For the Re:Research column, Marielle Ingram shares the thinking behind her short film Document 0 (2021), a meditation on the relationship between time and Blackness that asks how, in the wake of George Floyd’s death and on the eve of the end of the world, new languages for moving images might emerge.
Found
What do we do with images post-accumulation?
In one way, the accumulation of images is unending. At the same time, the rhetoric of the information age and information overload is beyond rote. After well over twenty years of it, I have to imagine that, although there’s definitely still excess, we are now living in a new mode.
I am often drawn to artists whose work employs, in addition to other elements, what I see as an aesthetic or logic of accumulation—that is, a formal approach based on putting an overwhelming number of images or objects together, either preexisting or created by the artist, to produce an aesthetic that conveys and is birthed by the sheer accumulation and arrangement of said images or objects. For example, Document 0 was spawned by my reflection on an essay entitled “Contracirculation” in which I analyze Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2017) as an example of an artist contracirculating images of black suffering and death, while also critiquing the rise in social media activism during the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. In the essay, I pay close attention to the ways in which images of black suffering were used and circulated throughout social media.
Jafa’s work is a good example of an accumulative logic, but there are others—within film and video practices (Seth Price’s Redistribution, 2007–ongoing), Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue, 2013), photography (Sara Cwynar’s Flat Death, 2013), and sculpture (Sarah Sze’s Triple Point, 2013, or Centrifuge, 2017). Of course, accumulation in these works is not only present in their production, not merely in the fact that they were made by accumulating images. Accumulation as a mode of perception is also made visible in the aesthetic cultivated in these works. The aesthetic of accumulation that these artists both make visible and use as a tool is, of course, preconditioned by the endless accumulation of images on the web.
What if, as we live with the internet and social media, the information overload has given way to an inability to imagine a new image—a phenomenological condition that has emerged from accumulation itself? Rather than accumulating images, we can only find them. Rather than create and upload, we repost and resend. Now, image accumulation is imperceptible. That is, while images are of course still accumulating, still piling up, with new images being produced and old images being reassembled or re-presented, the number of images by this point is so large that it is unfathomable, and begins to approach infinity. While accumulation entails the production or birth of images into the big, wide world, the post-accumulation moment is marked by the always already image. For Heidegger, the always already, the immer schon in German, is a state of being that is without any identifiable beginning or genesis. Any image is not so much given to us as new as it is found.
A thought experiment, then: what does it mean to live in a world with no new images?
Capture
In such a world, there would be no more new images of black suffering and death. Might searching then become a form of catharsis or healing?
To capture these events would be to search and find images that, phenomenologically, already existed. The death of George Floyd, for example, becomes a tale as primordial as blackness itself, an event that occurs again and again throughout time and is therefore as old as time itself.
As in Frank B. Wilderson III’s book Afropessimism (2020), black suffering is the condition of possibility for our entire world. Its end would mean the end of the world as we know it. In this way, Floyd’s death is both the beginning and the end of our world. Floyd’s death becomes a world-ending event.
Who is to say if its image is the first image or the last? This last image eradicates our ability to perceive the world as before, thereby doubling as a world-creating event and opening up new possibilities for our being-in-the-world.
Redaction
In making Document 0, I was influenced by Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée. But the similarities between the two are in some ways less important than the following difference.
The first image in Marker’s film, our birth into Marker’s cinematic world, is also the image of the narrator’s death. The instance of his capture both enables our ability to perceive the narrator’s story—it opens up the world of the film—and is also the instance in which his death is sealed—the world of the film is destined to end.
In Document 0, however, rather than Floyd’s death becoming inevitable due to his capture in these images, the act of capture, the cinematic space itself, becomes accessible to him. His blackness allows him to transcend the logic of the image.
As the redacted images (not edited by myself but as released by the Minneapolis Police Department) appear alongside entirely black images, Floyd’s being expands and contracts. His being becomes bigger than his physicality. He comes to stand in for blackness itself.
Like black suffering as the condition of possibility of our world in Afropessimism, blackness is the condition for the possibility of cinema, of images themselves. This allows Floyd to operate on an ontological level with the space of the film. Unlike Marker’s protagonist, Floyd is able to open, close, peek into, and peer out of the window of cinematic time. He is able to hinder our ability to perceive and, at the same time, the blackness of the screen is always the harbinger of a new image.
Redaction acts as a kind of cape; Floyd becomes invisible because of his visibility. He exists in an ebb and flow: from apprehension to overwhelming and overtaking our vision to total opacity.
Stillness
Stillness, for Marker, following the classic view of photography as akin to death, is the notation of death in the film, which is composed almost entirely of stills. “The man of whom one is telling the story” in La Jetée is not only destined for death as soon as the film opens and as it unfolds, but his mortality and the fact he is somehow already dead are signified in every second of the film by Marker’s obscuring of the frame rate. Capture and the resulting stillness become a tomb, solidified even further by the frequently analyzed scene in which the protagonist and his love interest are pictured moving through a museum filled with taxidermy animals.
But, when there are no new images, capturing is merely finding. La Jetée’s images, whether we consider them new or old, whether Marker’s intention is for them to feel found from the distant past, are unlike these images of George Floyd.
For Marker, the stillness of the images signifies a lack of the movement that the standard film frame rate offers. Here, George Floyd is not hindered by being outside of the frame rate. Rather than film’s 24 or video’s 30 frames per second being a sign of life, Floyd’s redaction opens up for us another world that exists beyond our ability to perceive its motion. In this way, he escapes the frame rate through the screenshot, through capture. His existence through screenshots of the video of his death allow him a new form of life outside of the original. Stillness here becomes, marks movement.
In Seth Price’s Dispersion (2002–ongoing), Price similarly considers time as an important dimension of escape within a dominant image economy. He advocates for slowness as a tool which “works against all of our prevailing urges and requirements: it is a resistance to the contemporary mandate of speed.” According to David Joselit, Price views slowness as “a tactic for escaping the ‘blind spot’ that results from moving along at the same rate as the market.”
But why escape the blind spot, implying that you’re now somehow able to see the market, when the very fact of your suffering and thus the content of your being, is the condition for the possibility of the market? As Christina Sharpe argues in In the Wake (2016), in chorus with Wilderson, “the ongoing state-sanctioned legal and extralegal murders of Black people are normative and, for this so-called democracy, necessary; it is the ground we walk on. And that it is the ground that lays that, and perhaps how, we might begin to live in relation to this requirement for our death.”
Price goes on to say that “if you’re a part of the general tenor, it’s difficult to add a dissonant note.” But what if you are the dissonant note?
Or, as Arthur Jafa puts it, black people “worry the note.”
While slowness still implies an adherence to the arrow of time, stillness might offer an even more radical reorientation, necessary in this moment, a speed appropriate for the so-called end times.
A thought experiment: at the end of black suffering, at the beginning and end of our world, what would it mean for stillness to become our primary mode of perception? x
Marielle Ingram is a writer, who sometimes makes short videos and films, based in Brooklyn, New York.