The network of references throughout Johal’s selection mines its own phenomenological hermeneutics as a series of linked displays of homage. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s tribute to Bruce Baillie and Kang Seung Lee’s tributes to filmmaker Derek Jarman and writer Oh Joon-soo ask their audiences to sit with a clump of grass, gurgling water in a brook, or freshly shoveled dirt. With these calming images that register passing time and the flow of details that unfold in a natural setting, they create spaces eliciting burial, altar, and memorial. The time codes for works by Carolyn Lazard and Tony Cokes nod to the “flicker” technique of structuralist film of the 1960s and the queer aesthetics of dance clubs saturated in acid color and the beats of house music. Picking up on the physical effects, Cokes’ “pulse” is coupled with text phrases by Rainald Goetz, Jeremy Gilbert, and Ewan Pearson, re- energizing the contradictions of that lost world. Lazard’s and Cokes’ works connect through the sensual sphere of clubbing, which appears in the films as a dominant thread that locates desire and its obstacles. Kang’s steady camera fixates on dancer Joshua Serafin, who appears as if in a trance, embracing becoming the late Singaporean-born choreographer Goh Choo San. Here also, the music’s driving beat propels the video forward. Serafin’s dance, compelled by sorrow and an insistence on bringing a life back into view, invokes Goh’s embodiment. Dineo Seshee Bopape also employs her own body in real time, in a performance of unfolding intimacy, insisting on the mirror encounter between the camera and the screen. Documentary is a genre of recovery—a remembrance of what happened or could have been. Seeing the performance of someone who is no longer alive reawakens their presence in mediated form. Filmmaker P. Staff brings Tom of
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