“i don’t understand you, but i love you.” affects aren’t symptoms. explanations are as difficult as they are rare. material conditions chip life and with it the logic between cause and effect. pain. pandemic. parentification. death. anti-blackness. fearful commitment. maternal disappointment. it all compounds until complaint and its circumstances reach a vanishing point. there will be no epiphany. wakeup wailing. a thousand grievances knotting in your jaw.

when the world is gone, who will carry you? 

when you fall 

ill with homesick heartbreak, where the one you thought would stand here is not. 

handover. a recorder. and you sob.

a longing that is no longer. grieving staunched desire. the people who once wished to be here. deictic and diasporic. 

happy together: a lighthouse for the brokenhearted who will watch until water covers the earth. 

[stills]

an abandoned mattress blooms into a lotus on the surface of a submerged construction site. kuala lumpur’s undercurrent swells. the part without part sinks into worn foam. meanwhile, forests burn. land is cleared. palm oil over migrant palms. oxygen smogged. intimacy is scarce. sex is not love. yet there’s touch. sound. music leaks through a tv in the streets. a pond develops. washing life. soaking the consumed. 

[stills]

“someone was looking at me.” a gaze disrupts solitude. yet the camera has been there all along. watching. even so, julie repurposes the window, a medium of objectification, to perceive herself. here, the window poses as the camera. outside on inside. look carefully, though. there’s more. julie. reflection. shadow. a geometrically distributed self. these differential figures temporarily jam the subject/object machinery that is cinema. visual écriture feminine.
 
[stills]

this film excavates the disparate routes of afrofuturism. however, to receive it as documentary risks disciplining afrofuturism’s latent negativity. it’s to confuse drexciyans with astronauts. spin back june tyson’s transmission. “it’s after the end of the world, don’t you…?” heard linguistically, the statement reinforces the sensemaking of this world. astronaut. on another frequency, its sonic materiality obliterates anti-black worlds from timespaces that cannot (yet) be decrypted. lardossa. 

[stills]

“i don’t care who you are.” law of the city dweller. apartment. street. transit. you live among strangers. life is private and privatized. it's lonely, crowded. and pandemic time only deepens the longing. 
 
“i don’t care who you are.” a call to intimacy without identity. music isn’t a window into the self. it’s a hole in subjectivity, an extinguished enclosure, a space for outstretched life. sonic hydration.  

[stills]

no one closes like kiarostami. not even derozan. fourth-quarter abbas. a few shots:

(1-3) a flowerpot under the trees and into the distance
(4) a notebook-pressed flower 
(5) a bouquet on a motorcycle 
(6) vegetation swaying in the wind while two ascend a hill
(7) thunder, then camcorder footage of white blossoms 

you know it’s game over if the clock is running out and someone’s holding flowers.

 “when al asked him during a scene, ‘is there any country you want to go to?’ cazale improvised his answer by saying, after long thought, ‘wyoming.’ to me that was the funniest, saddest line in the movie, and my favorite, because in the script he wasn’t supposed to say anything. i almost ruined the take because i started to laugh so hard… a brilliant, brilliant ad lib.”

if you squint, there are times when it appears as if brian cox is being mutilated. consequently, siksa kubur carries a grave risk of logan roy ideation. beyond this minor amusement, the film orbits an unfortunate paradox: the runtime seems infinite, yet it still manages to feel rushed (narratively, philosophically, and thematically). without focus, a staccato story, it suffers from blurry tunnel vision. a cgi mustard-tinted haze.

a ten-minute take that could crush the boulder of sisyphus.

and kaycee moore’s performance is the force.

“i’m tired. i’m tired.”

“i am tired. i am tired. i am tired.”

contraction to expansion. language brakes. even the camera’s exhausted. wobbling. not tracking or capturing the world, but dignifying the unrest.

even when life is made to feel small, cramped. there’s extension. duration. being is asserted.

“i am.”

who needs foucault when you can ruin your eyes with truffaut?
 
“your turn to see the psychologist.”
 
“if she drops her pen, pick it up, but don’t look at her legs, or it goes in your file.”
 
“what file?”
 
“you know, what everyone thinks of you: the judge, the doctor, even your neighbours back home.”
 
“i know mine by heart. it says i’m unstable with perverted tendencies.”

“i was in love for five years. we’ve just split up.” when heartbroken, don’t jog. watch chungking express. the effects on the body are similar. it won’t decrease the volume of your tears, but it will soften them. everything expires. and so much never even has the chance to expire. 0.01cm away. i haven’t had reason to see this since 2015. what a difference a decade makes.