Yearning as method - notes on programming
Watch this text as a performance lecture, commissioned by the Independent Cinema Office by clicking the image below
Yearning as method in programming
- Yearn. Desire. Yearn. Repeat.
- Remember Akilandeswari. (“To be embodied is to always be in flight.”)
- Remember “description is not liberation”
- Remember “practice makes different” (not perfect).
- Listen “in that fine space / between desire and always
the grave stillness / before choice.”
- Try to (under)stand Try to (under)stand Try to (under)stand
I
Diptych
A diptych is an artwork made up of two pieces that together create a singular work. The two pieces can be attached together or presented adjoining each other.
Latifah and Himli’s nomadic uncle is one film but through the parallel movements of its titular characters, it appears like a moving diptych. Latifah and Himli seem interchangeable even as they are antagonistic. They are both/and not either/or.
II
Writing in Space
“Description is not liberation … Description is not liberation …Description is not liberation.” – Katherine McKittrick Dear Science
“practice makes different.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore
As I find ways to write toward both/and I am introduced to the writings of artist Lorraine o Grady who describes a lifetime of practice in considering how an expansive conception of the diptych might be a challenge to the binary of either/or in western thought. At heart a writer, her consciousness of the power of concurrence in her being - “the stages [shes] lived through and the multiple personalities [she] contains” means she is unable to to commit “linearity of writing.” In order to “layer information the way [she] perceives it, [she] needs the simultaneity she could only obtain in space.”
In a writing workshop, I bring a final draft of this piece, with intention to write away from description and towards sensation. The workshop leader says that my writing is like two halves - description and sensation - that constitute a movement inside and outside the poetic realm. Inside and outside of vulnerability, inside and outside of risk. Don’t hide out in the critique he says.
Stay inside the poetry.
“…if the demand of a certain kind of anti-racist siege that we explain, and explain, and explain again, then it seems that poetics is that inhabitation of opacity and refusal of the imposition of a certain kind of sense-making project, and the refusal of that project in its terms of legibility are key to producing this otherwise.”
— Sadiya Hartman
In a class where I learn about the nervous system, after a practice, someone shares they got lost in the story of their sensation. The facilitator tells us to touch in and touch out of story as our sense making instincts arise. Don’t hide out in the story she says.
Stay inside the bodily sensation.
III
Practice makes different
I am thinking about programming Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle as a practice towards difference and change.
Today I am wondering what might happen if instead of beginning with the kind of introduction that appears when we commit the linearity of words to page and then speak them from a stage, we instead formed a collective practice of writing in space. What if we began with a practice that could hold simultaneity and space? What might practising layering these realms of the visual and cognitive, with felt sensation make different?
What might a practice that considered simultaneity and space not just between the programmer and audience and the film, but inside each of us and between each of us change?
First
Imagine that the theory or teachers I offer are like honey, and you are placing a spoon in what they offer.
If the conditions are right, the honey will stick to the spoon, but if they aren’t maybe it won’t adhere
yet.
In any case not all of it will stick and some of it might spill everywhere.
Remember how it feels.
Second
Stand.
Imagine you are a tree and your feet are your roots.
Imagine the ground is holding you up with the same force gravity holds you down.
Imagine the ground has everything you need close by.
Remember how it feels.
Third.
Take a break from the screen.
Look straight ahead
Now move your eyes and your head to the right, slowly so as not to jam your neck, track everything you see.
Take it in, move on.
Now move your head slowly back to the centre and to the left and repeat.
See if your shoulders drop, you yawn, or your belly gurgles.
Remember how it feels.
" in that fine space
between desire and always
the grave stillness
before choice.”
– Audre Lorde Echoes
IV
Recognition
When Latifah and Himli talk about “where I come from” they signal to ideas of xenophopbic verification, one that hinges on checking, ticking and clearing for entry.
The question “where are you from” - appeals to a sense of nostalgia: tell me about when you “belonged” so I can place you. By participating in this line of questioning we reveal the lack of choice that is at the heart of recognition based on conditional access.
In Latifah and Himli, both colonial gatekeeping and immigrant nostalgia leads to a dead end. Access to an overcrowded city, suburbia, assimilative belonging is not the recognition their uncle or their ancestors ever sought.
They prefer to keep it moving.
In programming,
you (who are you, where are you from, where do you work, where do you programme)
you,
once you are verified in turn verify.
By programming by region, or genre, theme or period, ideas are enclosed in the films, meaning is attached in order to explain why they belong.
Inside every act of choice is something about where you have been before and what you have wanted, but the space where the traces of this movement and this desire reside disappears somewhere as you present your choices.
“We need to have a cognitive schema as well as practical mastery of way-finding”
– Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is teaching me about geography.
In a podcast she says “it might be interesting to listeners to understand that geographers don’t make maps. Rather, we think about, we ask ourselves: Why do things happen where they do?
She repeats because she knows that practice makes different “Why do things happen where they do?”
Programmers can act like map makers placing things, creating borders, apportioning visibility and connecting and disconnecting regions, languages, specificities creating generalities, affinities and resonances. These acts of placing can assimilate ways of seeing that haven’t been placed, as it is seen that in order to be seen one must see a certain way.
Programming can be a mimetic practice between programmes too - “this is programmed because it has been acknowledged that this work is important. It has been mapped elsewhere in a different place, so I can place it too. This is canon now because I put it on my list or it's always been on the list: it's a classic.”
Or you might programme to affirm the necessity of taking space and place: that something that has been historically ignored should no longer be, you found it and you want others to find it too.
Even though affirming and confirming are supposedly welcoming acts of inclusion, there is a rigidity in the recognition that programming like this can provide - a story about who gets to confer the inside and the outside, one that is fixed, enclosed and set in the binaries of correct and incorrect, ethical and unethical, old and new.
When preparing for this, I read a piece of press written about a programme I included Latifah and Himli in in 2017. 2017 is not that long ago, I think the programmer I was in 2017 is the beginning of the programmer I am now, or perhaps she is the dying breath of the programmer I used to want to be.
Underneath my statement about the film that feels now wholly misrepresentative of both myself and my connection to it Alnoor Dewshi explains his motivations for making it:
“I felt there was a gap in the market for films about Asian girls with big hair,”
“Also it’s an alternative perspective on the debate about cultural identities raging in the 90s. ‘Where I come from, we don’t worry about where we come from’ sums it up! Nomadic culture is portable. They scorn settlement, occupy space, and move on when they need or choose to.”
*
I am learning as I am watching Latifah and Himli move that I feel and have felt the need to connect to the idea of recognition that appears to offer sovereignty but cannot always confer true freedom. In the past recognition has felt an urgent necessity, a story that has enabled and propelled my programming practice. More recently I have attached to a newer story: one that describes and exposes the ways recognition draws us all in and stops us from moving. As I propel myself into the future, I wonder if there is something beyond a desire for belonging, beyond a desire to describe.
Latifah and Himli pass these two stories between each other as they walk, and as they walk their ping pong is interrupted with images of expansive space - the landscape of their choice. These spaces between my old self, my present self and my future self, the spaces between the pursuit of belonging, suspicious criticality, and something else, make me think of So Mayer’s reflection on the idea of making a list of the greatest films of all time. “all time means the futures we need, the pasts we have been cut off from or denied and the possibilities are endless. There is no ‘greatest’, just the inducement to imagine together”
V
An Old Story
What I am trying to say, and what Dewshi is trying to laugh at in the quote above when he says that he though there was a gap in the market for films about Asian girls with big hair,” is that in the past I played Latifah and Himli for the basic crumbs of recognition - recognition that brown girls walked and talked in films too, recognition that films about south asian women existed, recognition that a subjective film programming practice might include subjects who looked and moved like me. Recognition of lineage, recognition of erasure and historic ambivalence, recognition of my discovery,
recognition, recognition recognition.
In this pursuit, another game of ping pong - difference becomes sameness and sameness passes back difference. Recognition is only conferred when something familiar is found in the other to superficially connect us —an accent, an attitude, a shared disgust.
Part of what led me to this dead end was that my programmes are often put together like a piece of writing. What Laura U Marks calls an argument. But I think for me it was always a story.
Programming in this way sometimes leads us away from the ways film is composed of non linear elements of light and weight, motion , space, time and sound. Story is only one way to describe and experience film. But in film programming, ‘aesthetics’ or letting the work speak for itself can also become attached to a kind of curatorial swagger, where you get to decide what is good and bad, pleasing and unpleasing, legible and illegible. As B Ruby Rich puts it “the magical and utterly unsubstantiated notion of ‘quality’ protects a curatorial agenda from critique.”
Unable to embody detachment or curatorial swagger I have always wrapped my programmes up in a story about myself, my subjective reactions to work rather than mapping them in cinematic history, or aesthetic movement.
I am interested in ideas of subjectivity in film programming. I am interested in subjectivity from me as a film programmer but also in recognising and communicating that subjectivity outwards. A subject needs an object though, and so in this interest I am now realising I have also been playing out a repetition between oppression and domination in my programmes, my writing and in the spaces I’ve gravitated towards.
This explains why for a long time I imagined I could by changing the content, the actors and the mode of address I could interrupt the repetitive norms of programming and make it a method and vehicle of recognition. This strategy was a form of fortification - a way to protect my curatorial agenda of subjectivity from critique: a way to surround myself in case of attack.
But this strategy was not just a defensive wall, but also an opening, a desire for reciprocity which is yet another kind of ping pong. I am here thinking, writing and speaking about film programming but I am wondering about this attachment because I am deeply suspicious about the practice of film programming in most contexts even as I am attached to sharing and exposing the things that are most suspicious. I wonder why I care about film programming and want to think with it when I am not entirely sure that the work and people who I attempt to care for in my programming practice can truly thrive in the norms that its rituals and practices represent.
Lauren Berlant writes that “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”
In programming, in the search for the thing we thought we set out for, we might discover that what we were actually searching for was witness for something bigger than the politics of recognition or representation. And we might grieve, knowing that representation and recognition is the only thing that the tool we have in our hands can deliver. In misrecognising the desire that is too big, too shameful, too full of yearning, we accept one that keeps us moving to the next incidence of cruel optimism. Maybe that is why a practised detachment in film programming is a safer place to inhabit than the subjectivity that I have moved in and out of.
I see in my past programmes a programmer moving inside and outside of desire. Finding ways to embody detachment as a position of knowing and invulnerability and practicing attachment as a position of questioning and searching.
In my programmes I used the idea of subjectivity, of identification to dis-identify with the coolness of knowing detachment, but the apparatus of marketing, of onstage presentation, of cold and brightly lit foyers, and competition with others always drew me back into a place of cool knowingness.
Without knowingness you might be found out.
VI
Between Desire and Choice
To admit your surprising attachments, to trace your transformation over the course of a long (life) sentence, is sentience—that’s what I’ve learned. The pain of paying attention pays me back in the form of eloquence: a sound pleasure.
— Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
I am imagining Latifah and Himli eye rolling at me. They scan their city and their people and they see what they already know. As they move their legs, we rarely see their heads turn to look around. They are always moving forward, they have seen the sides before. Refusing meaningless categories conferred to manage difference such as “Asian culture” they refuse also the nostalgic attachment of belonging. Their detachment to their surroundings is a detachment from the ways of being and relating that constitute this kind of recognition: they reach beyond the essentialisation of difference and sameness.
In their detachment they embody suspicious criticality, what Eve Sedgewick has called “paranoid reading” yet their moving interconnectedness embodies the ways that sovereignty is part of interdependence. If necessary suspicion constricts hope to survive, the pursuit of the spaciousness of choice expands the possibility of collective freedom.
Latifah and Himli’s bodily movement is a vital part of the choreography of their freedom. Movement keeps them attached to their knowing, at a remove from the colonial amnesia of assimilation. In dance a choreographer offers words to the dancer to place inside their bodies which they translate into movement. Here Latifah and Himli’s moving bodies decide to detach from words that want to attach themselves to their bodies and halt their movement.
Latifah and Himli mobilise the emotional power of duality, but they are not either, or, they are both, and. They are a duet, connected. Two bodies with two hands, eyes, ears, legs, feet - they perform sameness but are not interchangeable, walking in tandem they function separately. They embody a practice of exchange, friendship, sisterhood but through movement they also enact rupture, change and error.
In their movement, they outrun my embarrassing desire for recognition for reciprocity, for connection or belonging. They lead me into romantic reverie about ancestral knowledge, into expecting the voice of Lata Mangeshkar and instead give me the sound of a banged up ice cream van.
This is all part of knowingness too.
The Bridge Poem Donna Kate Rushin (1981)
I've had enough
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody
Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me Right?
I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks
To the Ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the
Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friends' parents...
Then
I've got the explain myself
To everybody
I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.
Forget it
I'm sick of it
I'm sick of filling in your gaps
Sick of being your insurance against
The isolation of your self-imposed limitations
Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners
Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches
Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people
Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip
I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your human-ness
I'm sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long
I'm sick of mediating with your worst self
On behalf you your better selves
I am sick
Of having to remind you
To breathe
Before you suffocate
Your own fool self
Forget it
Stretch or drown
Evolve or die
The bridge I must be
Is the bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses
I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful
“Part of our intellectual task is, then, to perhaps get in touch with the materiality of our analytical worlds. Part of our task is to read carefully and, when necessary, reckon with materiality of metaphor.It is worth repeating, then, that this is not a request to abandon metaphors. We need metaphors! Metaphors offer an (entwined material and imagined) future that has not arrived and the future we live and have already lived through.”
– Katherine McKittrick Dear Science
When we talk about programming often we talk about connecting films with audiences. In this space of brokering of connection, are lots of invisible forces like marketing spend, visibility, film rights and formats, preservation, subtitling and this is not even to mention who in the world even gets to make films in the first place - so many things that informs what works we show to whom when and where. Most of this is out of sight of the general audience, and I sometimes feel like it's a programmer’s job to make sure it remains hidden so the meeting between audience and film is protected: the fantasy of colonial encounter kept intact.
We visualise the space between audiences and the screen as an empty void so that we can be the bridge.
The pre-determined containers of the introduced screening, the screening and q&a and the architecture of screening spaces, raised stages, and more, place the programmer in the role of a reconciler between artistic genius and mortal audience.
Separately we sit on panels to talk about the industry, closed off from the work of filmmakers and the spaces they open up. If we used to be outsiders we talk about where we came from and how we came to be inside. Just as the question where are you from fixes identity in one place, the diversity panel offers an opportunity to show how you have moved from one side to the other. None of these containers leaves room to dwell in the quiet space of relation, where questions transcend the answers we can give them.
In her book Witnessing beyond recognition philosopher Kelly Oliver explains how our quests for recognition often result in misrecognition through a conceptual misconception of vision. We have a tendency to think of vision as something that can:
“bridge the abyss of empty space between the subject and its object …“Space, however, is not an empty void. It is full of air, light, and the circulation of various forms of electrical, thermal, mechanical and chemical energies that sustain us and connect us to each other and the world …In order to see, we first have to orient ourselves and keep ourselves steady in relation to the force of gravity. Vision, touch and basic orientation to the earth work together to produce sight”
VIII
Tree
A little while before I started writing this piece, I fell down the stairs. Airpods in, eyes on phone screen, I assumed that my body knew the way down the stairs. Descending onto the ticket level, I missed a step and landed on the side of my foot with all my distracted weight.
My foot landed on its side and the full force of my distraction cracked a section of bone, pulling the ligament away from another section. Pulled a shard of bone off.
Left it to float around in the space of my body.
My inattention meant that there was an instability that could not support my body to stay upright. Or perhaps, the falling was a sign that my attention was the stability I needed to stay upright.
I fell under the gaze of a group of TFL police.
For a minute as I fell one of the officers seemed to forget about his uniform, his eyes widened and he seemed like he was about to run to my aid. Then quickly his body remembered his uniform, his bulky protective vest perhaps restricted his movement, reminded him his job was to be primed to expect grave threat everywhere, not to run to the aid of a grown person who had simply missed a step. Correcting himself, he kept his distance, told me to “wait”,” sit down on the step”.
The little tears in my eyes prompted a “calm down. Take a minute”
“DON’T MOVE.”
Something about the clumsiness of my fall or the bodily memory of an effortless (and now impossible) yoga pose just a few hours before, made me feel the sense of being a fallen tree whose connections that rooted it to the earth were unstable. A small moment of inattention and I had toppled.
Untethered.
My belongings spread out around me were like damaged roots, searching for something close by to lift me back into stability and make movement possible again.
As I sat on the floor wondering if I could lift myself up , this sentence broke off from somewhere in my brain and started to float around my body:
You can't write poems about the trees when the woods are full of policemen
Bertolt Berecht.
When you twist your ankle, a key part of your vestibular system is impacted. The vestibular system is the sensory system that creates the sense of balance and spatial orientation in our bodies - for the purpose of coordinating movement with balance.
It allows us to move without falling.
The vestibular system is made up of input from the inner ear, the eyes and the ankle and foot. All three inputs result in postural stability.
When you sprain your ankle, your brain loses its main input from the ground as your foot stiffens up and refuses to weigh down on all its base. As the brain loses its full sense of the ground, it perceives threat and compensates by using other parts of the body, like your hip and your neck to move you forward. This creates pain and stiffness, all of which create a sense of heightened security.
Your body locks off,
is cordoned off.
The cop inside your head has police tape everywhere.
As my body stiffened up at different points in the days and weeks after I fell and attempted to walk again, I noticed I found myself looking out the corners of my eyes rather than straight through them, I found myself assaulted with sound rather than able to listen carefully, I found myself navigating space with deep suspicion.
A key part of the recovery process is reminding your foot that it is safe to walk on all of it, that you won’t fall. Through small repetitive movements, I was creating the conditions which would allow my foot to absorb the information from the ground that it needed to hold me up again.
IX
an old wound
I don’t know, but I sense that what I have just learnt about the ways my body understands and misunderstands space has something to tell me about what we might be missing when we conceive of ourselves as merely connectors and not as embodied actors in the relationship between filmmaker, film and audience.
How has what I have seen and heard been impacted by the different things I have felt under my feet?
How does the input between ears, eyes and ground change from body to body, from decade to decade?
When have I moved with grace and ease and stability?
When have I been lurching stiffly, clumsily forward, silently restricted and unaware?
When have I been a programmer who has been choosing without choice, practising towards sameness?
when have I been
mis(under)standing
mis(under)standing,
mis(under)standing?
When I have programmed Latifah and Himli, I have often included a quote from John Akomfrah in the film description where he calls it “an excellent film on Nomadology and the diasporic sublime."
Falling over, staying still and learning to move again helps me to understand in a felt sense the lessons of nomadology - the ways that our identities are not located in a single place, signifier or way of knowing. Learning about the vestibular system helps me to understand how much of Latifah and Himli’s ancestor’s desires to keep moving, to resist being fixed in place, were based on the harmonious functioning of a system which reciprocally connects the physical experience of movement with the imagined experience of stability and groundedness.
The diasporic sublime is both/and, not either or.
When I fall over and break my ankle, no one can tell me exactly what has happened. One nurse tells me the bone is broken, a doctor tells me that the ligament has torn a piece of bone away but its not broken, just cracked, my physio who is also an Ayurvedic doctor puts jelly on my ankle and through an ultrasound machine shows me an older, calcified injury.
This is an old wound she shows me.
In film programming like any professionalised, institutionalised practice, calcification is often hidden but always present.
Calcification and difference sit side by side. They brush up against one another and if you don’t pay attention, they will trip each other up and make something fall over. This wrapping around of calcification and difference can pull and pull and pull until something gives.
Then that something just floats around.
A floating signifier, loose enough to mean many things to many people, yet specific enough to galvanize action in a particular direction.
In Girish Shambu’s Manifesto for a New Cinephilia he differentiates between the old story of cinephilia and his proposal for a new one, one he describes that might be
“fully in contact with its present global moment—that accompanies it, that moves and travels with it.”
In 10 precise sections he shows us how the old story is not lost when we move away from it, but our collective ability to detach from its power over us grows. As we learn to not get drawn down the paths of the old narrative, we can discern between the urgency of the present and the conceit of the past
a cinephilia that can witness without the immediate need for recognition.
X
A New Method
In considering what a new method might look like, I want to practise an act of witnessing
(as Audre Lorde tells us there are no new ideas only new ways of making them felt)
and repetition.
I have gathered Keguro Macharia’s invitation to be curious, to muse on possibility, to follow the generosity of his call and have replaced his word method with the programming. I am wondering where it could lead us.
What if the aim of method [programming] is not to define an object or subject, not to mark out an area or field? What if method [programming] does not teach us how to ask questions?
….
What if above all else the goal of method [programming] is to assemble people around shareable scenes and situations? What if method [programming] is a call that gathers different people — I mean, call in the call and response tradition, not in the call for papers [submissions] sense. And what if method [programming] assembles us not to define borders around objects and scenes and situations and archives, and not even to break borders between across fields and disciplines.
What if method [programming] calls us to assemble so we can be curious, so we can share a wonder so we can muse on possibility, so we can follow the generosity of the call —all such calls must be generous — and so having learned from the call to be generous, we can extend similarly generous calls?
I am trying to think beyond “what is your method [programme]” to “who is gathered for your invitation.”
….
We gather here in this space, as those who have heard this call. We gather across difference. I continue to learn from Audre Lorde, that we gather across difference when there is a shared goal. And I always assume the shared goal is pursuing and practising freedom.
So I end with two questions.
How will you imagine freedom today?
How will you practise freedom today?
XI
A postscript for Leena
Dear Leena,
Do you remember the book So sent us when you were small? Aracelis Girmay, who is a poet, wrote it for her girl when she was small. She started it by making collages after a period of feeling so sad. Through the collages she taught herself something that her sadness showed her: the ways that places, people and relationships are always in movement, changing position, making new formations, appearing differently.
Reading about her process reminded me of some collages I made a while back and made me think about this piece I have just made - how it is a bit like a collage - and of how drawing with you makes me feel lighter and how seeing you put words and image together, helps me put mine together too. I wanted to share what she writes in a letter to herself before she began writing all the words and images in the book:
“In some books and in some stories that have only ever been told and not written, it is said that the earth slowly made its way into the form of man and woman; that, eventually, stones gave way to fire. Metamorphosis.
I have heard the stories of people held in bondage, in slavery, rising up from Georgia cotton fields as birds. I have seen the photographs of Adisogo’s heroes and have watched the tongues of women turn into a thousand ululatory lalalas like a flock of birds. The constant interaction between being and other being assures that this will happen always; experience of the world is physical and emotional osmosis. Those who are born near the sea will carry with them, always, some sense or salt from that sea - no matter how far away from it they travel.
Weathered by time and evolution, bodies turn themselves into other bodies, and others still. Sometimes it is the body that changes; we gain scars, grow the physical, move from our homes. There is life. There are births and there are deaths.
Sometimes the essence of a person changes.”
…
This is the story I will [write with you]