work as a researcher on the podcast The Film We Can’t See, which informed my sense of an unseen cinema far broader, more inclusive and thus more aesthetically, technically and culturally dynamic than the cinema we can see. #6 and #8 are known and documented unfinished projects by historical filmmakers (of which I could have included many dozens more), some are entirely imaginary projects by historical filmmakers, and in some cases I have taken historical individuals and imagined them as directors.

#0 is the only film directed by an imaginary director, although starring a real actor, and it is also not entirely imagined by me, but an extension or Part 2 of Julie Dash’s film Illusions (1982), perhaps the foundational work of reparative speculative cinema, with thanks to Karen Alexander for her discussion of the film at Cinema Rediscovered.

Cinema Redirected? This list is far from definitive, and in fact intended to invite other contributions, as we all make our own speculative cinemas.

Changing film history changes history: and yet we live with/in the history we have. Part of the challenge has been seeing these films through and in the gaps, thinking about why they have been ‘lost’ – not only in terms of not being made (which they weren’t) but, if I wish to commit to their existence, why they have not changed the world as we know it, due to the various ways in which even artistically, critically and/or commercially successful films can lose their visibility, especially when made by filmmakers from marginalised communities.

0. Mignon Dupree, Windtalkers (1944)

Dupree’s first fiction feature stands out as both an astonishing technical achievement whose poignant and despectacularised battle scenes equal those in Come and See, and a powerfully argued narrative that led to an amendment to the GI Bill, reneging its accommodation of Jim Crow laws. Esther Katon’s breakout romantic lead role as Julie, the head nurse, was cruelly denied an Academy Award nomination, while her co-lead, Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels, received a nomination for his performance as Joe, the lead codetalker – but in the category of ‘supporting’ role, which both he and Dupree refused to acknowledge. While some contemporary critics question the casting of a Mohawk actor in a Navajo role (and that character’s tragicised fate), the film remains extraordinary for casting all its Indigenous characters with Indigenous actors, many of them non-professionals drawn from USO staff and servicemen, who deliver outstanding performances under Dupree’s skilled direction. The loss of her brilliant career to a vicious McCarthyite investigation incited by her former colleague remains one of the most profound tragedies of Hollywood cinema. John Woo’s 2002 film is not a remake, but borrowed the title unacknowledged.

1. Alice Nuvalinga, ‘Avannarleq’ (1922)

Despite – or because of – its brevity and efficiency, this moving, witty and beautiful one-reel, single-take film is a foundational documentary, not least in its contestation of the Flahertys’ Nanook of the North (1922). As well as being both a direct and sideways critique of that film, it was made with camera and stock purloined from that invasive production. During breaks in the Flahertys’ laborious set-ups, Inuk performer Nuvalinga (who plays ‘Nanook’s wife’) rapidly learned cinematography, and worked with Allakariallak (‘Nanook’) to devise a very short film drawing on their expertise in front of camera, one that could include as many community members as wished to be involved, in order to craft a message to their descendants, who have reserved the right to show the film only within community and approved settings. Recent screenings in programmes by First Nations curators, in some cases featuring a live improvised score by Inuit artist Tanya Tagaq, have shown the profound and abiding influence of Nuvalinga’s dynamic staging, stunning sense of natural light, and framing of beloved faces and places. ‘Avannarleq’ is technically translated as ‘north’, but its meaning of ‘the right direction’ is clearly at play in Nuvalinga’s corrective to the Flahertys’ exploitative approach.

2. Sergei Eisenstein, Fuck! (1932-35) (Блядь!/Biyad’!)

Shot in Berlin, Paris, London and New York in 1932, but not finished until 1935 as post-production proved complex, costly and controversial, with the original American developing house at one point threatened under Comstock laws, this legendary film did for cinematic and lived sexuality what Strike! (Стачка/Stachka, 1925) did for cinematic and lived radical politics. Screened only in private venues in London, Moscow and Paris on release, the film was unseeable for years due to censorship, and its content was the subject of intense speculation. It was known to have led to Louise Brooks’ brief third career in France (foreshortened by the outbreak of war), as both a performer and a screenwriter collaborating with Colette, Jean Cocteau and Josephine Baker, among others. Eisenstein’s better-known subsequent collaborations with Paul Robeson after his relocation to the USSR are clearly influenced by the collaborative liberatory development of this first project. Due to the survival of a partial soundtrack lifted from a damaged print, the film earned a deserved reputation as Eisenstein’s first successful sound film. Sadly, its co-screenwriter with Brooks, Magnus Hirschfeld, died just weeks before its premiere in Paris, and (as reported by H.D. in her diaries) a subsequent English-language print had an opening intertitle dedicating the film to ‘Mutter Magnesia’.

3. Marilyn Monroe, Burning the Crucible (1958)

Considered the first Hollywood feminist film, Monroe’s adaptation of her ex-husband’s play is a necessarily radical reimagining in which Abigail turns on John Proctor by reaching out to Elizabeth (an incendiary Method performance by an unrecognisable Monroe in full Puritan garb), and, as the girls chase out the male judges, Tituba becomes the rightful leader of Salem. For a long time, it was best known for its Oscar-winning score by Ella Fitzgerald, her first public foray into composition which arose through conversations about the play between the two friends during her El Mocambo residency. Letters show that it was Fitzgerald’s pursuit and inspiration in developing what she initially titled ‘Tituba Sings’ that led Monroe to question Miller’s behaviour and seek out support for her addictions. Winning the rights to the play in the divorce, Monroe was able to make good on her desire to produce and direct, with new research arguing that the film’s roman à clef relates not just to her relationshiop with Miller, but – in the character of the judges and priests – to her own devastating experience of Hollywood sexism (and of her collaborator’s experience of racism), which defeated all further attempts at collaboration between the friends, leading to Monroe’s severe depression in 1962. Post-#MeToo, the film’s visionary brilliance has been recognised, and the film’s 2022 accession to the Library of Congress will hopefully lead to further screenings and publications that interpret it outside the prurience that too often marks Monroe studies.

4. Sara Gómez, Una Palabra Más (1979)

It took Gómez five years to make her second fiction feature, as she balanced recovering her health and raising her children with setting up a school-within-a-school to focus on teaching Afro-Cuban women, who had been underrepresented at ICAIC. Several of her students crewed on Una Palabra Más, which refines the docufiction hybrid of De Cierta Manera not least through the audacious sung-through voice-over. Its keystone street dance scene, with its protagonists passing on an urgent message between themselves as they move through its non-professional cast of hundreds has been oft-imitated, but never bettered. Despite being hard to view after its initial, rapturously-received run on the international feminist film festival circuit, its playful, loving narrative of three generations of women living and working together, as a framework for depicting (while critiquing) the revolution’s complex feminisms, including around women’s sexuality and motherhood, was widely written about, with a particularly notable essay by B. Ruby Rich that has been cited by Jennie Snyder Urman as a key influence on Jane the Virgin. The film was also championed, remembered and quoted in her biodocs by Agnès Varda, who kept in touch with her assistant director from Salut les Cubains (1963); she described their conversations about reproductive justice and film narrative as central to her development of L’une chante, l’autre pas.

5. Grunwick Collective, We Make Film (1979)

This literally striking documentary is both an intimate record of labour activists in their own words, and a reflexive deconstruction of the industrial processes of film, shown from the inside. Its use of still photographs, working structurally through multiple genres from family snapshots to sporting news to crime scenes, as the connectors between the two strands remains unique in British documentary, and gives the film its haunting power. Unable to be distributed to cinemas due to the uncleared soundtrack of Lata Mangeshkar songs (some taped at her 1974 concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall), the film screened widely at union and community meetings. An incisive roundtable discussion between Stuart Hall, Susheila Nasta and Laura Mulvey, transcribed for publication in New Left Review, led to its widespread adoption on film and media courses in the early 1980s when it was made available on VHS for community and educational use via Concord Media. But the film was taken out of circulation when the filmmakers, who were never publicly named, were investigated and secretly blacklisted under the Major government of the early 1990s. Never digitised, this key moment in British film history is only viewable via Cinenova on Umatic video. It deserves a full and respectful restoration, under the supervision of the surviving members of the collective.

6. Michael Powell, A Wizard of Earthsea (1984)

Unquestionably the defining fantasy film of all time, and the only great wizarding film made at a British film studio. While its animatronic dragon set new standards – who doesn’t  remember Yevaud’s fiery final blink, or the incredible aerial ‘dragon ballets’ – it was the explosion of its cinematic magic, reviving and revisiting techniques from The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, that made the film both a popular and critical success in its day, both on screen and on VHS, as did a stunning debut performance from Tilda Swinton in the somewhat attenuated role of Arha/Tenar. The protagonist Ged, the outcast wizard who undergoes a long struggle after a deep failure, is clearly a resonant figure for Powell; like Ged, the director did achieve a return, thanks to this film, to the full embrace of the cinematic establishment. A planned sequel adapting The Farthest Shore proved difficult to finance and was, all too poignantly given the book’s plot, halted by Powell’s death, with the lack of a sequel leading to an attrition in viewing. A complex rights situation means that the film has only recently been restored and digitised, with a Bluray release making the film available for the first time in over 20 years – possibly prompted by an image widely circulated on social media a few years ago, showing a young Yamada Naoko clutching her bootleg dubbed VHS copy. It’s been recently announced that Yamada will become the first female director at Studio Ghibli, with an adaptation of Tenar and The Other Wind, the fourth and fifth books of the Earthsea trilogy, tentatively titled Dancing on The Dragon’s Tongue (2025).

7. Park Nam-Ok, 의 딸/The Daughter (2002)

Few filmmakers have a career as remarkable as Park’s, with two major fiction feature films separated by nearly five decades. The Daughter is the embodiment of mature style, a film that both shows the influence of her time spent in Hollywood, by utterly rejecting and dismantling its narrative language. Inspired by Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnès Varda, 2001), Park used the innovations of mini-DV to shoot a stunning companion piece to her first film The Widow(1954). Its surprise impact on the international festival circuit kickstarted a new wave of Korean women directors, who turned to centring older women character actors to stunning effect. Park’s use of restored material from her older film to create the main character Joo’s memories of her mother is electrifying, at once a sophisticated reflection on Park’s own decades of longing to make cinema, and a reconsideration of the auteurist oeuvre as a biographical project. Due to The Widow’s lack of presence in the Anglosphere, The Daughter (strictly, The Daughter of) has remained largely underknown until the Wachowskis’ recent citation of its cinematic flashbacks as an influence on Matrix Resurrection, which generated considerable interest in an upcoming Bluray release of the English-subtitled high-quality digital transfer made briefly available via the Korean film archive during the first year of the pandemic.

8. Sarah Maldoror, Un Portrait de Madiba (2004)

Redefining the biographical documentary much as The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003) redefined the talking head, Maldoror’s authorised portrait of Nelson Mandela is a conversation between two great revolutionaries and artists (and ageing bodies), a complex interweaving of decolonial histories across Maldoror’s experience of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Algeria and France, and Mandela’s of South Africa. An honest consideration of the difficulties of turning ideals and desires into practical governance, and a penetrating look at the shift from radical to national and international hero, Maldoror’s film also sets a standard for documentary integrity in its refusal to hagiographise while retaining a sense of rigorous respect. A recent videographic essay on the political aesthetics of green and gold in the film, shown in relation to the colour patterning in Maldoror’s earlier Sambizanga, provides a fascinating auteurial read of a film that plays stringently and strategically with the question of authority. Made for ARTE with a focus on televisual exhibition, the film is best known in France and la Francophonie, not achieving the international profile of Errol Morris’s work. The recent restoration and reappraisal of Maldoror’s oeuvre, under the guidance of her daughter Annouchka de Andrade, will hopefully lead to a wider release of this extremely significant film.

9. Tayf, طيف / Tayf (2015—

Taking its name from a Mashrou’ Leila song, this ongoing collection of anonymised short films embodies the dual meaning of its title – ghost/shadow, and spectrum – in collectively exploring LGBTIQ+ spaces, their erasures, memories, reflorescences, diasporas and destructions across the Arabic-speaking world. Apprehended inaccurately the West as a ‘YouTube’ film (and often described as the ‘first great YouTube crowdsourced film project’), the film and initial filmmaking collective actually innovated a non-commercial platform that defied government surveillance as well as corporate social media companies, allowing filmmakers to ‘dead drop’ and edit films securely using blockchain. Travelling as memes, GIFs and clips alongside the ever-growing anthology (which currently stands at around 47 hours of films or film, given that they can be watched as individual entries or as the constantly-changing edit via the collective’s YouTube channel but also via other, more secure platforms given that it is unclear how much YouTube edits or removes at any moment), Tayf has been described as both a moment and a movement, a transformational digital project whose collaborative aesthetics of exchanged objects and matched gazes prefigure the TikTok make-up brush challenge and influenced a generation of queer audiovisual image-makers.

10. Albertina Carri, Autobiografía de Rojo (2024)

Shot on expired 35mm and hand-developed, Carri’s latest film is yet another shape-shifting move after Las Hijas del Fuego (2018). While retaining that film’s concern with queer sexuality and landscape, its visionary incorporation of hand-drawn animation and shimmering sound palette make the film a summative statement not only of her own work but of the buena onda and the new New Queer Cinema. At once an adaptation of Anne Carson’s novel-in-verse and a response to, and expansion of, the narrative’s use of Buenos Aires and of the history of the dictatorship, Carri’s film has been hailed for its revitalisation of political aesthetics in narrative cinema, including its creative soundtrack by trans feminist sex work activist and musician Sasha Sathya. A decolonial tango explosion, Sathya’s opus incorporates aspects of the characters’ dialogue and Geryon’s voice-over into songs that are sometimes diegetic and sometimes extra-diegetic, reflecting the presence of music in the poem. Logan Rozos’ transformative central performance as Geryon added a Silver Bear to the film’s Golden Bear and Teddy Award at the 2024 Berlinale. 3D printed copies of Geryon’s red wings (designed by Santiago Artemis) were the must-have costume at 2024 Prides worldwide, demonstrating the film’s rapid accession to queer cult status.

This piece was written in 2022 and published in summer 2023 in What the Water Gave Us, an anthology by women and non-binary writers from migrant backgrounds, published by Lucy Writers and Takeaway Press. The first print run has sold out and I’m grateful to editors Elodie Barnes and Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou for permission to reprint here. A reprint will be announced at the link above, and will be available to purchase in The Mosaic Rooms, Tenderbooks, The South London Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Brick Lane Bookshop, Burley Fisher Books and many others.

ish

from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free

Was I the only Jewish child who prayed for the Messiah not to come?

*

Being a British Jew is and was an education. Steeped in education, of all kinds; in obedience, walking the line. Rendering unto Caesar while keeping yourself to yourself. I didn’t want to stay in this country because it felt good, but because, in the language of 80s graffiti, I woz ere.

What I really learned in that education, the dog whistle that came unerringly from both the secular state and my conservative religious community, was that I didn’t and could never belong: here, or anywhere, in the present as it is. Sure, there might be a future – if only I prayed hard enough for Mashiach – in which I could exist, as there had been a past that had been brutally and repeatedly severed.

But the present, here-now? No. That was for the goyim. We were just treading water, holding our breath.

*

I think of Susie (Christina Ricci) – birth name Feygele, anglicised on her arrival at Southampton fleeing a pogrom in Ukraine – going under as her ocean liner is bombed days out from New York as she once again flees, this time the Nazis, in Sally Potter’s film The Man Who Cried (2000). I think of the water that surrounds her, and the flames burning impossibly on it. Of how moments before, her friend Lola (Cate Blanchett) was swimming Esther Williams-graceful laps in the ship’s pool. Water that we swallow can swallow us up.

*

Mi’ma’amakim: from the depths. This is where David says he cries from in Psalm 130, translated into Latin as de profundis. The loss is real, the grief, the lostness. But I have come to feel that the response is all wrong. No-one owns or is owed land, dry or otherwise.

Dried. European Jewish settlers in Palestine planted invasive eucalyptus to ‘dry out’ what they characterised as swampland. As Amjad Iraqi writes for +972 Magazine, the dispossession continues. In a 2015 article, he quotes Ali, a Naqab Bedouin citizen of Israel whose village, Atir, is being erased by settler afforestation. ‘They tell us that a plant brought over from Europe has more rights than a non-Jew who was born and raised here’.^[1]

Intensive plantation and farming in the desert by Israeli settler-occupiers has dried out the Jordan river to make Jordan one of the most water-scarce nations on the planet. The Jordan – Yarden in Hebrew – is the river that defines the border of Zionist Israel, a long-imagined line that is woven into the songs and stories I learned at Hebrew school, the river that stands opposed to the ‘rivers of Babylon’ that Boney M sang about on my parents’ record player, covering the Melodians’ Rastafari version of Psalm 137. Despite its demonisation as an anti-Semitic phrase, ‘from the river to the sea’ was a Zionist slogan originally, as Seraj Assi writes for Ha’aretz, describing European Jews’ territorial ambitions in Palestine.^[2]

Palestinian-American scholar Maha Nassar writes back to those calling the phrase anti-Semitic by exploring the liberationist anti-colonial context of the 1960s in which the phrase was taken up, and continues to be used, by Palestinians.^[3] Three years on from Nassar’s piece, which responded to the unjust firing of African-American author and activist Marc Lamont Hill for his use of the phrase, Nadim Zahawi made the use of the slogan by student activists a referrable offence on UK university campuses.^[4]

*

Immersed in not-belonging, in not being present, the other thing that I learned (that I was not supposed to learn) to see was policing. Judaism is, famously (and deservedly famously), a religion of purity codes: what you can and can’t eat, who you can and can’t marry, what you can and can’t do to your body, who is and is not Jewish. No in-betweens allowed.

There is no -ish in Jewish. No fluidity, at least in the conservative community in which I was raised. That meant equally that others could not enter, and that I could not escape. Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water.

Frida Kahlo’s father, Carl Wilhelm/Guillermo, was not – as she claimed – a Hungarian Jew from Arad, according to German historians Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle Schirmer’s 2006 book Fridas Vater. Art historian Gannit Ankori observes that Kahlo would not be strictly considered Jewish anyway, as Judaism is matrilineal, but Ankori draws attention to Kahlo’s invocation of her father’s claimed Jewishness in the face of anti-Semitism, including to shut down Henry Ford.^[5] Distancing herself from her father’s Germanic lineage during the war years allowed Kahlo to take a stand, and simultaneously, to make a strike against or escape from her mother’s intense Catholicism.

It was also a way for her to keep company with Diego Rivera, the descendant of conversos, the Jews of Sepharad/al-Andalus, the Muslim Iberian Peninsula, who were forcibly converted by the Reconquista; although recent research suggests that Rivera was also staking an unproven claim. In Kahlo’s and Rivera’s claims, which also become claims to each other in a famously tempestuous and definitional relationship that also made a complex Modernism, Kahlo and Rivera make visible the often-ignored extent of Jewish diaspora, its complexity, and its role in empire.

María Rosa Menocal notes in her exquisite book Shards of Love: Exile and the Origin of the Lyric that Cristóbal Colón took along a Sephardi Jew to act as interpreter, as he planned to land in India and knew that there, Arabic would be the lingua franca. Menocal theorises that Colón himself might have been a converso, possibly a crypto-Jew or Marrano (meaning: a dirty pig, although spanishdict.com notes graciously that in modern Spanish it is no longer used of Jews), one who practiced Judaism in secret. Menocal lingers on the fact that the Santa Maria sailed the very same day that the Jews expelled by his patrons Ferdinand and Isabella sailed from Cadiz.

Imagine the encounter in what Colón misnamed Hispaniola, little Spain, of an Arabic-speaking Jew in exile and a Taíno translator and diplomat. What warnings could the former have given; have failed, believing he was securing his own dry land, to give.

*

I hear this as a story of traverso as much as converso. It asks: how can we move ethically in diaspora, not lose ourselves in the depths? It reminds me that I bear necessary witness to the entanglement of here and there, however hard I wished the Messiah away. I can’t simplify or get stuck. I bear responsibility. It goes deep. The depths are not abstract, but geographical; military targets. Not just here-now, but then.

In 2012, I re-read the Song of Songs in Ariel and Chana Bloch’s translation, a poem that had been presented to me as erotic, as feminist. As if. In their introduction the Blochs note, ‘Jerusalem is the centre of [the lovers’] world… but the geography of their imagination reaches from the mountains of Lebanon to the oasis of Ein Gedi, from Heshbon in the east to Mount Carmel on the sea’.

I am dependent on the Blochs’ translation and notes because I can’t read the Hebrew fluently, despite daily lessons at primary school that I have repressed. But I start to track the references to oases and watersheds, such as the mountains of northern Lebanon, where ‘living waters’ run, which ‘feature prominently in the geography of the imagination of ancient Israel’, as the Blochs note.

Why? Because water is power. Water wars traverse millennia in Palestine. The Song of Songs is a militant hymn, a battle map, its vision of Edenic plenitude dependent on conquest and colonisation. In song 3, threescore warriors attend Solomon’s bed. There is nothing romantic here.

I write a version of song 4:12-15 that goes:

the cinnamon peeler’s wife

is out on strike : saffron pickers

raise their stainèd fists : the rose, its

dethorner, its packer protest :

lo, even spikenard takes a stand, refuses

access to everest. Solidarity, o! lovers

of words – of bodies – of spices. Ein Gedi,

two miles from the 1949 Armistice Agreement Line,

is not everyone’s oasis.

Translation can be a way to be in ethical relation, because it is always ­ish. My version is no more or less accurate or pure than any other rendering.

To be traverso is – another thing I learned that I was not supposed to – to reject purity and purism, those forms of policing. To be in the in-between, and listen to it.

*

There seems to be a queasy resonance for many critics between Kahlo’s suffering and her Jewishness, or claim to Jewishness.

I like more the argument that it was part of what connected her to Leon Trotsky, one of her many lovers, an internationale of those who stood outside the status quo. Philosemitism is deeply problematic, and I do not treat her claim – if it was an evasion of her Germanness – lightly. But, out of love for her work, I want to stake a claim to her claim as, at least in part, an internationalist act of solidarity at a time when Jews fleeing Nazi Europe were being turned away from safe harbour in the Americas.

The thing that I am still learning from being a diaspora Jew is internationalist solidarity. That it cannot apply to some, and not others. That it cannot be about creating a scale of suffering, a victimhood pyramid scheme. As Judith Butler writes, Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of faciality is not adequate, or acceptable, if it excludes Palestinians. Their call in Parting Ways for a Jewishness defined by a rejection of Zionism, and beyond that a Jewishness that holds Zionism to account, calls to me.

*

There is a specific act of casting-out, and specifically casting upon the waters, called tashlich. It takes place on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year (literally: head of the year) and first of the sequence of High Holy Days. In preparation for Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement, you fill your pockets with crumbs and take them to a river or stream – it must be moving water, the kind you cannot step in twice. You throw your crumbs on the water, and your sins go with them. Brush off your hands and walk away.

How easy ritual is. How little it cares for what or who is downstream.

Look again. Tashlich walks us to the water, and asks us to attend to it. Tend to it. The river has to be there, year in year out, for us to cast our crumbs. Waters are a commons, and they are all connected.

The rivers of Babylon moved the psalmist in exile because they reminded them of the rivers of home, a memory act that persisted into the song’s significance within Rastafarianism. The right of return, of reparation, cannot apply only to one nation and not others. Cannot recognise certain historic wrongs, and not others. That is a strange land, a Zion in which I cannot live.

*

Writing this piece has been a reminder that I am Engl-ish and Jew-ish. That in neither community am I fully accepted, and in neither community do I wish to be fully acceptable, and yet I bear witness and accountability for both. My own internal diaspora, my unsettled place in the in-between, does not mean I am exempt.

I do not dwell on Theresa May’s invocation of the pro-European ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, and other anti-Semitic dog whistling of the Tories around Brexit, immigration and policing. But I dwell within the borders they enforce. I dwell within the attempts to divide and rule, to sow dissensus that turns Jews against each other, and against solidarity with refugees; with Muslim communities with whom we are placed in competition and conflict despite centuries of co-operation and shared heritage; with the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities who face genocidal policies that echo the Third Reich; with Palestinian organisers, activists and exiles fighting for liberation from the river to the sea. I dwell in reflection on how easily that dissensus has been generated, how easily we are divided.

Tashlich can act as a reminder that we have been cast out onto the waters. We know how it feels. We cannot just throw our actions away, and hope that water will carry them. The past comes into the present with us, makes the present present to us. That is what I hold in my breath.

1. https://www.972mag.com/bedouin-village-of-atir-to-be-replaced-with-forest-of-yatir/ ↑
2. https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2018-12-16/ty-article-opinion/.premium/hamas-owes-its-from-the-river-to-the-sea-slogan-to-zionists/0000017f-deef-d3ff-a7ff-ffef96ca0000 ↑
3. https://forward.com/opinion/415250/from-the-river-to-the-sea-doesnt-mean-what-you-think-it-means/ ↑
4. https://www.972mag.com/palestine-slogan-britain/ ↑
5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23537909 ↑

In her book Diane Kurys, the first and only English-language study of the director, Carrie Tarr notes that:

Diabolo menthe could have been the model for the [autumn 1994] series of television films commissioned by Arte under the umbrella title Tous les garçons et les filles de [leur] âge, in which filmmakers addressed the problems of growing up at various moments in postwar France, and were required to include a scene at a party.

Chantal Akerman’s Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles is probably the best-known film of the series, dealing with the radical era of 1968, which Kurys herself would address in her second feature, Cocktail Molotov (1980). As their titles suggest, Peppermint Soda may be less inflammatory, but its effects are as heady. Through her (self) portrait of the soixant-huitarde as early 60s schoolgirl, Kurys suggests how the burgeoning post-war youth culture – comprising bikinis, stockings, pop music, fizzy drinks, sassing teachers, hanging out in cafés, and fighting posh fascists – was the fuse that lit the dynamite of ’68 student activism.

And its influence has been lasting: beyond the Arte series (which also included Claire Denis’ US Go Home, set in the same period as Peppermint Soda), Kurys’ film could be seen as the long fuse that lit the recent explosion in critically-acclaimed French films about girlhood by female filmmakers: its attention to the textures of teenage life – and particularly to sisterhood – seem to linger behind Catherine Breillat’s A ma soeur (2001) and Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy (2011), as well as the Camera d’Or-winning Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016) and Academy Award-nominated Mustang (Denis Gamze Ergüven, 2015).

These girls, whose lives and gazes are turned towards their own girlhood and that of other girls, even as they also experience sexual desire, form a counter-movement to the trope identified by Molly Haskell in her essay on A nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983):

The teenage girl on the cusp of sexual awakening is a beloved icon of French cinema… But over the years, as one transfixing newcomer after another, barely out of braces and backpacks, embarks on the vita sexualis, we have to wonder, whose sexuality is it, exactly? Is this the way they see themselves, are these their yearnings, or is this precocious sensuality a projection of the guilty desires and fears of directors old enough to be their fathers?

Kurys’ sisters Anne and Frédérique were thus a breath of fresh air in French cinema, girls shown in “the way they see themselves,” emerging from the director’s own experience of growing up in Paris in a single-parent family – in fact, Kurys shot the film at her own secondary school, the Lycée Jules Ferry in the eighteenth arrondisement.

Peppermint Soda started life as an autofiction, a novel based on Kurys’ schooldays, which a friend advised her to turn into a screenplay, according to Tarr. She had been working as a bit-part actor in films (including Federico Fellini’s Casanova [1976]) and as a theatre actor and director since 1968, when she had left university. She told Tarr that it was her ‘formidable inconscience’ [incredible foolhardiness] that led her to submit her screenplay – originally titled T’occupe pas du chapeau de la gamine (Never Mind the Girl’s Hat) – to the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC) in the hope of obtaining an avance sur recettes (an advance on box office receipts); and also to name herself as director on the application. She received 500, 000 francs in advance funding after some minor edits (including the change of title), and then persuaded Gaumont to invest in the film. Her partner (they have been together since 1963 and have never married) Alexandre Arcady became her producing partner (with Serge Laski) in Alexandre Films, and they raised 2.8 million francs. The CNC funding was approved in February 1977, and by August, Kurys was shooting, having auditioned over 500 girls to find the right actors to portray Anne, the younger sister, who is just starting at the lycée, and fifteen year old Frédérique.

While the film makes clear reference to two ‘youth in revolt’ classics of French cinema – Les 400 coups (François Truffaut, 1959) and the film to which it has a deep debt, Zero de conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933) – it also points to what those films lack: girls. In fact, it depicts an almost all-female world: Anne and Frédérique live with their divorced mother, and attend an all-girls school at which the only man is the caretaker. Lycee Jules Ferry was built on the foundations of an old convent, and in fact included part of the original buildings until an overhaul in 1932–34. In this predominantly female world, men appear mainly as figures of fantasy, fear, derision or (often misplaced, as in Frédérique’s crush on her schoolfriend Muriel’s widower father) desire. Anne and Frédérique’s own somewhat hapless father, the street harasser with whom Anne collides, Frédérique’s summertime boyfriend Marc, the singer Cliff Richard present on the soundtrack: they all have a slightly unreal air compared to the grounded detail of the sisters’ daily lives at home and at school.

As Judith Mayne notes in Framed: Lesbians, Feminists and Media Culture, ‘all of Kurys’ films are marked by the connection between storytelling and a bond that wavers between the homosocial and the homoerotic,’ not least towards the end of the film when Frédérique and her new friend Pascale almost kiss while on a school trip to an abbey. That they are also playing moustachioed male characters in a school production of Molière’s The Learned Women adds an additional frisson to Kurys’ tentative exploration of desires and gender identities beyond the heteronormative, picking up on the opening (trick) shot in which it looks like – because she is buried in the sand beneath him – Frédérique’s head is attached to Marc’s body.

Peppermint Soda was released in 1977, the same year as Agnès Varda’s hymn to feminism, L’une chante, l’autre pas, although Kurys’ film looks back to an era before popular feminism had emerged from the more academic arguments of writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, whose monumental La deuxième sexe had been generating intellectual discussions of inequality since 1949. 1977 marked the year that the magazine des femmes en mouvement was launched by the feminist collective Psychanalyse et Politique du Mouvements de liberations des femmes, and the publishing house Editions des femmes, both led by Antoinette Fouque. Its February 1978 issue carried an interview with Kurys, who described the film’s contrast to the mainstream: ‘il n’y a pas d’action, pas de vedettes, pas de violence, pas de cul, pas de fric’ [There’s no action, no stars, no violence, no sex, no money]. Despite this – or perhaps because it offered such a contrast to the usual fare – the film grossed the second highest box office of 1977 in France (indicatively, Star Wars was #1).

In a radical move, des femmes en mouvement paired this auteur piece with interviews with four schoolgirls who had seen Peppermint Soda, reflecting the film’s own commitment to making the voices of girls heard. Poignantly, Kurys’ film looks back to a time before a momentous change: the admission of male pupils to Jules Ferry, which transformed what had previously been a world that echoed with female voices. Although the decision was reached to become a mixed-entry school in 1957, it took until 1974 for the first male pupils to arrive – and there was continued resistance. As Kurys’ film reflects, the demographics of the school had already begun to change, as in the 1950s it became a state school rather than an élite establishment. This shift is reflected in the teachers’ unease with some of the students, such as a new student from Oran – which the deputy head assumes is a private school, rather than a city in Algeria.

Kurys, as the child of Russian Jews who had met and married in a Vichy detention camp for Jewish refugees during the German Occupation of France, would undoubtedly have been aware that Jules Ferry had a mixed political history: while (according to the school website) a resistance committee that organised at the school in the early years of WWII included many of the staff, there were still several who continued in their jobs without taking part, and the school’s Jewish pupils, in both the primary and secondary classes, were deported by the occupying Nazi in 1943. This history shadows the film’s references to increasing anti-Semitism (Frédérique tells her mother that the deputy head mistress is an anti-Semite) and the rise of neo-Fascism in France, as well as drawing subtle parallels between the Nazi occupation of France and the French occupation of Algeria.

Thus, what sets Peppermint Soda apart from recent films about girlhood is the way in which the intense observation of the girls’ inner lives explicitly entwines their sexual and political awakening. Frédérique’s friend Pascale describes having witnessed the killings that occurred on 8 February 1962 at the Charonne metro station, in which the police killed nine members of the CGT trade union who were demonstrating peacefully against the right-wing nationalist terrorist group, Organisation Armée Secrete (OAS, whose graffiti appears outside the school – ironically, Kurys had to engage the police in holding up traffic so this 1960s graffiti could be applied to the wall). Even though the group had been proscribed by the state, the French National Police committed an attack that echoed a larger-scale police assault on 17 October 1961, in which, according to historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, as many as 300 victims (the government only acknowledges 48) were killed at during a demonstration by pro-National Liberation Front Algerians in Paris, including demonstrators who were drowned in the Seine. The 1961 massacre was effectively hidden by the state for decades, but the Charonne murders were far more public, and hundreds of thousands of people – including, in the film, Pascale and her father – attended the funerals of the nine protestors the following week at Pere Lachaise.

Charonne and Oran act as reminders in the film that the school – which assumes such a huge role in the film – is not detached from the world, or a ‘safe’ space. Its staff and students are involved in, and by, events both local and international, with both current events and historical legacies shaping their day-to-day interactions. Although the film’s ending cycles back to its beginning, finding Anne and Frédérique once more en vacances with their father, it suggests the difference that a year makes: not only have the sisters experienced momentous events, but in doing so, they have grown both together and apart. At the start of the film, despite Frédérique’s relationship with Marc, the sisters are similar. The opening scene of the school year portrays a hydra of girls hugging and touching each other’s coats; shot from above, their homogeneity is only broken up slowly by a range of primary-coloured coats, and by the teachers calling their names. Despite their difference in age, Anne and Frédérique are close at school and at home, and it is a significant moment when Frédérique tells Anne to leave the café opposite the school where the younger sister and her friends have gone to order the titular diabolo menthe in order to celebrate not being suspended. It’s equally significant when Anne is allowed to perch on the sofa and sip the sophisticated beverage at home with her sister and her friend Perrine, after their friend Muriel has gone missing.

But what Anne has not yet grasped is that the finish line of adolescent sophistication does not stay still: in the subsequent scene, Frédérique and Perrine light up, and banish her to her room. Through the pace of adolescence – including the central, incredibly awkward party that Tarr envisages as the inspiration for Arte’s series, which starts with formal dancing to chansons and ends with twisting to rock n roll – Kurys also subtly, intelligently shows the unstoppable pace of political and social change. All the deputy head’s efforts cannot change what Frédérique has learned from joining an anti-fascist group, any less than the deputy head could stop the OAS-supporting teenagers from waiting outside the school to mount their attack. The caretaker might shout “No politics in school – especially the girls!” but it is clear, even as the end of the film resumes its holiday mode, that the battle is lost. Cocktail Molotov is on its way.

When Jules Ferry was modernised during the height of its success in the interwar years, two significant Modernist features were added, both of which appear in the film: the covered gymnasium on the fifth floor, seen in early scenes, and the dramatic cupola above the refectory. Made of glass bricks and reinforced concrete, it is laid down on – rather than fixed to – its pedestal; this allows it to contract and expand with the temperature so that it does not crack. Modern girls, Anne and Frédérique are shown in the process of formation on the model of the cupola: translucent, they admit the light of the world – its politics and its desires – into the ancient all-female space that was once a convent; reinforced with the concrete of modernity, and of Kurys’ material memories of her adolescence, they are political animals able to grow and change with the times. Anne grew up to become filmmaker Diane Kurys, as well as her semi-autobiographical radical firebrand in Cocktail Molotov. And both sisters, and Peppermint Soda itself, have grown up through the tradition they spearheaded in French cinema: sisters doing it for themselves, whether the party is swinging, or political, or – perhaps inevitably – both.

*

Tender Hearts

One Night on Bareback Mountain; Tender Loin; Big Girl’s Blouse; Boys Do Cry. There’s plenty other reviewers out there to deal in snide homophobia. Fuck ‘em. And fuck all those macho reviewers who fainted when Brokeback Mountain stole the crown at Venice. True, there’s no auteurial presence to ooh and aah over (apart from Lee’s trademark slightly off framing shots, intense light and, er, sheep), and your hosts are the teen stars of The Day After Tomorrow (Jake Gyllenhaal), A Knight’s Tale (Heath Ledger), The Princess Diaries (Anne Hathaway) and Dawson’s Creek (Michelle Williams).

But the smooth Hollywood exterior girds a tender, dangerous heart: a love story told in minimal gestures and fewer words that anticipates, in its two horrific queerbashings, the brutal beating it will likely get from the rightwing US press.

Brokeback Mountain is Sense & Sensibility with – well, they’re scarily alike. Both based on fiction by renowned women writers, the films pierce the hearts of tightly-guarded people in highly restrictive societies. In doing so, they share an attention to period detail (paeans could be written to the sideburns stylings of the lead men), dances where social rules are insidiously but brutally imposed, and loving but never lavish landscape cinematography.

And sheep – seriously. Whereas in Sense & Sensibility the flocking sheep represent the social conformity that binds Elinor Dashwood (Emma Thompson), in Brokeback Mountain they offer an image of freedom (moving through pastures where no-one is watching), vulnerability (in one striking image, gutted by a coyote) and a certain rough tenderness: whether grappling with a sheep or each other, Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) speak a language of gestures at once caring and combative, honed through the ethic of hard knocks worked into every texture in the film. Dented coffee cans, beat-up trucks and old jackets are as much a telling, feeling landscape as the rocky distances and lined faces.

Like Elinor Dashwood and the Hulk, Twist and Del Mar are loners who conceal passionate selves beneath false exteriors. Twist is a smooth-talking clown, a natural car salesman, while Del Mar is cut from cowboy cloth. In him, the Man with No Name meets the love that dare not speak its name. Silence and a spare score contribute to the wide open spaces of the film’s beginning, where freed from social constraints when they spend a summer herding together on Brokeback Mountain, they find a love that will sustain – and bedevil – them through twenty claustrophobic years of marriage, poverty and terrible hair, scored perfectly by the seventies country music playing on jukeboxes and radios, eradicating the silence in which they found each other.

The women they cheat on – Alma (Michelle Williams) and Lureen (Hathaway) – hold their own, from the moment Lureen charges across the screen on a rodeo course in a red outfit, a slash of lipstick across the greens and browns of the boy’s own world. Alma uses sex to get what she wants, which is the material security to escape poverty. Williams carries an unsympathetic role with an inspired innocence that lights up her courageous and misguided attempt to help Ennis about Jack. Hathaway is astonishing as daddy’s girl Lureen. Her flickering glances and nervous fingers in Lee’s searching close-ups indicate her awareness of the stupidity of the net that she is caught in – nowhere more so than in her only conversation with Ennis, so intense and intimate you forget that it’s over a telephone.

Yet you never do. Lee has a quiet genius for capturing the character of, and distance between, people’s inner worlds that finds its fullest expression here, and in the scene that follows in which Ennis visits Jack’s childhood home. The worn light and faded objects of Jack’s spare bedroom and Ennis’ attentive silence could break the least tender heart. Here is the core of the film, deep in cowboy country, in the blank house of Jack’s stern parents: set against the mountain is the closet, the claustrophobic, secret heart – the hidden space that Lee opens in each of his characters, as Ennis reaches for the last of Jack, and in doing so finally reaches into himself.

The last fifteen minutes of the film belong to Ennis – and to Ledger, who brings an intense seriousness to each of his actions, whether washing plates or kissing. He’s tender as meat is tender, beaten down until pain and love are indistinguishable. The rack of smoking elk meat that dominates Ennis and Jack’s longest conversation argues that tough hides disguise tender hearts, and that homosexuality is as American as red meat. Willie Nelson singing Bob Dylan’s “He Was Friend of Mine” over the credits brings it home. Lee pulls no punches about the homophobia of the red states – nor any about the love between men, natural as the mountain pasture.

As I learned the shortcode for footnotes in WordPress and deep-dived into google searches for precisely the images to illustrate the pieces, I began to realise how bound up writing is for me with editing as a practice in my own work, something I’d forgotten since my zine-rich adolescence. It freed me up from my anxiety about having to write queer time linearly, so I came to write A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing through collage (including more triumphant image searches) and montage – which itself became a key word in the book for how QUILTBAG and decolonial histories are assembled.

Writing thus helped me realised that what I loved and learned from editing others’ writing, of all scales and kinds, was this provisional and accountable freedom. Without the scaffolding of conventional rhetoric and argument, every choice has to be made consciously; ethically. The questions I found myself asking as an editor – and the ways I thought about how to ask them of unpaid contributors writing, often, about deep feelings – gave me a renewed way, at once more generous and more rigorous, to edit myself and to interact with my editors.

I’ve never been formally trained as an editor (except for one of those proofreading courses they advertise in the back of magazines), and I’ve rarely been paid for editing: student newspaper offices, micro poetry magazines and feminist journals were proving grounds, for both better and worse in terms of transparency, skills-sharing and internal politics. Those politics all too often included the persistent assumption that editing is learned on the job, which perpetuates the elitism of professional and commercial publishing. It’s located in the insidious belief, at least in Anglophone publishing culture, that editorial judgement and practices are matters of (white, upper/middle class, cis male) taste, and therefore (best) transmitted through family and education. The rest of us have to play catch-up.

When I found myself spontaneously committed (by an out-of-control) Facebook thread to editing a bilingual anthology of poems for Pussy Riot in 2012 (with Sarah Crewe and Marcie Burnhope), I found a community that helped me start to think that editing could be a change-making social and political practice in itself: one that might, inspired by Pussy Riot’s call to ‘be Pussy Riot wherever you are’, be a deliberate provocation and disruption of conventional editing through inviting in what was usually considered outside. Editing as a ‘punk prayer’ making a shared space for anyone excluded from other spaces, a space defined by naming then shouting down, rather than relying on, those conventions and what scaffolded them.

Gradually, through the work of those difficult, joyful conversations and decisions, it became clear that the back-and-forth of consensus-based working practices could themselves disrupt (or feel disruptive of) conventional hierarchies of publishing and labour. I came to revel in the way that self-aware collaboration can celebrate its messiness, the way it takes up time and space, pressing back against expectations of productivity; the way that skills-sharing, questioning, and listening cause the stakes of writing and editing to reveal themselves. What if, through the work of editing, we are able to come to think of the cycle of writing and reading (of which editing is a key part) as mutual aid: that is, as constantly, confidently offering and asking for help.

It was several months into lockdown when I remembered that, and could email an editor to say I needed help because I was ‘reaching out from a messy place’. It’s a cliché to say ‘because weren’t we all’, with our laundry and black mould and caring responsibilities and griefs on Zoom. Beyond the cliché, or around it, I had turned to editing and being edited as a shared space not just for collaborative creative practice, but to shape it through care. Culture Club is designed around asking contributors what they care about, and how they care about it; about how caring for a film or book or genre or artist helps them care for themselves and their world. An editorial exchange could blend into a confession-sharing, world-(re)building, feeling-cascade listening session: a great privilege to be part of.

The writers I was editing led the way. I was shielding, and at first that meant I was also shielding my emotions as a way to feel able to be in the world without crumbling. Editing then shaped being edited into one of the few places where I could feel like my messy self, like I understood (myself and the world through) the process, although its screen-based familiarity enlarged to become or encompass a way of living. Call it Track Changes as a way of seeing and being in the world: hanging out in the margins, cracking puns, tracing hidden histories, plotting revolution.

There was something more intimate than usual about sharing screen space – the only space I could share. Editorial attention felt close; not only the kind of close reading it can be at its best, but also a necessary tenderness. That in the collaboration (particularly with Sam Fisher, who edited A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing) we were reaching for the openness on which that essay centres; for the world of consensual touch and trust that it celebrates. Infectiousness heightened my awareness of the body’s permeability; made me think ever more about its permeability to language, about my responsibility as a writer reaching out to touch with words, rhythm, emotion.

At any time, an editor is the first reader (or one of the first readers) who accepts that charge of being open to a writer’s language, of being connected and affected, of attending to the mechanisms of that connection so they can flow throughout a text. How much more intense that process became when everything felt alienated and fearful; overwhelming even, especially as resonances between the historical fascisms I was writing about and the present echoed eugenically. Editing, then, became about negotiating what I think of as a semi-permeability, a way to safely take in what we share with each other.

Working on queer, feminist and disability politics projects as an editor created an awareness of editing as an embodied practice: holding space for contributors, feeling what they brought to the work, supporting myself and my collaborators against burnout. It was strikingly different from working in academic, critical and journalistic settings, where white cis male editors prevailed, some of them bullies and abusers. For a long time, I’d pushed the effects of being edited away from my body; or rather, held my body tense, rigid, closed, such that I could repress those effects­ in the moment, only feeling them – displaced and self-blaming – later.

Feeling the edit in the moment is something messy. It makes the kind of space from which I could reach out to write this essay-in-conversation with some people who generously agreed to speak to me about editing, writing and publishing, including how it’s sometimes hard to see where one ends and the other begins. Multiple relations cascade through this piece, many of them mutual, where each of us has played the role of writer and editor in some form; there are old friends and new, some whom I met through online exchanges of work over the last year. Every interlocutor shared more thoughts than I could represent here; enough that I can see (and long for) a choral book about the radical potential of editing and being edited.

We need it: both because the ecosystem of micro-, small and indie publishing is currently vivid with mutual aid and extraordinary collectivity, and because it not exclusively practised as or premised on mutual aid. It can be exclusionary and hierarchical, not least because it is underfunded and thus social capital is at a premium. Equally, commercial publishing is full of visionary, generous editors who also negotiate the complexity of working within sometimes very large corporations whose values sit uneasily with what they publish. Financial necessity (that is: capitalism) and creative opportunity sometimes align, and sometimes are fissile, for both writers and editors.

Where there is less money, there is also often less time – and yet, in my experience (which is not universal), there is more will to practice an ethics of care there, to be transparent and accountable so that the writer-editor relationship can flourish, and, within it, language, meaning and feeling. That messy place takes its unshape from listening, which is an openness to (ex)changes: those that are trackable, and those that are intangible, but change you deeply in that other messy place from which the writing – and the editing – slowly arise.

*

Maybe it’s about embracing the space in between – the space that understands certainty to be a limit, an imposed frame. Collaborative processes are one way to resist the rigidity and limitations of the individual – resistance to this is necessary because fixity is also born of an imperative to own, to possess. Because our words and work is commodified, objectified, made into objects, so too the idea of meaning (as well as ownership) becomes paralyzed into one space. We can become people of words who understand themselves to be in dialogue with the world in its transience not in its fixity.

• Elhum Shakerifar

The relationship between a writer and editor has always felt like a gentle dance: of words, of understanding, of exchange. I’m aware of the ways words and sentences bounce and rattle, their expressive hand movements. I see and hear their stops and starts, their pauses. When a piece of writing appears before me, I have to take all those things into consideration before I begin to edit. There’s a sense of adrenaline, and utmost care.

• Vanessa Peterson

I essentially hope that people feel I’ve handled them and their work with utmost care. I really do think care should be at the forefront of everything we do anyway, but especially in the arts and education. Care for what people do and how they want to do it, in addition to respect for their time, needs, schedule and the various contexts from which they write.

• Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou

What if instead of the blunt maneuvers of rejection or acceptance, editing became a kind of enabling? I’m thinking about how a rejection of work from a journal or magazine might not always be a rejection. What if being an editor was less anonymous and more about building relationships? I can’t always include all the great writing that I see, but I can find others ways to support those writers which relates to community building.

• Zoe Brigley-Thompson

A really good editorial relationship is hard to establish with just one piece; ideally, I think, it builds up trust, you get to know each other in a strange way, even if you have never met. Although obviously antagonism is bad, and unproductive, I do think difficulty and even gentle conflict are very productive, if they’re coming from within a relationship that has established boundaries and, crucially, trust between both parties.

• Helen Charman

What we’re really talking about is trust: the trust that it takes to put your work in the world, the trust that it takes to give your work to someone else and say please help me make this better. If you’re the kind of writer who is a listener as a researcher and a writer, then you’ll take on the editorial notes you’re given and hear them. Having someone read your work at that level is a real privilege, and there’s a real intimacy that comes with that. For me as an editor, feeling is the most important thing. Everything has to work in service of the creation of what you feel when you’re encountering it and then when you’ve finished reading it.

• Preti Taneja

There is an author, but there is also language and what happens there, and that is beyond authorship for me. You can say that it’s text, it’s language, it’s totally rebellious to say that. Editing, the way I understand it, you’re getting to language and the nature of language; at this very core level, it’s about moving blocks around, which is labour, and you have to be trained and have talent. I have a gift for doing what I do, and I also worked for it. I give something to people that will give them pleasure, this is satisfaction from adding to knowledge, building community I believe in, building networks I believe in.

• Ania Ostrowska

I like to have a conversation early on about the conditions and situation we’re working in, with a writer, and asking them about the situation that they’re in, trying to get it all out in a conversation at the beginning. It’s interesting to think about the hierarchies involved in the relationship, and a lot of that has a class element to it, in the publishing industry and magazine industry, both are extremely upper middle class. When I graduated from university, I asked someone who had an internship at a publisher, ‘what is publishing?’ I didn’t know it existed as a career, and I didn’t know anyone who worked in it. I didn’t know what an editor did. I feel like I’m harbouring this kind of secret, but maybe it’s important to retain a secret part of yourself.

• Anna Coatman

I’m cleaning the flat and I’m thinking what do we do when we edit and everything seems like a political process. When we formularise the process and position of being a reader, maybe impose structures and ways of thinking about something that should be fundamentally unstructured, collectivise something that is individual. And surely, the political is in everything we do and when we believe – and hope – that by merely existing we can help an actuality: more queer writers writing within a sphere of mutual (publishing…editorial) care. That’s what a scene is surely, this collective cuddle.

• Ellis K.

Reach out to other writers, as a writer: that’s one thing I have felt as a writer. Talk to other writers. A lot of editorial work happens there, in a mutual aid sense, and that also gives you a lot of resilience in coming to edits and editorial conversations, because you have a second opinion and strength, which is really fruitful for the relationship. Especially if you’re a new writer, confidence comes out of talking to other writers who can show you what’s happening in your work.

• Sam Fisher

At school, editing was about correcting mistakes. But the idea that you could work like a painter, building something up through sketch after sketch as a cumulative, organic process – I had no idea that was possible until I read twelve drafts of W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’. It was a revelation: that the first thing that comes out of you may not only not be the finished thing, but might bear no resemblance to the finished thing that comes after dozens, or even hundreds, of steps. This is the thing I try to communicate to kids when I talk to them about writing: every single element of what you’re working on can change in surprising ways – and that requires enormous patience.

• S.F. Said

*

Patience – and openness. As readers we may be prepared to be touched: to be open to the text, the language, the world-building that make up – as Taneja says – the feeling of the encounter. As writers we are less often offered the experience – or the opportunity to think with the experience – of being open to readers’ touch, even semi-permeably. Hence, perhaps, the combative framing that persists around editing and criticism, as a way to limit the risky possibilities given the complexities of conversation under capitalism.

Editing and the editorial relationship, practised as mutual aid, can offer a potent and potential model of what that encounter might feel like: a suspended moment in which, as a writer, you are allowed to decide how to be open. In cultivating the messy place of drafting, asking, revising, refusing, revisiting, we might generate and speculate on the social, cultural and political circumstances could enable us to feel that openness to feeling in all our living.

Reaching out from a messy place is something that we may be more likely to experience when young, but that can be quickly discouraged by the test (and taste)-based strictures of colonial formal education. The sense of fixity that Said describes has political as well as personal import: a fixed text mirrors a fixed social order, and vice versa. Knowing that every single element can change in surprising ways, through collaboration and patience: that’s the radical possibility here; that we can, collectively, care-fully and discursively, edit the world.

In the meantime, one young writer and reader (one of my niblings) was inspired by one of Said’s lockdown workshops to write his own novel via Zoom whiteboard (he narrated and drew the pictures; I typed) – including a note to the reader. I think it speaks to any reader listening for how a text welcomes them – and perhaps to any writer warming up for that dance with an editor, whether it’s their internal editor or an external interlocutor. In the name of mutual aid, I’ve been given permission to say whoever needs it can use it freely.

This book is just the draft but it might be the proper one if everyone likes it! Thank you for reading.

— Freddie Levy

This essay, too, is – in the best sense, a discursive sense arising from a dozen conversations with editors and writers – just a draft in which I continue learning a practice of writing and research as a form of listening. Thank you for listening with me.

• ‘Missed Hands‘, on Tara Fatehi Irani’s Mishandled Archive, Lucy Writers’ Platform, 5 Oct 2021
• ‘Delight in Disruption‘, on Juliet Jacques’ Variations and Isabel Waidner’s Sterling Karat Gold, Frieze, 15 Sept 2021
• ‘Listender‘, an interview and two poems, Shuddhashar 25, 1 Aug 2021
• ‘ “Have You Ever Heard of Surplus Value?” ‘, on Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls, Criterion, 13 Jul 2021
• ‘Island Hearts, Desert Hearts: Travelling with Tove and Tooti‘, ICO, 6 July 2021
• ‘Interview with Frances Galt: Women’s Activism Behind the Screens‘, WFTHN, 28 Jun 2021
• ‘In Conversation with Carmen Maria Machado’, livestream, 22 Jun 2021
• ‘Thick Description/Anatomy of a Scene‘, on Top of the Lake 2:3, chapter 6, 14 Jun 2021
• ‘The O in Cow‘, on Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, Literal, 28 April 2021
• ‘what you do with a curse‘, audio poem, A Curse Poem, April 2021
• ‘An easeful transition in Orlando‘, The Guardian, 17 Mar 2021
• ‘voice: on Charlotte Salomon‘, Lucy Writers’ Platform, 10 Mar 2021
• ‘Public Transports‘, an interview with Sarah Turner, MAP, March 2021
• ‘Grass in its Fist‘, on Olga Ravn’s The Employees and Star Trek: Discovery S3, 17 Jan 2021

When I am killed

You will find in my pockets

Travel tickets

To peace

To the fields and rain

To people’s conscience

Don’t waste the tickets

Killer, my dear killer

I beg you to travel

— Samih al-Qasim, ‘Travel Tickets’

Friendship’s Death marks Friendship’s death, and the end of the main narrative, with a voice-over recitation in Arabic. ‘Travel Tickets’ is the best-known poem by Druze poet Samih al-Qasim, one of the group of Palestinian ‘resistance poets’ of whom Mahmoud Darwish is best known in the Anglosphere. The film exhorts the viewer to take up the ticket and travel: to Amman, Jordan during September 1970, alongside the Scottish journalist Sullivan, played by Bill Paterson, who is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause but also waiting for his exit papers; and imaginatively into the consciousness of Friendship, whom he thinks he is rescuing from the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), and whom he thinks is a young woman. It is in and through the conversations between Sullivan and Friendship in a hotel in Amman that the film issues its tickets to an extraordinary journey.

In fact, Friendship, played by Tilda Swinton, is the codename of a robot made by sentient computers in Procyon, a binary star system that is one of Earth’s nearest stellar neighbours. She has been sent to earth to prevent humans’ self-destructive behaviour by the computers, who witnessed and survived similarly self-destructive behaviour by the dominant biological species on their own planet, which Friendship describes as a ‘kind of giant tree shrew’ complete with zoom lenses and heat sensors. Describes, because Friendship’s Death is a film about travelling through imagination, through the dual power of political solidarity and the riches of verbal and visual language. Shot at Twickenham Studios over two weeks before Christmas 1986, the film takes place in four almost-identical small rooms, like an absurdist play. Two are hotel rooms with windows onto the Amman street where unseen gun battles rage. One is a PLO outpost, where the newspaper Fateh is printed on a hand-cranked press, and where Friendship’s journey begins with her mistaken arrival in Amman rather than at MIT, and ends with her in fatigues joining the PLO; and the other is Sullivan’s living room back in London, some years later. In three of these, Sullivan and Friendship talk. In the last, he talks about Friendship – seemingly for the first time in a decade or more – to his friend Kubler and his teenage daughter Catherine, a computational ‘clever clogs’ who cracks the ‘gift’ that Friendship left behind. She understands that it is a storage unit that holds a record of the alien’s impressions of life on earth, from a foetus to a fractal, amid fragments of her encounters with Sullivan.

Like Friendship’s ‘sketchpad with a language facility’, the film is a gift, a capsule of a time and place: not only of geopolitics but of an often-obscured internationalist independent British cinema alive to them. The film’s genesis attests to a British counterculture of public intellectuals and political artists reimagining present and/as future. Peter Wollen initially published the short story ‘Friendship’s Death’ in Bananas, a late-1970s literary magazine edited by Emma Tennant, with J. G. Ballard as contributing editor and contributors including science fiction writer John Sladek, and Angela Carter, whose short story ‘The Company of Wolves’ was first published there before being adapted for the screen by Carter and Neil Jordan in 1984.

Wollen was writing a decade after the PLO’s Dawson’s Field hijacking of three civilian aircraft had imprinted the Palestinian struggle on the internationalist consciousness and conscience, and it’s with a reference to this event that the narrative begins. Or rather, exactly to images of the event, and their framing, as Sullivan arrives to report on the situation. In its way, Friendship’s Death could be grouped not only with the experimental British coeval cinema of Jordan, Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien and Ngozi Onwurah, but with the wave of post-Vietnam films about foreign correspondents superficially concerned about the ethics of bystanding, particularly The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). But Friendship’s Death enacts the ethics it examines: there are no spectacles, either glamorised or pathetic, of blood and death; no romance amid the gunfire; no liberal reaffirmations of democracy and freedom of expression.

Instead, there’s a lot of talking, interspersed with drinking (tea and Scotch), some grainy news footage of bombed-out Amman, and an eerie, heightened sense of awareness that is created by the absurdist longueurs of waiting in small rooms, and centred in Swinton’s performance, which carries carefully and knowingly the analogies between many kinds of Others: aliens, machines, women, and, in ways whose complexities the film itself grapples with, Palestinians. ‘You can’t become a Palestinian through an act of soliloquy’, Sullivan grumbles when Friendship claims that she has found her place because the PLO are ‘aliens like me’.

Crouching by the open window with her face framed by a creamy white hijab that stands out in the candlelit room, Friendship describes being ‘a very valuable piece of property’, something that links her status to that of those whom Sullivan describes as ‘victims of a map’. Friendship’s friendship extends to and through objects unloved and unseen by dominant Anglo-American capitalist culture: plastic detritus, toy figurines and lightbulbs that she finds in the market (and which came from Wollen’s own collections); traditional and contemporary local dresses and headgear, sourced by Cathy Cook to indicate Friendship’s increasing allegiance to the Palestinians; Sullivan’s battered portable typewriter and travel razor – even his stubble, ‘little filaments flourishing on [his] face’, objects that become subjects under her gaze and in her recorded memory.

            Likewise, the film – by virtue of its stringent budget of £180, 000 and its wartime subject matter – makes ‘of this little room, an everywhere’, as John Donne wrote, but neither through sexual desire nor the clichéd battle of the sexes. Nowhere is that clearer than in Friendship’s arresting monologue about travelling to the ruins at Jerash, carefully choreographed in close-up and silencing Sullivan entirely. After nearly 35 years, in which Swinton’s almost-supernatural ability to command our attention through the camera has shaped cinema, it’s hard to recall that this is only her second screen role, and her first lead. She was Wollen’s first choice for Friendship after he saw her in Caravaggio, and as producer Rebecca O’Brien recalls she committed unhesitatingly.

It was the same with future Academy Award-winning hair and make-up artist Morag Ross and production designer Gemma Jackson, whose sets were so convincing that a Jordanian filmmaker asked O’Brien some years later where in Amman they had filmed. They were joined by composer Barrington Pheloung, whose first film score, combining oud and electronica, could not be more uncannily different from the lush romantic work for Truly Madly Deeply (1990) that would make his name a few years later.

All of the small team had significant input into the staging of the film, including a week’s rehearsal before the shoot with the two leads and cinematographer Witold Stock, allowing them to develop blocking that means the intimate spaces never feel repetitive or claustrophobic. As one would expect from the author of Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, each space abounds in precise details and objects; O’Brien notes that though the objects Friendship collects came from Wollen’s own study, they were also intended as a whimsical goose chase for semioticians trying to read too closely. Instead, like a politicised version of Craig Raine’s well-known 1979 poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’, they signify Friendship’s tenderness for the varieties of life on Earth – even if she has more ‘fellow feeling’ with a typewriter than with the human who types on it.

The shifting positions and energies between the protagonists are captured by creative camera angles that expand and contract the hotel rooms, with lighting ranging from bright daylight and almost-complete darkness to create a chiaroscuro across the film that is mediated by candlelight and shadows. A distinctive sense arises of a multiple and mobile point of view that cuts against the potential narrowness of the two-hander. At the same time, the film does focus unrelentingly on the interaction of Sullivan and Friendship, portrayed by two white British actors. Yet it remains remarkable that a British film that presents the Palestinian cause sympathetically, albeit externally, exists at all, even though it makes barely any mention, of the British Empire’s key role in creating ‘victims of a map’ in Transjordan and Palestine. Similarly, it cannot – and does not try to – square the circle of how to support the Palestinians without armed action, in the same way as the film is interestingly ambivalent about a possible future in which humans have self-destructed and been superceded by a sentient computer-robot interdependency.

That’s partially a strength of the even-handed, often zingy writing for the protagonists, a reminder that Wollen was the co-writer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). The later impassioned debates in which Sullivan tries to talk Friendship out of her chosen commitment are prefigured by seemingly throwaway lines such as his toast to hijacker ‘Leila Khaled, the glorious pirate of the air, beautiful heroine of the doomed and the desperate’, which captures the romanticism that underlies Sullivan’s world-weary devil’s advocacy and that leads him to be intrigued by Friendship almost against his will. Friendship replies that she ‘dream[s] of impossible objects’, in a reminder of the gulf between them.

She is, after all, a rather on-the-nose example of what philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls the ‘body without organs’, albeit been manufactured and educated to pass as human, and specifically as a woman, which she claims is supposed to be reassuring. There is a queer frisson in Friendship’s relation to her own body and its (non-)functions, as well as the refusal to fulfil heteronormative desire; her descriptions of her manufacture on Procyon resonate with Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that women are ‘made, not born’, and also provide an early glimpse of what a transfeminist cinema might enunciate. ‘I can’t accept subhuman status’, she states, refusing to accord biology any primacy; but while the binary between born and made persists, she says in a resonant line, it’s ‘a world where I have to wear a human disguise to be accepted’.

The film thus resonates with a wider theoretical and activist zeitgeist: Sandy Stone’s foundational essay ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’ was published in Social Text in 1987. And although Friendship is entirely a robot and non-biological, it’s hard not to read her – and the film – through the essay that influenced and companioned Stone’s, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ by Donna Haraway, first published in 1985 in Socialist Review. Haraway’s cyborg, like Friendship, is partial and ironic (Friendship notes, with reference to blushing, that she is incapable of being earnest), self-realised through inscription, and enacting solidarity with global feminist resistance. Sullivan’s daughter Catherine, who is doing an O-Level in Robotics, seems like another subtle trace of Haraway’s vision.

Haraway’s hugely influential essay, and her more recent work in Staying With the Trouble, have refused the exterminationist and accelerationist arguments of eco-fascists, arguing instead that the strength of the cyborg and of natureculture is their hybridity that teach (Eurowestern) humans to see their interdependency across differences. The cyborg makes a case for fellow feeling, that is; or, one might say, friendship. Coming in peace, Friendship may leave us in pieces, with only fragments of an enigmatic puzzle, glowing in the dark. It’s our task, as Wollen had long argued in his work on semiotics, to make meaning of them, and use them to make meaning of our lives. Not just our task but, as Friendship suggests when she describes the computers as ‘connoisseurs of Earth’, our pleasure: to take up the ticket to peace for which Friendship – as the dream of the 1960s and 70s counterculture – fought, and to travel.

*

With thanks to Rebecca O’Brien for her generosity in discussing the film in a phone interview, 10 April 2020.

]]> https://www.somayer.net/2019/11/11/writing-born-into-armistice-margaret-taits-pacific-cinema/ Mon, 11 Nov 2019 18:54:54 +0000 https://www.somayer.net/?p=257 This talk was originally given on Armistice Day 2018, the 100th anniversary of Margaret Tait’s birth, to introduce a screening of the restoration of Blue Black Permanent at the British Film Institute, London, and subsequently published in the booklet for the film’s BFI DVD/Bluray release, and temporarily on the Margaret Tait 100 website.

*

Margaret Tait named her film, as Michael Romer attests, after the bottle of Quink ink that sat on her desk, and that is visible in the film on the desk of the poet Greta.¹ In tribute, I wrote the first draft of this talk in blue-black permanent ink, paying homage to Margaret Tait’s way with words and film, her concern with how artists and humans – particularly those who are women – make their mark, and with what lasts and what passes, and how it passes through her and on to us.

In her poem ‘Cave Drawing of the Water of the Earth and the Sea,’ published in 1959, Tait ends with an image of the water cycle that is echoed in the wave motions and writing women of her first and only feature film Blue Black Permanent, made 33 years later: The tide that comes pounding round Orkney:

To fill up the North Sea

Is obeying the law of gravity

— Is that so, now?

The ocean that shatters the rocks

Is having its surface fluffed off into clouds

Which will be ocean again some day […]

Water was made for one purpose only, –

So that I could come to being and write down these words here now.

Do you believe that?

I don’t,

But it could be argued.²

With her typical inquisitive modesty, Tait places herself in the centre of the water cycle, only so she can continue it, handing on the questions and ideas she has brought to the surface – about what it means to make art, to be a mother and daughter, to be in the world – to us, where they still resonate one hundred years since she was born.

Born in Kirkwall, Orkney to a merchant family, Margaret Tait – I want to argue – worked through her filmmaking and poetry to embody the values and significance of the Armistice Day on which she was born. Keeping the peace was, I think, the work of her life: not through the more public forms we think of such as demonstrations, petitions and protests, but through her close attention to the material of the world and its vulnerability – although she did document local protests against uranium drilling in Orkney in her 1981 short Aspects of Kirkwall: Some Changes.³ Witty, wild, precise, artisanal and non-violent, her films and writing are the literal antidote to the military-entertainment complex of mainstream cinema.

So, rather than asking ‘Why have I heard so little about her, or seen so little of her work?’ perhaps we can rather appreciate, immensely, that her work exists at all in such a climate. Mostly self-funded despite her protracted attempts to foster support for artists’ and independent filmmaking in Scotland, her forty-year body of short films has been receiving the care and attention it deserves from curator and filmmaker Peter Todd, and archival researcher and scholar Sarah Neely. I’m deeply indebted to her book Between Categories: The Films of Margaret Tait – Portraits, Poetry, Sound and Place for these remarks today, and recommend it highly. It’s their work that has led to the restoration you’re able to see today.

Blue Black Permanent covers three generations of women in a single Orcadian family: Barbara, played by Celia Imrie, who is a contemporary photographer, remembers Greta, her mother and a poet, who died when she was a child, and she recalls Greta’s memories of her own mother, who died similarly. Neely suggests that Greta’s character was based on the Orcadian writer Ann Scott-Moncrieff, who died by drowning in 1943; Neely adds that Tait originally considered casting Tilda Swinton for her resemblance to the writer! Others have suggested echoes of Tait’s close friend the poet Stella Cartwright, who appeared in her fiction film ‘Palindrome’ and who died young in 1985; Tait’s sister-in-law Allison Leonard Tait, herself a poet and newspaper editor, also died very young, in childbirth. Greta combines elements of these three powerful and much-missed poetic presences in Tait’s life, a lost community of women poets refigured on screen in the vivid figure of Greta.

The film’s work of mourning and revivification is not just for these beloved women, but through them for one of the central subjects of Tait’s work: the living world. When Greta runs out into the rainstorm to write a poem, she passes a newspaper board with a headline about bomb tests in the Pacific; in a subsequent scene, she and her artist friends listen to the radio news report about these tests. Almost forgotten now, between 1946 and 1962, the United States conducted 105 atmospheric and underwater tests in the Pacific, with an estimated total yield of 210 megatons, spreading deadly fallout over 3 billion square miles including inhabited islands such as the Marshall Islands, as reported by Agence France-Presse. Tait would have also been conscious that many in the Highlands and Islands were concerned about the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. In the mid-90s, there was a sharp rise in cancer clusters on Orkney.

Greta is thus part of the generation, like Tait, who came of age under a nuclear shadow; having been born in the penumbra of the ‘war to end all wars,’ her twenties would have been marked by WWII. Greta’s wartime life is only briefly mentioned in the film: it’s when she met and married her husband. But the ‘fallout’ is felt in the news of atomic testing and its renewed threat of a global conflagration. The war’s fallout certainly covered Tait’s life: it casts a fascinating light on Blue Black Permanent as an intimate ‘women’s picture’ to know that Tait simultaneously pitched another script to the BFI, a spy thriller called Scars of Battle, set in Sri Lanka where she had served as a medic during the latter years of the war (Neely, 286–87). Having served in India and Malaya as well, Tait wrote a novel about an Indian transit camp for British soldiers returning from Burma, called The Lilywhite Boys (an unpublished manuscript resides in the Margaret Tait collection in the Orkney Archive), which was turned down on the basis of a glut of material about the war; as, she told Lindsay Anderson a few years later, were her draft feature film scripts (Neely 8, 14).

How frustrating to know that British cinema might have had a female David Lean, or anti David Lean, from the 1950s, making films that – given what we know of Tait’s filmmaking and of the fragments that remain – might have paid attention to traumatised lives and to healing processes. We need to see her films through what documentary scholar Alisa Lebow describes as ‘unwar films,’ which look:

away from the main event, as it were, to that which is happening just outside the field of frenetic action… [to] do the destabilizing work of unthreading the very fabric of the militarist paradigm… [by] engag[ing] various techniques and approaches to make the imperceptible perceptible.⁴

Tait writes in her poem ‘Now’ that she turned to the camera precisely for its ability to make the imperceptible perceptible, and particularly to make visible everything from the vast scale of geological time to the microscopic scale of botanical time. Tait’s attention to the materiality of life, perhaps steeped in her medical training at Edinburgh University before the war, can be seen as a profound attempt to hold the world together, as Barbara in Blue Black Permanent attempts to piece her mother’s and grandmother’s lives together through her memory, and through her camera.

What the film is really about [said Tait] is persistence of the spirit – spirit of a place, spirit of a culture, and chiefly, the spirit of the creative person at the centre of the story. So that, although the story which is told in flashback is a tragic story, nevertheless the permanent thing that remains is optimistic (quoted in Neely, 273).

It is both tragic and optimistic to note that, in 1992, Tait became the first Scottish woman to make a feature-length fiction film, to be followed more recently by independent filmmakers Lynne Ramsay, Alison Peebles, May Miles Thomas, Corinna McFarlane, Hope Dickson Leach, Rachel Maclean and Margaret Salmon – it’s not a long list, nearly thirty years on. Rachel Maclean won the LUX Scotland (in partnership with Glasgow Film) Margaret Tait Award in 2013, and Margaret Salmon was shortlisted for it in 2017; while the award is open to Scottish artists of all genders working with the moving image, it has done particularly important work in showcasing and fostering radical work by artists of marginalised genders. Although it does indicate persistence, it is evidence, as if evidence were needed, that Tait’s film’s vision of a feminist genealogy of creative unwar work remains necessary to redefining film culture.

At the centre of the film is a memory that Greta recounted to Barbara about an experience she had as a very young girl, a memory that stretches back to her time with her grandparents. In addition to this four-generational time, which links the Edinburgh-living Barbara back to her family on Orkney, there are two manifestations of living time: the waves that come into the cave where Greta is stranded, with their rapid and repeated movement; and the rocky shore itself, images to which the end of the film returns. The pebbles stay still and hold billions of years, the water moves fast in and out – in the film’s terms, we could call them the times of bedrock and pibroch: the haunting traditional Scottish song form, built of circling repetitions, that appears on the soundtrack with lyrics by Tait and music by Hector McAndrew, composer of the pibroch also heard in her film ‘Where I Am Is Here.’

But the ocean – blue-black permanent, and a deathly place for Barbara’s family – is also a subtle connection back to those bombs falling on the Pacific, whose fallout might circulate as far as Orkney via currents as Tait writes in her poem ‘Cave Drawing of the Water’: Some particle someone gets

Has been in the subterranean passage from the sea into Loch Ness,

If there is one.

As she adds in a closely-related poem in the same chapbook, ‘Hooray, Hooray, Hoo Ray Ray Ray,’

‘The effluvium from the atomic power station will be discharged into the sea.’

Ever since time began, men have thrown their rubbish into the sea,

Thinking in that way they got rid of it

…

It’s not easy to get rid of your empty tin cans and your waste radiation.

There’s something deadly about ragged sardine tins under all the house windows

And about clots of radiation in the sea.

Water circulates and encircles, which makes it so dangerous, not least because it is the ocean – the currents of the North Atlantic – that made Orkney a centre for trade from Neolithic times, as Tait marks in her poem ‘Standing Stones of Stenness.’ Kirkwall’s Viking sandstone cathedral must have been a daily reminder for Tait that this, too, was one of the great centres of the earth, however much Anderson and others advised her to move to London.

Rather than go to London, Tait worked to cultivate local film cultures in Scotland that were artisanal, horizontal, and popular: centres in and to themselves. So it makes sense that Tait would crown her career with Blue Black Permanent, which was shot in Edinburgh and in Orkney, where Greta travels to see her father. Although the island is never named, it’s identified by a flower that grows nowhere else in the world, as Greta remarks. Gerda Stevenson, the poet and performer cast as Greta, remarked in an obituary of Tait for The Orcadian, that:

The Primula Scotica grows in only a few northern coastal areas of Scotland. You have to go a long way to find it, and even then, it might elude you. This tiny wild flower, a symbol used by Margaret Tait in her film Blue Black Permanent, encapsulates the essence of the filmmaker herself, an intensely private person with a unique vision, firmly rooted in her native Orkney (quoted Neely, 292).

A self-fertilising plant requiring the balanced growing conditions of well-grazed grasslands, the Scottish primrose is scarce today, affected by changes to traditional farming, and house building. Its combination of delicacy and hardiness are also emblematic of Tait’s filmmaking, as is the way it holds grassland together. Small, in need of careful notice of recovery, it symbolises the world that Tait brought onto the screen through her attentive camera and writing, whose necessity continues to reverberate today. Here’s hoping that this wonderful restoration gives Tait’s blue-black sea, her mood of melancholy wonder, the permanence of the ephemeral, local flower that she captured through Greta’s gaze – not the permanence of the Cenotaph and the standing stones, whose monumentality she questioned; but the cyclical continuity of the waves, the plants, and the ongoing generations who carry her memory.

*

Over the end credits of Jem Cohen’s latest film, Museum Hours, an acoustic guitar track – haunting, unresolving – plays. It’s an instrumental version of a song by US singer-songwriter Liz Durrett, niece of Cohen’s long-time collaborator and friend Vic Chesnutt, who died in 2009. The song is called “Stop the Projector,” and the song’s placement at the end of the film is both witty and profound. Its equation of the disappearance of the image and death – that if we are not seeing, we are not being – runs through the whole film.

In a celebrity culture in which being seen is being, Cohen’s work with musicians such as REM, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Patti Smith, Elliott Smith, and Fugazi, as well as Chesnutt, imagines otherwise. As Michael Almereyda notes in his interview with Cohen in Artforum in 2005, for many viewers the most striking moment in Instrument (1999), his Super-8 Fugazi tour documentary, comes not from seeing the band onstage, but from the series of portraits of fans queuing for the shows. Spectral, almost feral, these portraits of people waiting-to-see – being seen in their desire to see – are a keynote of Cohen’s art.

In Museum Hours, as in his first narrative feature Chain (2004), Cohen casts non-professional actors in the film’s three speaking roles. Johann, the film’s witness protagonist and voiceover narrator, is played by Bobby Sommer, whom Cohen met through the Viennale, where Sommer works in guest relations, and whose life story (managing punk bands) informs Johann’s. By contrast, Anne, a visitor to the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum where Johann works, is played by Mary Margaret O’Hara, the notoriously publicity-shy Canadian singer. Like the UK’s Kate Bush, O’Hara resisted the music business’ expectations as to how she would perform herself as a female celebrity; as a result, her face and voice will be unfamiliar to many of the film’s viewers. The two songs she sings in the film are her first original material recorded since 2000. The tangential location of both Sommers and O’Hara in relation to the music/fame business, and their option to remain independent of it, underlines their unusual performances – or perhaps, appearances – in Museum Hours, as they explore looking as well as being looked at.

When we first see Anne (who is only named in the credits), it is only the back of her head as she talks on the phone; her profile and full face are revealed slowly, over many scenes. The shift is repeated, finally, in her final scenes before leaving Vienna and the film: as she sings to herself, we see only the back of her head, before there is a cut to a profile. Cohen has a singular gift for the non-intrusive gaze, for making his act of looking as a filmmaker something that exactly reveals, rather than commodifies. His filmmaking practice is rooted in street photography, which, as Colin Westerbeck points out in the monumental history that he edited with photographer Joel Meyerowitz, is a genre unique to camera technology. Westerbeck emphasises instantaneity, but Cohen’s move to film underlines another key quality: anonymity. Both the photographer and the subject are anonymous, to each other and to the world at large – yet, paradoxically, achieve a kind of known-ness (to each other, and to the viewer of the picture) through the action of making the photography.

Fascinated by the face in the era of photography, philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote that, “The face is the only location of community, the only possible city.” It is this sense of shared identity rooted in looking that Cohen brings forth. The film opens with an artful shot of Johann framed by the mighty oak door behind him, and roped off like the paintings. Later, he described his job as “looking at the visitors.” Both the shot and the statement productively undermine the looking relations that museums appear to set up: art hangs; visitors look at it; guards surveill their behaviour. For both visitors and guards, the art is inert and framed by its monetary value. Instead, Cohen presents Johann as a framed art object for our contemplation, and simultaneously makes him active, looking back at us, the viewers. Rather than paranoid surveillance, he is both a practised observer showing us how to look, and a guardian angel: noticing, for instance, the student who might shyly linger behind his school group to look at the erotic contours of a classical male nude.

This work of noticing, of being alive to what he sees, leads him form the relationship that drives the film, offering assistance to flustered Montréaler Anne, in Vienna to attend the bedside of a comatose cousin. Anne and Johann’s fleeting connection is reminiscent of Cohen’s previous feature, Chain, where the title metamorphosed from describing the economic and linguistic barriers between the two female protagonists to the fragile possibility of connection between them. Anne and Johann’s names echo those of SS. Anne and Joachim, the parents of the Virgin Mary. Saint Anne’s emblem, as patron of pregnant women, is a door, that paradoxical site of entry and exclusion: through his interaction with Anne, the door that Johann appears to guard in the film is slowly revealed as open. From the classical, passive framing of Johann at work, the film opens up the museum: as well as skateboarders outside the windows, there are headscarved women cleaning the stairs; in one sequence, museum visitors become as naked as Lucius Cranach’s Adam and Eve.

Johann and Anne’s friendship begins with his explanation of a map of the city, but progresses through looking at paintings, connecting what’s inside and outside the museum. Museum Hours arrives on UK screens at a moment when such distinctions are being challenged, with street photography finding a home in museums, particularly Tate Modern, with its exhibitions on surveillance, and of the work of William Klein and Daido Moriyama. Rather than hanging photographs in the museum, the film practises street photography in the Kunsthistorisches’ hushed chambers, and cross-cuts between the museum and the streets – particularly two sequences of flea markets – with equal regard. Like Agnès Varda in Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse, Cohen does not so much juxtapose classical art and marginal urban life as reconnect them; while Varda used the practice of gleaning as both subject and metaphor for her film, Cohen roots that connection in the paintings of Jan Brueghel the Younger, who is described in the film as having disguised himself as a peasant in order to paint their lives.

As well as providing a genealogy for the themes (if not the instantaneous practice) of street photography in Brueghel’s vivid ‘snapshots’ of lived experience, the paintings are the subject of a centrepiece discussion by lecturer Gerda, who firmly leads her tour group to perceive the world differently, to look at the horse’s ass instead of acting like one. Taking their pat, presumptive answers about Brueghel’s greatness, piety and timelessness, she leads them – and us – to take time with the pictures, and to see time in them: Brueghel’s time, our time, and the unfolding of time itself. This is the ‘scenic route,’ as Johann wryly names his toilet directions for annoying museum visitors. Implied in his phrase is the visitors’ hurried lack of looking, both for signage and at the artworks, and an invitation for the viewer to practice the contrary.

As with Chain, the title of Museum Hours alters and expands – as Johann moves his job description – from meaning a set of imposed limitations and rules on access to high culture, to suggesting the dilation of time made possible by what the museum saves from time, the time it asks us to spend in looking. At the end of the film, Johann describes, in voice over, a series of Super-8 images, their near-square 1.33: 1 aspect ratio centred within the thick black borders of the film frame. At first the viewer presumes these to be restagings of unseen paintings, but as the images become more firmly located in Vienna and the present, it is clear that Johann is – somehow – watching the film we are seeing. While voice-overs are frequently used in documentaries to direct the viewer, it is a beautifully democratic gesture to locate the voice-over speaker as a member of the audience, someone watching the film as we are. The final shots show, as Johann describes, “a store that once housed a locksmith, but now has orange plastic in its window,” like the gatekeeping institution of the museum that now includes film, photography, installation and found art; and a junk shop, “that is by some strange decree… only open between four and six.” Cohen’s longstanding interest in artists and art classified in marginal, found and outsider reframes the Kunsthistorisches as a junk shop with odd opening hours, a site for strange discoveries, itself an artwork in the frame.

Throughout the film, Cohen raises questions about the ownership of art and its meaning. These closing shots of Vienna’s streets, like several in the film, occur from canted angles and with a fixity reminiscent of CCTV cameras, a pervasive surveillance humanised by Cohen’s approach. Control of the image is re-democratised; the film’s shots of museum visitors using camera phones and audio guides are documentary rather than judgemental, as of people at the flea market trying on shoes in the snow. Here, the film says, is a culture trying on new ways of looking: they are both disruptive and productive, necessary and uncomfortable. The sequences inside the museum were shot on digital, intercut with Super-8 exteriors: an experiment, an investigation into new technologies of vision, that marks Cohen’s hybrid, punk style.

Yet the film also locates this experimentation in the classical painting that Anne and Johann first discuss: one of the Kunsthistorisches’ four flower still life studies by Jan “Flower” Brueghel, father of the better-known “peasant painter.” Hesitantly, Anne reads from the text panel next to the painting, her vision moving back and forth between the two, that the elder Brueghel was the first to paint one flower stem in front of another, a visual practice and metaphor that could describe Museum Hours’ insistence on seeing everything in relation rather than hierarchy or separation.

She also notes that the foremost flower is a black mourning iris: a powerful verbal play on the film’s gaze, out of eyes dark with looking at poverty, illness and death, in the hospital, the street but also – as a montage of severed head paintings shows – the museum. At the end of the film, as Anne looks out the window in a pose similar to the opening shot, she sings that “in the darkness, you’ll see so clearly.” This is the film’s manifesto for cinema, but beyond that, for ways of looking. Although she looks the same, Anne’s looking has been altered profoundly by her friendship with Johann during her cousin’s coma and death; alive with all she has seen, she comes into view just in time to disappear.