Ice and Flames—Speculative Third Cinemas

by Nate Dorr

 

 

Political subtexts are common enough in science fictional first cinema. But first cinema is foremost a product to be consumed. All its elements, whatever their apparent values, become subordinated to this purpose. Ideas, then, risk reduction to a vehicle for perpetuating the spectacle of mass entertainment (and attendant profit), rather than film honed into a vehicle for ideas. Barbed questions, padded in pyrotechnics, become innocuous and forgettable, a footnote to a climactic cinematic resolution to what likely remains, in the larger world, unresolved or irresolvable.

But sci-fi and speculative scenarios, nonetheless, possess much power to raise significant questions and channel thought. Shorn of the typically comfortable, comforting heroic arcs of first cinema, the distributed, polyphonic, interrogatory modes of third cinema repurpose genre devices to precision effect. Like the socially-minded new wave science fiction that surged onto bookshelves just before the advent of third cinema of the 60s, speculative third cinema uses the rhetorical tools of the (often very near) future to finely dissect the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist-imperialist needs of the present, whichever present, often with lasting relevance to the issues of today.

 

 

“The camera is a weapon. To do any kind of film is inherently exploitative and inherently problematic and inherently fucked up. And I kinda want to make films from that baseline. As an indigenous person knowing the history of cinema and how indigenous people have been utilized to construct narratives throughout history, to be able to wield that weapon offers a lot of potentials.”

These are the words of Ojibway filmmaker Adam Khalil, discussing his 2018 feature Empty Metal following a screening in Toronto in 2019 ¹. The film, which was co-directed with Bayley Sweitzer, follows a cluster of interlinked radical groups in the oppressive dystopian police state that is the United States sometime right about now. A noise band, initially punk-postured but apolitical, is radicalized into direct action by an indigenous insurgent group. This group has telepathic ties (“the one means of communication that cannot be surveilled”) to a Rastafarian activist and a European mystic who immigrated to the U.S. only to spend years in prison for an attempt to opt out of the system. His son, meanwhile, leads training exercises for a second amendment militia who suggest various right wing, boogaloo, or prepper groups which have coalesced in recent years. Above, drones and satellite cameras scrutinize everything. Presented in a digital bricolage of surveillance footage, atemporal moments of action out of context, and computer-animated news reenactments of police violence (recalling, and quite possibly sourced from the same uncanny valley youtube news channel as, Peggy Awesh’s contemporaneous The Falling Sky (2017)) the film slips in and out of a fugue state of frustrated ideals and uncertain efficacy. By eschewing traditional narrative for a more dispersed approach to its themes, Empty Metal becomes a meditation on political action under a broken system, the means of resistance, and the utility or futility of violence. There are no immediate answers to the problems at hand, but to watch is to become ensnared, like the band who embrace the struggle, in multiplying questions.

With its largely non-linear format, concern with radical praxis, and sense of direct appeal to the viewer (at the same Q&A, a member of the audience enthused “I see this as a pedagogical film … like The Spook Who Sat by the Door” ²), Empty Metal could be seen to update Third Cinema programs directly for the remapped ideological landscape of America over the past five years. Especially as viewed as part of the larger project in which the film lies. Khalil’s previous feature INAATE/SE/ It Shines a Certain Way.To a Certain Place./It Flies/Falls./, made with his brother Zack in 2016, took a docufictional approach to the identity and history of the Ojibway tribe in what’s now northern Michigan, after centuries of their culture, language, and religion being suppressed by Jesuit missionaries, repressive state educational mandates, and the appropriation of their living material culture by museums and tourist attractions. The following short film The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets (2018, Adam and Zack Khalil with Tlingit artist Jackson Polys) digs deeper into questions of rights to ancestral remains, when these are seen as anthropological artifacts which may be seized and exhumed in support of others’ narratives. A current project borrows the visual and thematic language of the self-help seminar to galvanize the public in support of indigenous land repatriation ³. These works are unified, through their varied approaches, by a common semantics of resistance. Concerning Empty Metal, this goes back to key arguments of Frantz Fanon’s foundational text The Wretched of the Earth even as it touches the present. In Khalil’s new framing: “Violence does have a role in politics because it is invoked on us all the time. To not even be able to consider that as an option is deeply deeply neoliberally disturbing.”

Among these projects, Empty Metal also stands out for moving beyond the experimental documentary world to borrow the terms of the political thriller, even as it clearly rejects the visual and logical languages of popular genre cinema. In another Q & A ⁴, the directors describe the form as an attempt to find a “trojan horse” which would have “the look or feel of a narrative film but all this other stuff would be invoked or embedded within it.” In its highly familiar but slightly heightened atmosphere of oppression and revolt, the film successfully occupies an uncertain dystopian present that expands its speculative scope. The ambiguous timeframe is intentional, a look “one week into the future”, in critique of the tendency of classic sci-fi to use the distant future to allegorize the present. This is a science fiction of the immediate coming moment, no longer allegorically but actually.

But political subtext often underpins science fiction. Another recent indigenous-made feature, Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, embeds first nations identity and anger in the common genre tropes of the zombie film. Here the threshold of blood relationship once imposed by the U.S. government to determine tribal membership is subverted as a genetic difference protecting the indigenous from zombism rampant in the once-colonizers. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles’s 2019 one-week-in-the-future Bacarau pits a remote village that serves as a microcosm of third cinema alterity against transnationally white, European forces of globalism that arrive with vampiric extractive/touristic intent. Tellingly, the interlopers are abetted by a pair of white Brazillians from the cosmopolitan south, but while they see themselves as players in the global market, to their collaborators, they’re just as expendable as the rest of the third world.

But where Blood Quantum and Bacarau co-opt first cinema spectacle so effectively they may risk submersion in it, Empty Metal belongs to an entirely different lineage, where the elements of genre function primarily as a philosophical tool even as these sci-fi trappings may propel a work towards a broader audience. This requires no invention on my part, Khalil confirmed my suspicions of Empty Metal’s forebears directly in both Q&As:

“I saw Born in Flames on a ZeD TV CBC Broadcast … played at 1am, and I was 16, my brother was 13, and it just blew our fucking minds. That was a point of reference that we always went back to — where’s the 21st century Born in Flames? That was the mantle we tried to follow-up on. I don’t think we quite did it, but that was the hope. Or the intention.”

 

 

The “insurrectionary intersectional politics” (Khalil once more) of Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames (1983) remain singular. In another speculative present, the film opens ten years after the U.S. has undergone a successful socialist revolution, a nearly utopian premise undermined by the persistence of the white patriarchy even after major political change. With this framing, Borden critically isolates the sexism and racism very much present in leftist movements of the sixties and seventies from the spectrum of political ideology to more effectively probe them, and more importantly, to demonstrate the broad coalition capable of meeting them. Born in Flames unfolds in a patchwork of sequences following (among others) two renegade radio stations (which later cooperate to seize the government broadcast system), the street operations of Women’s Liberation Army, and a trio of white news editors who become radicalized through recognition of the limitations of the state media. The story is decentralized, polyvocal, and often ellides action to foreground the discussions that inform and unpack these flash points. Taking up intersectionality six years before Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw would even coin the term ⁵, Borden sought, in making the film, to draw on a wide range of voices to build a conversation that would reach further and be more inclusive. She came to film through the art world, and if the dominant art establishment was resolutely white and male, the feminist pushback in the downtown New York scene to which she belonged was also primarily white and middle class.

“So I wanted to make a film that was multiracial, cross class. These days they would use the word intersectionality, but that didn’t exist then. Even the word “feminism” was suspect, because that was a white word, and at that point black women used the word “womanism” and did not trust white feminists as epitomized by Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine, which seemed way too middle class.” ⁶

Shot via shoe-string self-financing over the course of five years (“whenever I had $200 I would shoot” — Borden operating by Kidlat Tahimik’s “cup of gas” model), the film evolved from its premise and intent without a script through a variety of scenarios bordering documentary: shoots took place at real women’s group meetings, actual protests which cast members took part in, and staged protests taken up by outside members of the public. Informed by these elements of documentation, the narrative took shape on the editing table, suggesting more directed scenes that still gave much space to the individual women on screen, often non-actors from very different backgrounds playing themselves or versions thereof (activist Florynce Kennedy and downtown punk performer Adele Bertai play key roles) thus making their own voices heard.

The only element of science fiction remains the establishing post-revolution premise, the rest feels deeply of the moment, even 35 years later. Made under Reagan, Born in Flames found new relevance and new attention when Trump took office. As with Empty Metal, science fiction here serves a (in this case perhaps unintended) trojan horse function. Borden notes that when the rediscovered film received a brief streaming run on netflix “really angry guys would write in and say, ‘This is the worst science fiction film I’ve ever seen!’ ” when the film failed to meet their expectations of mass entertainment. But how many unsuspecting viewers seeking escapism encountered, instead, the transformative?

 

 

Borden cites The Battle of Algiers (1967) as a crucial influence, along with the second cinema politics of later Godard, but in between, another key example of insurrectionary dystopian third cinema had taken shape on American soil in Robert Kramer’s Ice (1969). Tracking a distributed cast of urban guerillas in a fascist America that heightened contemporary political tensions by replacing Vietnam with an endless war against Mexico, Ice grew out of Kramer’s engagement, as a founding member in 1967, with radical film collective Newsreel. Covering topics of the moment from black power to student revolts to the ongoing war with a raw, galvanic format drawing in part from Cuban propaganda film, Newsreel was a direct response to the poverty of consumable media to bring about actual change or action in its viewers:

“The subject population in this society, bombarded by and totally immersed in complex, ostensibly “free” media, has learned to absorb all facts/information relatively easily. Within the formats now popularised by the television documentary, you can lodge almost any material, no matter how implicitly explosive, with the confidence that it will neither haunt the subject population, nor push them to move—in the streets, in their communities, in their heads.” ⁷

The collective’s confrontational approach to leftist polemics, as well as many of its members, became the fabric of narrative in Kramer’s Ice, but the content, often concerned with internal debate and schism as impediment to action that was already becoming an almost non-ideological ends in itself, reflected a self-critical examination of the efficacy of the New Left and Newsreel itself. Though the cast of insurgents is primarily white, there’s much discussion of the challenges of coordinating action with other revolutionary groups of different backgrounds and aims, which may be informed by Kramer’s experiences as an organizer in black-majority Newark a few years earlier and his recognition of the hurdles created by the U.S.’s long history of terrible racial inequality. If the protagonists are mainly white, this may be as much a self-criticism and acknowledgement of limitations as the rest of the thorny course of the film. When the film breaks free into direct viewer address, mirroring the iconography of Hour of the Furnaces (1968) with bold text overlays and use of negative black space, to outline immediate needs and dismantle the “false consciousness” perpetuated by the state to prevent revolt, it’s immensely refreshing.

The conflicted content of Ice (rejected by other members of Newsreel upon completion) precipitated Kramer’s break with the group shortly after and informs the deep post-’68 disillusionment of his following 1975 feature Milestones, which interweaves documentary and fiction to trace the slow fade of 60s idealism back into the American landscape which would only a short time later produce the consumerist narcissism of the 1980s. For its part, Newsreel diversified and rerouted its energies into greater representation of international communities of color, evolving into Third World Newsreel in 1973.

Once again, though, genre had provided a mechanism of insertion and subversion — the two hour Ice was funded by a $15,600 grant to make a “science fiction short” provided by actual state organ the American Film Institute, soon after its 1965 creation by presidential mandate of Lyndon B. Johnson.

 

 

Another major trajectory of the third cinematic sci-fi saw it intertwining with the ongoing course of Afrofuturism. This is too broad of a subject to properly take on here, but I’d like to highlight a final example. In 1994, the first theatrically distributed feature film directed by a black woman in the UK arrived, to critical loathing. This was Nigerion-born Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome. Taking its name from a 1989 Public Enemy song that referenced multiple acts of violence against Black people in the States that year, and its cold-burning fury from all of the similar atrocities that continued to occur on both sides of the Atlantic in the years before and after, Onwurah’s film pulled no punches in its portrayal of the legacy of slavery translated into an oppressive inner city carefully turned against itself by the surrounding police state. Like Born in Flames, the message resonates today because more people are finally ready to receive it. At the time, critics in the UK condemned Terrordome for its unflinching aggression and nihilistic frustration at the state of race relations, unable or unwilling to, in the Labor Party’s middle-left neoliberal 90s, admit how much remained very very broken. Onwurah, in speaking to the Guardian 25 years later, is emphatic about her intent:

“I call this my ‘angry film.’ Debates around race are meant to be measured and always have an entry point for white people; I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m just saying I made it because I wasn’t in the mood for tempered debate.” ⁸

The film opens with a retelling of the Igbo Landing story (also referenced in Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of Dust, from which the sequence may draw visual cues). Historically, the story is that of a group of captured West Africans (of the Igbo in what became modern Nigeria) who successfully took control of the slave ship on which they’d been confined during the middle passage in 1803, only to run ashore in Georgia. Facing recapture and servitude, they chose instead to walk back into water and drown ⁹. In various retellings, now multiplied in Gullah folklore of American southeast coast, they invoked the Igbo deity Chukwu to, even in death, carry them home. In Onwurah’s telling, they travel beneath the waves to new roles in a purgatorial city where it’s always night and the crimes of the past continue to play out indefinitely. The Terrordome, though given this brush of dystopian-mythic color is clearly the pressure cooker of the modern inner city, where the largely white police force confine black residents while allowing gang violence and a flow of drugs. The events of the film are drawn from real incidents, the news providing outrage enough to make pure invention unnecessary. Onwurah’s license was simply to compress these events, in three days of furious writing with a terrible toothache, into a single brutal night. Her crime, to contemporary critics, was to frame her indictment too clearly.

Onwurrah’s legacy, until Terrordome’s more recent reemergence as an icon of Afrofuturism and now Black Lives Matter, may have been her translation of the Igbo Landing story into the field of science fiction. This re-emerged, surprisingly, in the sounds of Detroit techno, in the elaborate mythology created by secretive duo Dexciya in the mid 90s. In the liner notes of their first full-length album, The Quest, they described “Drexciya” as a city on the Atlantic floor founded by the unborn children of pregnant Africans thrown overboard during the middle passage. Drexciya, then, is the utopia to the Terrordome’s dystopia, a place of autonomy and possibility too often denied on the surface ¹⁰.

But for all its rage and despair, Terrordome is also a galvanic film. Like other third cinematic insurgents, Onwurrah takes a multivocal approach that offers many parallel stories while denying climactic satisfaction or the comfort of closure. Reframing Black Power for the hip-hop 90s, she all but demands organization and accounting for the ever-multiplying wrongs of racist society. Decades later, her purpose is even more firm:

“You say it was the future, it was the future 20 years ago, and actually it was the future. I think what’s happening in retrospect is that the world is 10 times worse than Terrordome, who would have thought we would be where we are now.” ¹¹

The speculative third cinema, then, is an always-necessary outcry across time.

***

Collected and further viewing:

• Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles, 2019)
• Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby, 2019)
• Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983)
• Empty Metal (Adam Khalil & Bayley Sweitzer, 2019)
• Fresh Kill (Shu Lea Cheang, 1994)
• Ice (Robert Kramer, 1969)
• In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (Larissa Sansour, 2015)
• Le President (Jean Pierre Bekolo, 2013)
• Les Saignantes (Jean Pierre Bekolo, 2005)
• Night Passage (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2004)
• Welcome II the Terrordome (Ngozi Onwurah, 1994)

 

1. Images Festival, 2019. I caught a (virtual) screening and discussion in May 2020, but failed to take notes, so I’m reliant on these taped records to flesh out my recollections of the key points.
2. The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973). Adapted from the 1969 novel by Sam Greenlee, which struggled to find a publisher in the United States, until it was picked up in the UK. Similarly, the film’s depiction of armed Black revolt in the U.S. lead to its being pulled from theaters under suspected FBI influence and lost to audiences for many years.
3. An additional intriguing work in progress imagines a scenario where reparations are at last provided in the physical resurrection of the countless dead of America’s indigenous genocide, but only far from Earth and stolen land, aboard a spacecraft.
4. UC Berkley, Alternative Visions, September 2018, with film scholar Diana Ruíz.
5. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, 1989. Borden even anticipates the specific kinds of examples Crenshaw would deploy in making her case for the necessity of intersectionality in a scene where black women are seen as most expendable during layoffs at a construction worksite.
6. “Lizzie Borden talks about her scrappy, feminist magnum opus, ‘Born in Flames’”, Detroit Metro Times, March 1, 2017.
7. Robert Kramer, Film Quarterly, winter 1968. Reproduced online by Donal Foreman, repost by Diagonal Thoughts.
8. Has Terrordome’s time come? How a black British film found its moment. The Guardian, July 23, 2020.
9. Igbo Landing Mass Suicide on blackpast.com
10. In the years that followed, the concept has been retranslated into film many times, including two short films actually titled Drexciya: Ghanaian-American Akosua Adoma Owusu’s experimental documentary portrait of abandoned luxury pool in Accra in 2010 and German Simon Rittmeier’s envisioning of a future where white refugees from a ravaged Europe risk death to reach Africa, in 2012. Later, the myth was referenced in relation to climate change and adaptation to rising water in Egyptian filmmaker Mariam Mekiwi’s Abl Ma ‘Ansa (Before I Forget, 2018).
11. Ngozi Onwurrah on the Home podcast in 2019, in conversation with Rachel Hayward. As referenced in a piece by Amy Chambers.