Public Books Humans and Other Animals

10/13/16, 11:29 AM

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HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS

BEN MENDELSOHN

Still from Manakamana. manakamanafilm.com

April 22, 2014 Toward the end of Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velezs
Manakamana (2013), an elderly mother and her daughter enjoy fast-melting ice
cream bars while returning from their pilgrimage to a hilltop temple in rural Nepal.
Were like children still learning how to eat, the younger woman comments, as
much to her mother as to the camera.
As the ice cream drips, they alternate between teasing one another and staring
silently out the windows of their cable car, marveling at the surroundings. The film
is built entirely from such journeys, spanning a range of social arrangements: a
grandfather and a small boy, three elderly female friends, a group of goats en route
to their sacrificial slaughter. Each of the films 11 scenes is comprised of a single
shot lasting only as long as it takes to ride the cable car to or from the temple. The
structural contrivance produces moments both profound and understated, repetitive
yet utterly unpredictable.
With Velezs 16mm camera locked in place, the viewers gaze may drift
between the foregrounded subjects and the forests, villages, or corn fields receding
into the background. The glass encasement produces a neat frame-within-a-frame,
as if a separate film is playing just for us. These nested layers of viewing create an
elegant meta-cinematic gesture, one of Manakamanas many achievements. This
self-reflexivity avoids anxiety about the crisis of the image, instead offering an
optimistic, affirmative comment on cinema and collective experience.
Manakamana is the latest feature film to emerge out of Harvards Sensory
Ethnography Lab (SEL), which has produced a remarkable run of documentaries
since its founding in 2006. The SELs integration of aesthetic experimentation and
academic rigor landed comprehensive surveys at the Whitney Biennial and The
Film Society of Lincoln Center this spring. The exhibitions included widely

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Public Books Humans and Other Animals

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acclaimed feature films Leviathan (2012), Foreign Parts (2010), and Sweetgrass
(2009), alongside many shorter works by faculty and students.

Leviathan (trailer) from Cinema Guild on Vimeo.

The films are far from homogeneous. Yet many shared characteristics link the
projects, including the extended duration of images; an attention to nonhuman
environments, animals, and machines; and a recurring tension between realism and
abstraction.
Aryo Danusiri, a SEL PhD student whose films explore Islamic ritual and
crowds, demonstrates some of these shared interests. We are always talking about
the long take, he says. Danusiris film On Broadway (2011), included in the
Whitney program, documents Friday prayers at a Mosque renting space from a
Chinese cultural center in Lower Manhattan. The film is 62 minutes and only four
shots, all from a single fixed position. Danusiri describes these long takes as the core
of observational cinema, a visual building block that is also an essential research
method: Im very curious if I have this kind of infrastructure in the film, what will
happenwhat kind of encounter will it produce, and what kind of knowledge can
my film produce as a result.

Friday prayers slowly begin. A still from Aryo Danusiris On Broadway, courtesy of the
filmmaker.

Danusiri further describes On Broadway as a film about a mosque in which

space becomes the main character. His emphasis on the built environment reflects
the SELs broader attention to the nonhuman, be it architecture, environment,
animal, or technology. In a recent Film Comment essay, Irina Leimbacher posits that
the SEL is pioneering a kind of post-humanist cinema, best exemplified by
Leviathan.
This kinetic portrait of deep sea fishing was filmed largely on GoPro
waterproof cameras, forgoing a romantic portrait of sea life in favor of a disorienting
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collage of fish heads, fish blood, seabirds, and nets flying in and out of the water.
Codirected by Sensory Ethnography Lab founder Lucien Castaing-Taylor and
faculty member Vrna Paravel, the film doesnt merely embed with the crewit
penetrates the material fabric of the fishing operation through its tools,
surroundings, and motions.
Leviathan also rides a fine line between intelligible documentary and pure
abstraction, a tension present in several other works, including SEL sound designer
Ernst Karels audio composition Swiss Mountain Transport Systems. In this 68-minute
piece, field recordings of gondolas and chairlifts are pushed beyond their contexts
into the realm of musique concrte. Following an exhibition at Lincoln Center, Karel
referenced moments of the composition according to their various scenes. Yet its
difficult to accept the work in such representational or indexical terms. More
convincing is the projects official description as acoustic glimpses of a vast
surrounding landscape inhabited by humans and other animals.

Stil from Leviathan. cinemaguild.com

As Danusiri insists, any method of research will have tradeoffsthe Sensory

Ethnography Lab does not mandate attention to human discourse or labor, nor to
documentary verisimilitude. (Whether voiceover, graphics, or archival footage might
be tolerated is another matter.) Instead, their growing filmography demonstrate an
open-ended commitment to vivid, vexing documents that blur the boundaries
between art and research.
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Ben Mendelsohn,
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Books, April 7, 2014

Ben Mendelsohn is a PhD student in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University where he focuses
on environment, infrastructure, and experimental film. He is co-directing a documentary about human earthmoving
and the Anthropocene and developing a dissertation project about coastal land reclamation. Follow him on Twitter
@bamendelsohn.
Tags: Film, Technology
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