March Chronicle by Echo Guo and Muyang Teng
CHRONICLE: A Basis For Hope(Nicosia)`
by Muyang Teng & Echo Guo
Mirrors in Ancestral Echoes
I make the revolution; therefore I exist.
Words float through the room as first frames flicker against concrete walls. Eyes adjusting to darkness, pupils dilate to catch every shadow and light. The projector stutters to life, throwing spectral images that dance between presence and absence.
The camera is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons.
The projector will shoot 24 frames a second.
Each frame—a small piece of history
captured, contested, reclaimed.
Who is whispering of the Medu Art Ensemble’s lost archives—how in 1985 the South African Defense Forces descended upon Gaborone, how cultural memory became a military target.
Whose voice in the dark murmurs about archives scattered like ashes, how the struggle to remember becomes the struggle itself.
The struggle to remember becomes the struggle itself.
On screen: a long tracking shot of rubble. Fiction or documentary? The borders blur as we watch. From scattered notes in fading ink, voices dissolve theory:
“Revolutionary cinema is not fundamentally one which illustrates, documents, or passively establishes a situation: rather, it attempts to intervene in the situation as an element providing thrust or rectification. It is not simply testimonial cinema, nor cinema of communication, but above all Action Cinema.”
Action Cinema.
Camera as action.
Image as action.
The history of such cinema ripples through time, Buchsbaum’s words resonating:
Ever since the ‘heroic’ decade of the 1920s in the Soviet Union, countries undergoing rapid, usually Marxist or socialist revolutionary social change, have made a national cinema project a high priority in establishing a new social order, often citing Lenin’s remark that ‘for us, cinema is the most important of the arts.’
Am I full? From the revolutionary ideas I have absorbed, full enough to carry out an action, and the weight of my fulled body…
Are you inside of the frame? Behind the camera? Or, watching?
Are we all here? At the same rubble, remembering our soil, cultivating different fields…
The Temper of Image-Weapons
Chairs creak as people adjust their positions. The projector runs—“24 frames a second... 24 bullets a second”—its rhythm steady throughout the room. Faces turn upward in the projected light.
“Temper itself could be very fluid, totally adapting to the situation.”
The conversation weaves through multiple tongues, searching for translations of both words and notions:
“I always hear it in negative situations. A lot of people say, your short temper, your hot temper.”
“In Brazil, this word is the same. But at the same time, temper as a verb... you take that up too when you put spices in the food.”
The word in Chinese suggests the gas or air of the spleen—something very spiritual, very emotional, produced on the material level of your body.
The personal becomes political, and the body becomes archive.
Days later, as fragments of the “temper” discussion lingered, the conversation shifted to questions of representation and witness. Xiang’s reflections on Trinh’s techniques blend with the humming of the computer:
“Trinh’s attention to the filmmaker—speaker relationship, rather than the speaker—viewer relationship, explodes this idea of the interview as a meeting between one face and another along a horizontal axis. Her conception of the ‘inter-view’ as ‘a cinematic frame’ is based on interruption and suture.”
Each footstep, We notice that our tempos vary..:：。。..** Some grow temper; some lose temper; some keep temper
… On the burning road, walk with hot feet…
I would like us to think about the differences among us, the disagreements. (In third word cinema,) the kinds of militancy and propaganda serve different causes, pave separate roads, toward liberation and oppression.
Where are our conjunctions? How do we end up here, together, and why do we separate again, to where shall we reunion?
…Like weaving a net, in the hot air…
Camp Consciousness
Light shifts, bodies rearrange. Through the shadows:
“When I came to Europe and I was able to enroll in a university, I didn’t go to film school, you know, because I’m so chaotic when it comes to technicalities. My first video ever, I made with this—”
“—I Don’t Want To Get The Industrial Thing!”
And What makes the militant image?
Mirroring between theory and praxis, between witnessing and action.
Is it content? Context? Process? Intent?
Spiraling outward, nesting inside.
“I wonder if we can create, or if I can create, through my practice or my art, a militant image. And also the question of militancy…” The voice hesitates, recalibrates. “Militancy is not restricted to ‘I have weapons in my hand and I’m on the front line.’”
Yes. Militancy as persistence, as cultural memory, as the refusal to disappear.
The refusal to disappear is itself a militant act.
“I always want to keep my own language of seeing stuff in a poetic way, in a romantic way, but at the same time, I want to manifest that within my own struggle... To be paralyzed on one hand, to be witnessing, to bear witness.”
Stumbling toward meanings. A fragment from Solanas and Getino un/materializes like a ghost, hovering between me and us, projector and screen:
“Militant cinema is that cinema which sees itself integrated as an instrument, complement or support of a specific politics, and of the organizations that carry out the plan together with the diversity of objectives which it pursues.”
Gather around, lights off, sound on.
“It cannot be understood, it can not become clear to it self, except by the movements which gives a historical form and content. Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.” (Frantz Fanon, Wretched Of The Earth)
“We want to Produce a manifesto for libertarian not the fresh of liberate (movement) histories.” (Noor Abed & Haig Aivazian, Nothing Will Remain other than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World)
Sound echos, no one leave.
Moonshine Cinema
“There are three kinds of films. Coca Cola films—high sugar content and readily available everywhere. Wine films—requiring an acquired taste or lingo. And moonshine films—made in small batches for the community, shared directly.”
But moon questions: how does this moonshine reach scattered audiences across worlds?
Behold how to light up a constellation: “If a film that is made in, let’s say, Chile, how can it be shown in Cameroon and Japan and Sri Lanka at the same time?” The room becomes a map of networks drawn in glow, though we didn’t recruit another moon.
Fake global: “Hollywood has increased its domination of exhibition throughout the world, severely limiting opportunities for self-sustaining national industries. The massive introduction of television has, in 20 to 30 years, displaced the cinema as the mass medium of the popular sectors.”
Dead cinema: “In Brazil, cinema attendance declined by 42 percent; in Chile by 58 percent; in Argentina by 78 percent. Even Cuba, which has continued to maintain 500 theaters, suffered an attendance drop of 75 percent, from over 100 million in 1970 to just over 25 million in 1989.”
The figures hang in the air like smoke, obscuring vision.
Cinema has become its own ghost.
Labor of Listening
The silence between words carries weight.
“I think the emphasis on filmmakers ‘seeing itself’ integrated as an instrument, complement or support of specific politics, and of the organizations that carry out the plan…” [Pause.] “Filmmakers bring their expertise to the militant organization, but their work acquires value only as it advances the organization’s strategy. The film itself has no intrinsic value.”
Interruption: “If commercial cinema is the tradition, the auteur cinema is the revolution.”
The prayer between listening harbors death.
García Espinosa’s “Imperfect Cinema” emerges:
“The only thing imperfect cinema is interested in is how an artist responds to the following question: What are you doing in order to overcome the barrier of the cultured elite audience which up to now has conditioned the form of your work?”
The image between visions carves wounds.
“Imperfect cinema cannot lose sight of the fact that its essential goal as a new poetics is to disappear.”
El-Wardany speaks of solidarity:
“To speak to the dead means to undo the function of my ear such that the tiniest bones in my body can transmit this ‘unvoiced longing.’ Everything meaningful I can think of about the word solidarity resides in this longing. An untimely solidarity that endures and gradually intensifies counter to capital time, and to capital geography.”
…imperfect cinema is to disappear…
…the essential goal of the new poetics is to be born…
…born, burn, born…
Nicosia, Cyprus. Along the Greek side of buffer zone, we, as a group of roaming students, tutors, and guests, walked with the local artivist Seta Astreou Karides and listened to the sound from’Occupy Buffer Zone’ movement she was part of in 2011.
Return to Ruins
What makes a testimony?
What makes an image speak?
What makes silence audible?
“With my trip there and the stuff I saw, I think no camera, no image, nothing could debate or capture what I saw with my eyes.”
“I took this picture last month, and this is the camp where I grew up, which is now completely destroyed and ruined. After 12 years of being away…” [Pause.] “I’m trying to find still words to meet my family and to also meet a place.”
“The sunset there is really amazing. You could see it everywhere because now it’s completely destroyed. Wherever you go, when the sunset is there, you see the orange of the sky.”
Destruction makes the sunset visible.
Time suspended in ruins.
“You feel very calm, yet deeply agitated inside. Time is suspended while simultaneously showing its passage. The ruins frame the absence itself, making the void tangible.”
El-Wardany offers:
“The dead. They have a plan. And their plan is simple. It is called Sumoud صمود. To stand fast and start all over again. The dead. They direct us to the open graves, desecrated by bulldozers. A severed hand. A mutilated tongue. A stained truth, beside a suitcase of books.”
Sumoud صمود. Standing fast.
To witness is to remember.
To resist is to return.
It’s time to return.
Return to.
Return.