stills from the film, copyright Greg Mahoney, used with permission
nostalgic histories pursued by the film’s various characters. These characters constitute a post-public, builders and citizens of the short-lived utopia who struggle to rescue the city from its debased present. They also strive for self-definition through their individual readings of history, each one with an idiosyncratic interpretation, and corresponding practices of research, documentation, and archiving. The film’s narrative is linear, yet each of these ‘saints’ traverses its time-space in ways that gesture to circularity, repetition and haunting return. Failed by progress, they live in a twilight shot through with contemporaneous pasts. Meanwhile the city, too late for living, is a double-ghost: the manufactured body of unmoored utopian ideals, now also alienated from even the context and intellectual consciousness that engendered it. Still, it does not exactly decay like other dead things — into ashes, or into a historical footnote. Rather, the Brockton of the film piles itself up into an illegible aggregate mass, an intractable site of mystification where compasses run awry and the cracks of the pavement dance in inscrutable patterns. At the same time, the force with which the characters weave their mazes of interpretation riddle the junk heap with holes, denying it even the stability of accretion. solitary struggles Saints ’ saints grapple individually with a failed history that has produced no clear victor to write it. Each one attempts to demystify the city, to make its buildings and spaces, as well as the ideas they were meant to embody, into objects of knowledge, something to fit into a coherent narrative. Like the Christian saints in Michel de Certeau’s reading of hagiography as a form of history writing though, their works do not produce modern, liberal stories,
but rather individually orthodox versions of the city’s origins as a practice of rallying and reassurance in the face of the fragile present. 5 Their self-appointed work is to understand the city from outside the planning process: once, they were its intended citizens, but in the aftermath they are left with only a fragmentary knowledge of what the city was supposed to be and do. The Architect maps the streets while delivering indecipherable history lectures. Headquartered in a burnt-out factory, he develops a scorched-earth scheme to return the urban landscape to the moment when, according to his careful research, utopia went off the rails. His drive to destroy and thereby resurrect the city is characterised by a fierce, protective love of this treasure marred by others’ neglect of it. The Digger sings as she dredges the earth for the city’s missing pieces: ‘for in this earth we may reveal the key to History’s Arc’. She displays a millenarian’s enduring faith that there is meaning in all that happens and all that will; her effort to understand the past, once and for all, constitutes a preparation for the coming storm. At the Hall of Records , a city bureaucrat in secret collusion with The Architect participates in dark rituals of creation with his peers: half séance and half birthing, they are building an artificial body. Where the earlier populace had failed to be properly moulded by the reforms of the original utopia, these aspiring leaders of the city’s resurrection will produce their own, pre-colonised citizenry. The Climber positions himself as an omniscient narrator of past and present: watching from above, he is convinced that he understands what has truly happened and tries to win others to his truth, to little avail. The Street Scholar reads from scripture and recognises its message
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