Midweek Film (14/07/21)
A special film edition of Midweek Mixes.
NB my radio show Flamingo will be on today at 16h GMT on Rádio Quântica.
This weekend I sat down to watch the new documentary about Terre Thaemlitz, produced and directed by Patrick Nation for Resident Advisor and filmed in 2018. The blurb for the film sets the scene by quoting Thaemlitz:
For me, the worst nightmare would be ending up with a film that's somehow a construction of an artistic figure that had this singularity and a growth path, if it started with photos of childhood and then talking to different people in chronological order about when they knew me.
This Is Your Life this is not.
To sidestep this linearity – and the hagiography that this kind of narrative usually entails – the film uses a model devised by the activist sound collective Ultra-Red. This is introduced early on, but not before Thaemlitz’s transgender reading of What’s Opera Doc?, a bit previously only performed live at various events and which provides many laugh out loud moments. It’s even funnier coming from someone whose stated aim is to “critically reject the incessant optimism lurking at the core of virtually all media, conferences, concerts, events and symposia”.
Ultra-Red’s ‘Protocols for a documentary discussion’ involve a gathering of people close to Thaemlitz presenting and discussing objects (films, photographs, sounds, documents) in a format that’s both strict and loose. For each object, the chair (Ultra-Red’s Dont Rhine) asks the questions: “What did you hear?” and “What did you see?”, leading to an open and unpredictable discussion; yet for each object there are only 20 minutes available, and once the time is up, it’s up. (One promising exchange about the role of artists in gentrification processes is cut off mid-flow by the alarm.)
The participants are a carefully chosen mix of people from different domains of Thaemlitz’s life: music, academia, activism, writing and, in the form of Tsuji Aiko, a friend unconnected to any of those. This has the desired effect: the objects presented are varied (a Sylvia Rivera speech, the sound of FM synthesis, a proposal for queer school regulations, a scene from the film Kuro Takage etc.) and the discussion is multifaceted, albeit a little formal and often dominated by the native English speakers.
This latter point is offset by individual conversations between Thaemlitz and each participant, conducted in Japanese where appropriate, in which we get a more informal picture of Thaemlitz’s world. Through Tsuji’s account of childhood bullying or Mark Fell’s deconstruction of Thaemlitz’s “18th century vicar” personality (another laugh out loud moment), we get a glimpse of the person that lies beyond the artist, the academic, the activist. Although now that I’ve written it, even that construction of “the person” as separate from “the artist” and so on is itself questionable, something the interwoven structure of the film makes very plain.
This kind of mental gymnastics illustrates one of the many ways in which this film succeeds. It deftly reproduces Thaemlitz’s own critical point of view and practice and, in so doing, encourages that kind of thinking in the viewer. Crucially, it’s also a showcase for the full extent of Thaemlitz’s work, including one particularly intriguing research project about the soundsystems in convents in the Philippines. The editing of the group discussion, individual conversations, excerpts and voiceovers adds to the overall sense of Thaemlitz-as-prism, an effect that I reckon will bring her much satisfaction in the finished article.
All of this meticulous work means the film pretty much earns its closing conceit, which I won’t describe here – you’ll just have to watch it.
Terre Thaemlitz: Give Up On Hopes And Dreams