The Sun Does Not Lie

The Sun Does Not Lie
by: Leslie Supnet

In early June, the leader of the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, eliciting mass disappointment and outrage from the global community. Unbridled emissions from the USA could potentially warm the world by 0.3C by 2100, raising the global temperature beyond 2C, exacerbating the already life threatening heatwaves, sea level rise, displacement of millions of people, brutal wars and the loss of delicate ecosystems forevermore. For my #EyesOnVu selection, The Sun Does Not Lie, I chose experimental works from the VUCAVU catalog ranging from found footage to film essays that interrogate our current moment living in a time of catastrophe and conflict. As anxieties mount over the seemingly never ending news of devastation and crisis, these works offer a prismatic lens to unpack and shed light on the array of complexities that have influenced the state of our current situation.

Mesmerized by the ongoing destruction, how can we better understand our historical moment living in catastrophic time? The programme starts with A Film, Reclaimed (2015) by Ana Vaz and Tristan Bera. Bera and Vaz are founding members of the COYOTE Collective, described as “a cross-disciplinary group working in the fields of ecology, anthropology, ethnology and political science through an array of cross­cutting platforms.” A Film, Reclaimed is an essay film that looks at apocalyptic uncertainty in the wake of our current ecological crisis, framed in conversation with the popular cinema that has accompanied it. The filmmakers draw upon an archival pool of relevant films such as the avant-garde found footage classic A Movie (1958) by Bruce Conner, popular genre films such as They Live (1988), Blade Runner (1982), Herzog’s art-house epic Fitzcarraldo (1982), and cult oddities such as Orca (1977) to name a few. Bera and Vaz weave together a dialectic concerning the domination of nature, and possible political transformation contextualized into theoretical epochal sections: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene. Critique of cinematic image and sound reflect on how we conceptualize nature and its relation to these proposed epoches. Facing the historic recurrence of catastrophes from Hiroshima and Nagasaki onward, the film argues that these epochal terms should remain open, speaking to the uncertainty symptomatic of our modern times. Catastrophe is the language the landscape speaks. A Film, Reclaimed urges us to re-evaluate our response to nature in new ways: through deterritorialization, reciprocity, symbiotic relationships and to accept the notion that, as one narrator states, “We are nature.”  

Warnings by the world’s best scientists and top military strategists urge that unchecked global warming is the greatest threat to 21st century security. How can one conceptualize such unprecedented magnitude? By focusing on the issue close-up, Zachary Finkelstein’s Point of No Return (2016) provides an alternate view of global warming through visual abstraction. Using microscopic videography and polarizing lenses, shots of magnified slow melting ice shards reveal an alien-like landscape that look like the rings of Saturn floating in black space. Finkelstein gives us a stunning other-worldly frame to reflect on our current climate change crisis. An uneasy tension is created between image and sound, as the mesmerizing close-ups of ice melting play amidst the dark undertones of the sound design. A strong female voice states, “How powerful an image ice is for slow dripping loss? So solid, and then turning to water. How many of our emotions are frozen too along with this imagery?” With dialogue in eleven different languages, Point of No Return connects global scale to the micro event, eliciting anxiety, dread and an acute awareness of lost irreversible time. Finkelstein’s abstraction of climate change makes ethical and aesthetic demands on how we bear witness to the ongoing warming of the earth, often hypnotized and overwhelmed with the magnitude of unimaginable loss.

A hilariously unique and biting critique on spectacle and the war movie, Bring Me The Head of Tim Horton: The Making of Hyena Road (2015) by directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson create a cine-essay disguised as a making-of documentary of Canadian director/actor Paul Gross’s Afgan war drama Hyena Road (2015). “I put a Trojan horse inside a Trojan horse.” says Maddin, as he reveals the true nature behind the making-of: a quick money making scheme to fund the completion of his own beleaguered project The Forbidden Room. Maddin, also being used as an unpaid extra to play a dead Taliban soldier on set narrates with characteristically charming self-deprecation, weaving together a gloriously comedic and thought provoking collision of documentary and fictional filmic landscapes. In a heat-induced dream hallucination as he lay baking in the Jordanian sun, Maddin disrupts the the movie magic, using Gross’s actors and sets to create his own “ultimate war movie cine-essay. A formally radical ill-tempered retort to Paul’s digestible adventurism.” A frame within a frame, the war movie sequences become pantomimes, both comedic and reflexive. “Is the war movie just a funeral without a body?” Maddin contemplates how the war movie can be held more accountable to the actual cost of war, as cinematic approximations of mass death will always be distortions of reality. Interweaving the tragic death of Canadian hockey hero Tim Horton and the impression it left on Maddin as a young boy, the filmmakers provide the “counterintuitive jolt” to wake up the sleepy passive spectator by intersecting themes of war movies, sport and the Canadian collective consciousness to provide insightful perspectives on easy entertainment, patriotism and the philosophical underpinnings of war.

Confronting the spectacle of war in mass media, artist Jayce Salloum’s In The Absence Of Heroes, Part IV: Warfare/A Case for Context (1984) uses dialectical montage of appropriated TV footage to critique and dissect the complicated mechanisms in which war is packaged and sold to the citizenry. Salloum presents a carefully edited archive of war images in the context of the mass dissemination of romantic ideas that allow for societal acceptance of militarized violence. This video was part of the artist's ongoing 'In the Absence of Heroes' project which included a performance, slide programs, and a hand painted archival photo series. Made in 1984, the overarching themes of this found footage work are still pertinent 33 years later. Salloum creates an aestheticized archive of footage from feature films, documentaries, cartoons, educational/military materials, and sound bites of heroic patriotic monologues contrasted with documented interviews with an exiled Greek activist and veteran soldier from Beirut. Clear repetitive themes come to the surface here, untangling Western war propaganda, the emotional exploitation it thrives upon and the cyclic characteristic of the perceived inevitability of war. Made before the wide accessibility of non-linear video editing software, this relentless video work brings into focus the normalization of war through a discursive reading of the material and the political context in which they were produced.

From a bombardment of televised war imagery we close with Ellie Epp's film last light (2013), a video consisting of a single take. In this meditative landscape work, we witness a sunset, shot in Borrego Springs. Similar to Ellie Epp's early seminal 16mm films, duration functions as a pathway to a deeper viewing experience. Majestic and unflinching, our eye wanders over the dry rocky surface taking note of the soft wavering luminance of the sun. A bird soars into view, reminding us that the earth is living, breathing, and mortal, just like us.