The Golden Ass

I saw this beautifully discomforting film last Saturday afternoon at The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk. “Tropikos,” by John Akomfrah. I don't know if Akomfrah is Christian, but he presents an image that, besides also being similarly unsettling, has a lot in common with the Cross.

We find ourselves set in the midst of two interwoven scenes strikingly juxtaposed against one another:

One is pervaded by African wilderness, in the midst of which we are confronted with images of fragments representing two different worlds. The clashing together on the screen is appropriate both to the nature of what we see and their historical background: a medieval-looking, aristocratic warrior helmet sitting perched above its spoils of war that include painted wooden masks, exotic fruits, and primitive weapons easily overcome by the swords we also see before us, swords bought by riches like fine beads of pearls lying next to the alloyed, aristocratic breastplates with frilly engravings.

These signs of clashing times and places lie crowded together next to one another as though embodied in a living still life captured in the movement of cinema. And, they are clearly representations. No one helmet on a screen conquers multiple tribes of an entire jungle.

Primitive masks are signs that perhaps our sense of unsettling is because an ancient, unheralded spirit that we’ve banished from our consciousness is, in spite of us, presently appearing in our midst. Whether it’s a primitive mystery that we’ve sacrificed to our secularism or the “spirit of the age” of our racist tribalism, I can't say. The film is a wondering of the difference.

The other scene against which that one is juxtaposed is suffocated by images of death embodied in castle ruins. The sweat, dispassion, and opium on white faces take center stage of our consciousness despite the loud, lush screams of the Victorian attire and armor that adorn noble postures overlooking a tamed, silenced countryside of England.

What both juxtaposed scenes have in common is the total and absolute lack of social order or community that might otherwise give meaning to the characters, their identities, or their lack of interactive relationship. The actual act of capture is conspicuously and disquietingly absent from the filming.

The limited social interactions – almost eye contact here, being in the presence of unacknowledged company there - bear no mark of the violence at the heart of their relationship. But neither do they bear any mark of human warmth, friendship, tenderness, compassion, unity, loyalty, or partnership. The capturing among captors and captured by the frame of the film does the speaking for itself. The invisible silence of it almost screams, leaving the skeptical among us with a void of wonder. Why is no one actually speaking to one another, like human beings do?

The utterly suffocating silence of England is startlingly broken by the juxtaposed rain crashing against armor that appears foreign to the African wilderness in which we are immersed. Dislocation of sound. We are dislocated with it; sentence fragments are appropriate.

All of this can be very disorienting. The artifacts fragmented from their social fabric that doesn’t exist, the speech that no one – especially myself – dares utter, the complete lack of a history to give meaning to the story that is never told, being dropped in two different kinds of Wastelands like alien observers, it can all be very confusing at first. Is the film meant to be a contemplative meditation or a rupturing from the prevailing social order? Do they perhaps become one and the same? Perhaps the fabric of the social order, rather than dead and lifeless, is tearing and opening?

At first, the known rules are followed that we use to demark identities. Captured is draped in vibrantly colorful cloths that flow freely with the wind and have no care or worry of being immersed in water. Captor is ennobled in tailored outfits or armor that both take their own shape and themselves give posture and form to the body that wears them as they stand separate from and overlooking a large body of water that they’ve conquered. He drinks a bottle of opium or wine in sympathy with the sea by drowning either his guilt or his boredom. Which it is, I can't say?

Captor makes his clothes, and they in term make him. This is why it’s so strikingly and powerfully disorienting when Captured suddenly and without warning appears before us in ennobled, Victorian attire. There is no back story, no explaining, no change in facial expression. Whatever primitive spirit appears in this mask speaks through the multiplicity of silently neutral vessels that hold themselves open to us. We are only left with the question of our own identity mirrored before us in relation to Captor and Captured. How we clothe ourselves has always identified us. Our hopes and aspirations are wrapped up in how we wrap ourselves. The film is a tear in our clothing. Where were the chains? They appear invisible. Captured and Captor, you begin to wonder which is which.

Towards the beginning of the film, the white man stands over a distant image of the chaos of a body of water, while his slave is immersed in it. The white man is dressed as a conquering noble, while the black man is appears as a primitive tribesman. A key moment is when the tribesman appears in the frame with us as the aristocrats sit for a portrait that signifies nobility bordering around class. By the end of the film, the slave appears to have taken on the image of the nobleman, and the aristocrat is standing down by the water, gazing over the opaque mystery of the sea.

The moving poetry of the film eventually presents us, 36 minutes of montaged memories later, with irreconciled fragments of poetic story telling and standard modern history, present and past, waking and dreaming, home and exile. If we’re set in 1557, where did the modern steel pipes come from, which are tied down onto the concrete dock with steel screws? The craftsman of the film doesn’t bother to artificially construe our reality for us by imagineering what a dock in 1557 might have looked like on a modern screen. He’s up to something else.

As Captured in 1557 stands, clothed in flowing vibrance, not overlooking the water but gazing towards the horizon, not from above it but on a particular location of time and weather-worn concrete dock and with water lapping over his bare feet, where did the post WWII battle ship lying horizontally on the body of water in the distance come from? A still life is always the capturing of a dead body, of disenchanted objects known only in the eye of the mind. But, if the dead body is moving, then are we in a dream?

It all seems so strange and foreign. Jesus was lifted up in the air on a cross on the outside of the city. Was John living closer to heaven when exiled to the island of Patmos? I come to wonder if perhaps the wooden masks from the jungles of Africa and the ennobled tailoring of Victorian stiffness both representationally serve simultaneously as the embodiment and fear of an ancient spirit at the heart of our primal history. Captured and Captor, I begin to wonder which is which.