Life in Film: The Otolith Group

The Otolith Group was formed in 2002 in London and creates art works, curates exhibitions, programmes events and designs platforms for discussion of contemporary artistic practice. The group’s members are: curator, writer and artist Anjalika Sagar, who was a founder of Multitudes, the independent news network established in 2000, and moderator of the Undercurrents list-serve; and Kodwo Eshun, a writer, artist and curator who is Course Leader of the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and will be Visiting Professor in the Critical Studies and Experimental Practices programme at University of California, San Diego, USA, in 2007.

These are some of the films that inspire and provoke us. They are structured mysteriously, rather like the greatest songs, and have been chosen for our friends. Before you watch them, please spare four minutes to listen to Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’.

For Walid: Elephant, directed by Alan Clark (1989). A non-narrative anti-drama of grimly focused walking, emotionless shooting at point-blank range and the sound of car tyres in Irish suburbs. Clark distilled colonial Irish conflict into an abstract ritual that goes nowhere with an inexorable, self- fulfilling reciprocity. We like to think of Elephant as Sol LeWitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ replayed as assassination fantasy.

For Christine: Who Needs A Heart, directed by John Akomfrah (1992). We are working on the first retrospective of the Black Audio Film Collective, to premiere at FACT and Arnolfini in 2007 and Whitechapel in 2008. In March this year we held a mini-retrospective of three BAFC films in Beirut. Who Needs A Heart provoked the best responses; audiences were fascinated by Akomfrah’s oblique portrait of political exhaustion and racial infatuation in a 1960s’ London spellbound by Michael X, Britain’s Black Power anti-hero. Ninety per cent of the dialogue in Who Needs A Heart is muted, which is striking enough; equally compelling, though, are Edward George and Akomfrah’s deeply provocative script and the sound-track by Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and Anthony Braxton, among others, arranged by Trevor Mathison, one of the greatest sound-recordists and film composers working in Britain today.

For Tony: 79 Springtimes, directed by Santiago Alvarez (1969). A tender goodbye to Vietnamese communist Ho Chi Minh, set to exalted Prog Rock, which luxuriates in close-ups of waving hands and fingers tapping cigarettes. Abruptly it switches to wartime footage, soldiers canoeing upriver, shootings at point-blank that exceed the newsreel to fire at the medium itself; Alvarez joins in, attacking, assaulting and vandalizing the film strip; celluloid rips, tears and splits in explosions of light. Not so much a deconstruction as a calculated destruction of representation itself.

For Rabih: Jaguar, by Jean Rouch (1954–67). Three likeable fellows from a fishing village in late 1950s’ Niger decide to travel abroad to seek their fortunes in glamorous Accra, capital of the Gold Coast, which will soon become the Republic of Ghana. Which they do, and several adventures are had by all, adventures that will change them for ever. What complicates this Bildungsroman are the ways in which the three friends narrate their travels a full seven years after the events we see, in a voice-over that moves between past, present and future anterior, which passes between documentary and fiction, and reveals, moment by moment, how art makes life more complicated than art.

For Lina: Ganja and Hess, directed by Bill Gunn (1973). Dr Hess Green is a handsome, ultra-sophisticated art historian and Classical archaeologist; Ganja is the lordly lady who moves into his mansion after her husband commits suicide after stabbing Dr Green with an ancient Mithran dagger that renders him vampiric. Ganja and Hess is quiet, literate, thoughtful and sombre – as far from Blaxploitation as it is possible to get. Its luminous cinematography and fascinating modulation from refined Europhilia to sophisticated Afrophilia constitute an African-American art-house movie that remains unparalleled to this day.

For Akram: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, directed by William Greaves (1968). In Central Park: various couples repeatedly rehearse a screen test in the afternoon sun under the indulgent eye of the director. The script is acrimonious yet somewhat clichéd, the actors tense and awkward. The crew is unnerved and wrong-footed by the filmmaker, played by William Greaves himself, whose directing style is infuriating, inconclusive, vague and deliberately contradictory. At their wits’ end, they borrow a camera and film themselves debating the shoot in urgent, rambling, evening discussions. The frame splits in two. Greaves encourages his crew in their Palace Revolution; obstreperous tramps wander onto the non-set to hijack the non-movie, sound levels repeatedly stutter and glitch; through it all glides the sound-track of In a Silent Way: serene, serious, enigmatic.

For Lamia: The Gleaners and I, dir-ected by Agnès Varda (2000). With an exacting eye Agnès Varda’s film scrutinizes 19th-century French paintings of workers labouring in the wheat fields; allowing her to speculate on the relation of art to labour, cinema to paint, the history of media to the history of a present in which gleaning continues among the poor and the eccentrics of contemporary France. Her portraits of these figures, who persist in eking out a living in the margins of French society, evade piety through an aesthetic that is at once grave and gracious.