Brakhage Symposium, Boulder, March 1, 2025
The biggest change in culture in my lifetime is the centrality of the archive. What is an archive? A collection. A collection of stones, of letters, of sneakers. The archive used to be a place where these items were stored, but then the archive dematerialized, turned into ghosts, so we could all carry them around. The archive, newly mobile, is so important we wouldn’t think of going anywhere without it.
Side note: The biggest companies today don’t make anything – Amazon, Google, Uber, Air b’n’b, Meta – they just shuffle information around an archive.
Why has the archive become so important? Many people have big ideas about this, here’s mine. If climate scientists around the world are correct, and how could they not be correct, we are coming to the end of the human experiment. A hundred years, a hundred fifty years, it’s over. So why is every art organization, no matter how small and insignificant, busy working on their archives? I think our culture is driven by grief. We’re trying to gather the marks and traces as we hurtle towards the end.
The last film we saw is called Nazareth and it begins with light. If we want to see something, we’ll need to turn on the light. What does the slow motion camera flash show us? A picture in negative. How does the movie end? The same picture in positive. This is the narrative, not the story, but the narrative arc, from negative to positive. How do we get there? We look at four people, isolated in their own frames. The father folded inside himself, the mother who takes one step forward, the daughter with her arms open wide and the kid soldier with the droopy gun.
I did not make this photograph, I wasn’t born yet. And I didn’t make this film. The movie is a separate autonomous being, with its own needs, quirks, intelligence, sensibility. It began as a photograph, in negative and in positive, and those two pictures were the beginning of a line. My job, like Johnny Cash, is to walk the line. To unfold the film that is waiting there, as a potential. The first task of the filmmaker is to recognize these enfolded films, the films that are waiting to be unfolded. The second task is the unfolding.
The question that haunts this photograph is the question that haunts every archive. How to make this photograph visible? How to let this photograph live in this present moment with us? When you walk the line the answer is clear: It seems a story must be told, the ghosts need to speak. And so the line draws us into the cinema, which is the place where ghosts speak.
When a country is born it also draws a line. And that line often separates who is human and who is not human. I know that you are very familiar with this, because America began, just like my country, Canada, as an apartheid state. Just like my country you started with a lot of killing, and then you passed hundreds of laws that ensured that black people, Hispanic people, Indigenous people couldn’t go to certain schools, or they could only have certain jobs, or live in certain neighbourhoods, or not live at all. Does it surprise me that my government supports a radical apartheid government in the middle east? We did all that shit too, burn down the houses, kill all the women and children, rape the prisoners, it’s only too familiar. I wanted to show the movie here because in my country legacy media still calls this the Israeli-Hamas war. But we know better. We know that Hamas is just a code word for dead Arab n*ger. And we know that this is a Canadian war. A German war. A Dutch, British, and French war. But most of all, this is an American war.
The Nazareth movie is a fairy tale. It’s based on the fairy tale premise that Palestinians are human. Even though American corporate media is telling the world every day that this is not true.
The first movie is called Skinned. Like its companion, it is made from the archive. I did not find them, they found me. I was looking for something else, I was helpfully distracted so that my unconscious could locate what was important, necessary, urgent. My distraction helped get me out of the way, so the right choices could be made, choices that had nothing to do with me. Instead, I could let the material choose me.
These images are part of a digital showreel, very popular on the internet. There are so many high-tech wizards, “Hey hey check out this crazy shit I can do. You can’t afford not to hire me.” In the old days suitcases were filled with samples, dreams you didn’t dare to dream. Today a motion picture display case rolls out and there they are, already presenting as a family, a set, a collection. They were calling out to be rescued from their status as loss leader and revenue potential accelerator. The question is: how could these faces be made visible? How to let them live in the present moment? It seems a story must be told, the ghosts need to speak. There was a line already waiting for someone to walk it. When a virus comes and sweeps away the internet you might say, “We used to have movie stars and famous musicians. Now we had each other.”
