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007 Sunik Kim - Truth is Marching

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“Following Straub-Huillet—“The camera is nothing but an x-ray machine”—here I attempt to reconstruct, or synthesize, a communist consciousness; or, to be more precise, I attempt to render visible that act of reconstruction itself, beginning with scattered sense-perceptions—birds, clouds, the land—and moving into a series of flickering, warped abstractions of that raw sensory data, which eventually swarm and coalesce around the climactic, titular struggle of Eisenstein’s Strike. In exploding these surfaces—mundanities, even—and sequencing them, pitting them against each other, ensuring that each clash of color, form, sound, and text morphs organically into the next, forming a spiral that continually builds upon itself while assimilating and ejecting arcs and energies, I hope to historicize—politicize—both the landscape and flicker film, bending their usual “structural” aspect away from questions of a filmic “language,” the medium or material itself, its syntax, its formal qualities (Huillet: “the cinema isn’t a language; it’s an apparatus for radiography, a mirror that helps to see and… hear, to discover, under the accumulation of habit and clichés, reality—the truth?”) towards the world itself, questions of history, political struggle, rebellion, revolution, and their inextricability from questions of perception and consciousness. Or, put another way: I hope to shift the priorities of such a film away from questions of “expropriating the ownership of the codes of narrativity” to questions of expropriating the means of production. In so doing, I hope I have created a film that is porous, one that leaks and dissolves into the world rather than remaining fixed, hermetically sealed. I harbor no illusions about the political “utility” of such a film. It merely stands as a very early and flawed attempt to make legible, make visual, Marx’s method of the ascent from the abstract to the concrete, the reproduction of the concrete in thought, with an eye towards the universal interconnection of the whole, the totality, and the revolutionizing of that totality. This is, ultimately, a kind of x-ray vision: one with the power to overthrow the world and build it anew as soon as it has gripped the masses and thereby become—a material force.”

Originally created in 2021 for the Performa Biennial.

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Warning! The film contains bright, flashing lights and/or imagery that may cause discomfort and/or seizures for those with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised.

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