Mike: If our waitress knew what we wanted to order before we said a word…
Fan: …there would be no desire.
Mike: If only you could complete all of my sentences.
Fan: Desire relies on miscommunication and trying to fill the gaps. If the waitress understood what we didn’t understand ourselves—if there was a smooth telepathy of desire—there would be no hunger. And of course no desire.
Mike: You mean desire is based on getting what you don’t know you want? It’s a wonder that algorithms work so well.
Fan: There is no I that is not already we. A Taoist and a Buddhist walk into a bar.
Mike: The bartender asks: what will you have? A long silence follows.
Fan: Of about 400 years. Let’s oscillate between talking about the films and around them. Your films feel like they’re part of a life’s work that doesn’t stop at cinema. It’s about your relationships, your sound art, your impromptu forms. Not every shot has to be perfect, the perfection is in the impromptu-ness. Can you explain why I have this feeling?
Mike: Perhaps because it feels familiar? You’re also someone whose work comes out of your relationships in a restless and unending flow. Your work is responsive and interlinked, enlivened by chance encounters, along with steadily growing circles of friends and familiars. I think it’s about digesting or trying to make sense of what you’re going through at the moment. That could turn into a performance, a song, even a movie. “You” equals you plus whomever you’re around. I’m tempted to name your practice yoga, though it has little to do with striking poses. But it is a yug, a union, a coming together. Every expression arises out of contact.
The way you invite us to speak feels like part of your lifelong yoga practice, which you’ve kindly asked me to join. Oh look, there’s already a seat waiting at the table. The question of company, of someone sitting close, feels central to your work. Unlike me, still lost in the old world dream of a solitary self that left long ago. Your fantasies are mutual and co-created, part of a conversation that breaks only so that another can begin.
Fan: Your practice is no less dialogic; you present a self composed of dialogic fragments. Maybe you don’t need the flesh and blood of others. Perhaps a book, a citation, a look out the streetcar window is enough.
Mike: A dangerous propensity.
Fan: Dangerous for whom? Despite your appetite for being alone, your films are filled with collections of faces. Individual portraits come together to create community pictures. How do these collectives square with your solitude?
Mike: My (now dead) friend Mike Cartmell assured me that good teachers always teach one thing, no matter the subject. What he couldn’t tell me is that they are primarily concerned with what they don’t know, or are unable to do. For me that is community. My self-regulating solitudes are unfortunately encouraged in a neoliberal moment where differences and isolationisms are favoured, even while new forms of coalition and getting along are urgently required.
Perhaps I’m trying only to suggest that the wound is the path. My kryptonite is community though it remains the whispered hope behind every form of cinema. To create pop-up families at every screening. But crowded rooms fill me with anxieties that demand escape. In other words, the only thing that gives me pleasure doesn’t give me pleasure.
But meeting you offers a path not taken. The grace with which you summon an exacting attention, and ask someone to join you in that field of attention, feels like the heart of your practice. I can only begin to imagine the endless line of supplicants who have fallen into this warming embrace, encouraged to go on and on, as you soak up their cries for attention. Like you’re doing now. Because you’ve cultivated your bodhisattva service practice across a lifetime, how could you notice that the keen interest you have in leaning into people’s needs is not the way most of us behave.
Fan: I have a compulsion for authenticity. (That’s off the record.) I have to defend myself but only as a way to get back to your project. The call is limitless and I need to respond.
Mike: It’s a choiceless choice.
Fan: Just say yes to the cry of the other. Is cinema a way for you to conjure communities that you cannot touch in real life? Each film ends with a list of collaborators and influencers. Perhaps what is being named is the temporary community that made the project possible?
Mike: When something is missing, language speaks. Though I hear in your question a variation on one of the most traditional post-screening queries: why did you do that? For anyone who believes in the unconscious, answers are out of reach. Why did that person become your best friend? Why did you choose that shade of orange? Why can’t you talk to me instead of making that film?
Fan: The proposal of psychoanalysis suggests that the unconscious speaks all the time. Anything you say points to the answer, even if there isn’t one.
Mike: I guess we’re always saying it.
Fan: It turns out the unconscious is collective. Another old chestnut. If it weren’t for the q and a format, I don’t think we would have ever met.
Mike: I have no memory. I have no memory. I have no memory. Let’s hold up our phones and say it again.
Fan: The language in your films became easier to digest on second viewing, especially Skinned and Ice Cream. The parts of me that read language and read images are not always in sync. Nor are your images and language generally in sync. After the American Election is more bite-sized, the visuals aren’t doing as much work.
Mike: After the American Election shows 14 speakers in black-and-white, faces framed in close-up. We used a trick from Sacha Vierny, Peter Greenaway’s once upon a time cinematographer, who would throw light into bowls of slowly moving water to create shadows. Each offers one or two sentences, recounting a dream. I say to my friend, ‘Do you have a gun?’ because she lives in the South, where a lot of white people have guns. She doesn’t answer me exactly, she takes a gun out of her purse and shoots me. It’s an adaptation of Lucy Corin’s Night Terrors, which presents a collection of her pals’ dreams following Trump’s first electoral win in 2016.
Fan: This quote from Skinned stuck to me. “To plug the need for contact with the drug of perpetual attention.”
Mike: Sounds like a summary of the internet project. If we couldn’t go online, what would that contact look like?
Fan: That’s the question the film poses.
Mike: Internet technology has become newly central to our lives. The film asks: how has it changed who we are? The five faces/voices in Skinned offer a post-internet refuge, a small set of sci-fi figures who are offered up as everyday figures of resistance, attempting to live outside the hand-me-down corporate frame. Suddenly, the internet has stopped working. Here are five accounts of what that might feel like. Each glamorous, overly designed, techno face appears in slow motion, as metal fragments and digital detritus slowly circle the contested terrain of the face.
I wonder, is it just a coincidence that computers spread everywhere at the same moment of the AIDS crisis? I wonder if part of the urge to escape feeling, to plug the need for contact with the drug of perpetual attention, comes from the anxiety that we will one day be the last ones left. Skinned
Fan: For the past year, the internet has delivered pictures of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, shot and uploaded by the people who are bearing witness to the deaths of their own families, neighbours, children. And yet corporate media in the west is trying to deny the undeniable. The truth of their deaths.
Mike: Each morning begins for me with a short clip from Middle East Monitor, made that day by Palestinians in Gaza, showing someone lined up for food, or searching for the remains of their family in the rubble. Prisoners released after months of torture. How to eat knowing they are being starved to death? How to make pictures, when these are the only pictures that matter, and they don’t matter? What is the meaning of culture in a genocide? I’ve stopped making films, attended dozens of demos, written how many letters, but then?
My short film Rain is based on the poem Red Sea: April 2002 by Aurora Levins Morales, a disabled Puerto Rican Jewish writer and activist. The film holds out the hope that notions of a promised land for chosen people can be left behind, instead of becoming cornerstones for apartheid. How to understand difference as a way to bring people together, instead of dividing lines that separate who is human and who is not.
The collusion of arms manufacturers, banks, universities, prestige cultural orgs, shipping companies like Denmark’s Maersk, and of course western corporate media has made killing Palestinians one of the crowning achievements of neoliberalism. They have also helped turn the ongoing project of Jewish identity into an apartheid state—what else to name this but anti-semitism?
Fan: I’ve been reading a book called Post-Europe by Yuk Hui. He’s trying to understand how we can resist the Europeanization of technology. Euro-American colonialism is the driving force behind the development and uses of technology, minus marginal instances of non-corporate collectives. Hui wants individuated cosmo-technics. He argues that localities should develop their own relationships to technology that are not beholden to a West European model.
In the 20th century, China industrialized in order to keep up with the global economy, it might have been the last chance for tech to go in a different direction and create a competing cosmology. But after China embraced markets, there’s been no major force of resistance. It would be different if China were ruled by Taoist sages or even Buddhist oligarchs. What would the internet look like if it were based on a Buddhist cosmology?
I was challenged by a student recently on my translation of wu wei as “effortless effort.” He criticized it for being too literal. He offered an alternative take: “return to nature.”
Mike: But what is nature? Or what isn’t? I feel two figures in our conversation. One of us is a line that becomes a circle. The other is the empty space inside the circle. Would you care to take a side?
Fan: I think we’re both.
Mike: Thank you master. You are always adding, opening, embracing. It seems the lessons never end because the last word is always and. Shall we call this: the and?