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007 Sunik Kim - Truth is Marching
mov
“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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