Where Did Ramses Go? (Amr Bayoumi, 2019, 62 min)

Amr Bayoumi's only feature documentary, produced after 20 years of filmmaking, is the  film of his life in more than one sense. It’s a film about himself as a child, a son, a schoolchild, a conscript, a young man, an adult, a citizen and a filmmaker. Through this two-tiered self-reflexivity, where the author and the medium both appear as subjects, autobiography further merges with the author’s history of his country. Far from a ‘biography of a nation’, this social history of the imagined community of Egypt consistently abandons linearity. At face value, it’s about the famed Statue of Ramses II. But throughout the film, tensions will remain between it and its supposed subject, reaching its height as the closing shot repeats the eponymous, cunning question.

The film’s foundational moment sees Bayoumi’s return to his father’s house, and coincides with the father’s death, but also with a critical point on the political timeline, the terrible meaning of which we know only retrospectively without any commentary or explanation on screen or from the voiceover. In fact, January 2011 will not be referred to until towards the end of the film, and almost only because back in 2006 Tahrir was en route to the Grand Egyptian Museum. The 2013 moment takes us back, by way of a double flashback, to the experience of shooting the transfer operation in 2006, and to childhood memories invoked by the sight of the revisited void left behind by the removed statue, the void left behind by the deceased father, and the vacuum produced by all the preceding unspoken events in the withdrawn shadow of a fallen patriarch. This will set off a cascade of memories and associations, and open up a web of detours and meanderings along the way.

Serving mainly as a placeholder, the question of the title gestures, tongue in cheek, to other undercurrent questions leading to one another, as we’re invited by the author-director-narrator to take part in a needle-in-a-haystack search for answers - no child's play - through archives in the broadest sense; photographs, art, images, objects, discourses, private collections and personal belongings, but also official archives. Ten years after, Bayoumi tries to reflect on what he had captured on camera, and, decades later, to make sense of his childhood and early youth against the background of what was happening in the country (and the nearby public square), which becomes a deliberate attempt to make sense of the city and its transformations, to trace the paths of Egyptian modernity under colonialism and after the republic, by examining the urban experience of moviegoing that introduced him to Bab el-Hadid (Cairo Station, Youssef Chahine, 1958), an older name of the railway station located in the square, which also gave it its earlier name; the relations of subject and object via both the old and emerging mass media (press, television); development projects (transportation); shifting demographics and urbanization; and ultimately the reestablishment of a modern nation-state, complete with a national narrative, that later acts to “break” younger Bayoumi’s identity into a “civil self” and a “military self”.

Announcing a new state (of affairs), the statue is removed by (the will of) the Free Officers from countryside where it was unearthed by an orientalist-archaeologist more than a century before to a new location in Nahdet Misr (or Masr) Square (later Ramses Square), replacing 1919’s older brand of nationalism embodied in Mokhtar’s “Nahdat Misr” (Egypt's Renaissance) Statue, which would in turn be removed to a less central square. A colonial history intersects with an unfolding history of a newly independent country desperate to catch up (having been waking up for a while from a historical slumber). Requirements for the process include cultural and ideological paraphernalia: inauguration of museums, erection of memorials (and apparently moving monuments around), and creating new subjectivities, all as part of the contradictory procedure of giving legitimacy to a new/modern nation by tracing it back all the way to an ancient past. Objects are relocated, maps reappropriated, and history rewritten. Bayoumi’s commentary, accurately but sparingly, gives us room for processing and reflecting; here it accentuates the meaning involved in the arrival of an ancient military officer-cum-monarch accompanied by republican officers, new leaders of war and peace.

Enter the masses. Until now we’ve been looking from afar or from above, at the rooftops of El Sakakini, typical of those of Cairo’s middle and lower classes with their semi-abandoned junk, the distant empty streets in aerial photographs, and ‘remote’ villagers. Now millions crowd in the streets and squares, coming from the capital city and beyond, on their own, showing up for Nasser’s funeral. A most memorable spectacle, it’s tantamount to a superimposition that Bayoumi sets out to unpack, a highly condensed capture of history in motion yet standing still (Salah Jahin’s euologic metaphor of an abruptly and shockingly jammed film reel allowing us to examine the frozen image on screen), as it occupies the square in question, forever occupying and haunting the child witness, who’s now reconstituting and redeeming this moment from a foreign archive that has just released the material for the first time. The spontaneous, frenzied crowd is conjured up in later appearances, on later occasions, as the narrator jumps forward (and sometimes backward) - an on-the-move observational mode culminating in a nocturnal peripatetic sequenced camerawork - following the statue’s slow cavalcade. A strictly state funeral follows, with no masses in sight. Then later on the statue’s symbolic “funeral” turns into a royal, but again popular, this time even convivial, procession. (In the summer of 2021, the viewer will recall a fourth, more recent, grandiose, macabre “Pharaonic parade”). Meanwhile, maps recur, with changing meanings and functions.

To wait to see the statue at its final destination is not to get the joke of the title, a fake threshold that leads to open, poetic ending, an equally fake exit, making Ramses an allegory about true and false paths, pointless endeavors, and human agency in the face of destiny and authority. Amid a slew of archival material, childhood memories, old songs and solo oud tracks, viewers are sensitively spared an overwhelming nostalgia, thanks to a shrewd selection of music designed to emphasize the marginal and engage in ‘revival’ only by making ‘heritage’ relevant. Ramses proposes a survival by working rigorously through a certain Egyptian heaviness. One example is how the animated commercial (whose slogan gives the film its title), along with the Ramses cartoons, strips the ancient Egyptian civilization from its notorious gloominess associated with its religions, from its obligatory nationalistic and high-culture seriousness, but at the same time without succumbing to nihlistic sarcasm given the commercial’s exploitation of history early on in the post-1967 era of defeat, decadence and disillusion. 

From the outset, Bayoumi points out to this distinctive Egyptian weight of history, of living in conservative society, but also of family and private life, and establishes his film’s articulation of a yearning both for lightness and for a future, at a moment when a sense of impasse, a blockage, was felt. (One imagines Benjamin’s “Angel of History” stuck, with no winds of progress blowing). The weight takes the form of baggage, cardboard boxes, and endless junk plus a necessary return to give the spirits of the ghosts their bodies and voices back. But the diagnosis is also borne out by the central symbolism of a colossus that from time to time must be pulled, dragged and carried. This tedious task is also a site of a coming-together of technicians, manual workers and laymen to devise a way to implement decrees. Bayoumi chooses to join them, to help rescue them from collapse and disappearance and to make them the subjects and owners of the story. Like the engineer who designs the transfer process, Bayoumi designs a cinematic way to reduce weight and save labor. A meticulous inventory is required, and, here at least, is accomplished.

There is a moment in Ramses when the camera does a 360-degree pan, more than once, from a footbridge, the image is dyed with darkening, spreading red, and a dull, muffled buzzing dominates the soundtrack, while Bayoumi elliptically tells us that he lost memory on the day he finished military service and just after a confrontation with his father followed by an aimless walk to the square. It’s a scene that ruptures but also connects, an isthmus and a bridge at one and the same time, pushing Ramses further into a hybrid area, conflating fact, fiction and poetry. If the momentary memory loss is metaphorical, rather than a medical or biographical fact, it’s still a wake-up call for him, for us, to rest, to heal, to forget in order to remember.

Beyond the Factory (Mostafa Darwish et al, 2018-2019, 41 min)

The rest of the films in this program can be watched as if they were adaptations from Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, Studs Terkel’s 1974 book that interviews workers in various professions, a humane collective testimony about the tribulations, torments and joys of work, and a parallel set of conflicting emotions and states: frustration, pride, boredom, self-realization, and so on. Beyond the Factory is one of these social and oral microhistories in transmedial form. An anthology film, it was compiled in 2021 from short videos published on YouTube between 2017 and 2019 as episodes of a nonlinear online series from Mada Masr accompanied by short descriptions. Except for their rearrangement here and for the 8 videos/episodes entirely edited out from the film version, the 13 included were almost not retouched for the occasion. The project is in a way comparable to Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Human (2015), also made to be watched in parallel, both in fragmentary form and as a 3-hours theatrical documentary, and similarly based on interviews.

In its origin, this was intended to be a series on “labor crafts [sic] in Egypt” or “labor-intensive workshops in Egypt”, which holds true and applies to Beyond the Factory by extension, although this laconicism doesn’t do it, nor does it do the standalone episodes, anything near justice. The (original?) Arabic versions tell us a bit more about the subject-matter, about "handicraft workshops in Egypt" and “life” or “workers’ lives” in these workshops. In Beyond the Factory, the evolutionary dimension of the series, watched chronologically from a playlist, is lost; the last published episode (not included) runs for four times the average 3-minutes duration, but is also stylistically different.

Watching the very short films here (with “The Zincographer” as the longest at 4:47 and “The Cart Saddler” the shortest at 2:11), makes it compulsory to listen repeatedly to the intervening musical motif, with its psychedelic, hypnotic, and authentically Egyptian melancholy, mixing very well with the content to serve the function of lamentation and mourning, especially for those Egyptian or Arab viewers familiar with its lyrical source in a classic musical movie, where the singing actor plays a hard-working poor man complaining vicissitudes of time and life’s betrayals and longing for the good old days. Loaded with meaning and irony, this purely sonic reference is a wink and an interrobang.

It would be useful for comparison to imagine (or actually watch) these same crafts, or even same workshops and same interviewed workers and workshop owners, through a different media outlet, or filmed by other content creators, Egyptians or not. It’s easy to see them romanticized, aestheticized, melodramatic, a pretext for nostalgia or consumption, made exotic for a foreigner’s - or even a local tourist’s - gaze. Alternatively, say at the hands of militant or leftist ideologues, propaganda and agitation, for better or worse, might’ve been the case. Or more reasonably, since a Marxist orthodoxy would shy from going “beyond the factory” and wage-labour anyway, a radical leftist media would be more studious, delving more into the contradictions of labour, the nuances of profit, value, and means of production. We can imagine more and more approaches in this manner, developed in a more academic, anthropological or feminist vein, emphasizing any of the many aspects involved, including, say, the theatrical or the material, or putting these crafts in a global context from a business-friendly or entrepreneurial liberal standpoint. To the advantage of Mada’s project, it’s all and none of the above; an engaged journalism that wants to speak a visual language as purely as possible.

Quintessentially modern, cinema might have relatively neglected these pre-industrial spaces, while showing an obsession with the factory (notwithstanding Harun Farocki’s talk of “commercial film’s dread of factory work”) and office work. Which is one more reason why these films matter.

Many crafts in Beyond the Factory can be described as “endangered”, “obsolete”, “in decline” or (the more dramatic, scientifically-sounding and generally favored by the characters) bound for “extinction”, but the case studies add more complexity and strangeness to the matter: one of the last tarbush (fez) makers in Egypt, cut off since late colonialism from daily life, now exclusively produces for a staged, dramatized past, namely TV series, movies, and theater on the one hand, and, on the other, for the age-old institution of Al-Azhar, where the fez and the turban remain part of the religious attire worn by students and clerics. Papyrus-making even goes back farther to antiquity, but while “revival” is allegedly the case it is not clear if the contemporary practice followed an actual discontinuity. Similarly cut off from daily life, papyrus is made mainly for a now-stagnant tourism, also the target market of alabaster handicrafts. Meanwhile, copper smelting is still in more or less general use but also on the brink of some vague kind of disappearance.

It is significant that the film version (consciously or otherwise) emphasizes this sense of decline, demise and imminent “extinction” by not including some of the more stable and relevant and least threatened crafts in the series, such as the upholsterer, the feseekh and molasses manufacturers. As for those in the film who produce for a wider population, they do so for social occasions and special events (weddings, newborns’ sebou’ celebrations, feasts). A very specific and unexpected foreign market targeted by one of the crafts, the traditional ferka cloth making in Upper Egypt, is Sudan, where it’s imported to be used by Sudanese women. An obvious and ongoing trade relation between the two countries suddenly appears like a secret cult, thanks to the obscure nature of this outsourced folk costume making. Some products like the traditional Akhmim textiles and handmade tiles found the other side of the coin of decline: niche market, while others look like rare curiosities (Siwa’s salt sculptures).

Beyond the Factory looks at the strange in-between situation of a pre-industrial, premodern worker stuck in an out-of-joint time of high tech and de-industrialization, due in part to a colonial past and underdevelopment, and in part to a kind of resistance to an elusive yet threatening progress, together with an emotional attachment to the security of tradition and simplicity. The proud owner of the tarbush workshop, also on behalf of invisible brothers/cousins, is adamant that the fathers’ and grandfather's shop sign is there to stay, as a matter of family (and almost national) honour, come what may, reminiscent of the classic film The Bus Driver (Atef el Tayeb, 1982), where the threat closes in as the storm of the early neoliberal Open Door policy blows. The mixed feelings are also ours. We’d feel like protecting the vulnerable, but fully aware that gone are the days of protectionism, and that preservation is never enough. How do we reconcile our dreams of futuristic utopias and abolition of labour with our weakness for workmanship? We’re enamoured of ‘heritage’ and traditional art, angry about persistent backwardness and lagging far behind, and confused about ‘primitivity’. Is it cool or uncool that rural and medieval means of transportation are still roaming the streets of our big cities, threatened by tuk-tuks?  Isn’t “Our ‘Age of Anxiety’,” as Marshall McLuhan famously wrote in The Medium is the Massage, “in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools — with yesterday's concepts”?

At the risk of vulgarizing Marx, these films also seem to disrupt or undo, if temporarily and indirectly, an alienated fetishisation of commodities. First by an appreciation of the intimate relationship of craftspeople with their product, their sense of ownership, fuller knowledge of the stages of production and its various aspects, and their closeness to their bosses. Secondly, by introducing the potential consumer to the ins and outs of the product, when even salespersons and vendors don’t really know what they’re selling (including this writer who once traded in papyrus and alabaster artifacts).

Visually the unmistakably characteristic gritty look and visceral feel of the Egyptian workshop is the first thing to meet the eye. Fouad Haddad captures the hellish nature of any of these workshops in a colloquial poem about blacksmiths from his thematic collection about "Livelihoods and Artisans": an underworld of endless darkness and endless fire. The inferno of work is literal and visible (and fire safety is wordlessly out of question)—workplace as, at best, a heroic purgatory.

Troubling questions lurk behind the image and the statements (sometimes made by the interviewed while working with their hands, inspecting the process, or moving about); questions about religion (for example, Islamic aniconism dealt with in Ramses), child labor and workplace relationships, among other things. These silences become part of the restrained political commentary, with sporadic mention of a politicized lack of job security, labour organizing or state neglect. Questions of national diversity also creep in from among the lower, lower-middle and (shrinking) middle classes, together with questions of solidarity, resilience and limits of coping mechanisms and empowerment. A veteran zincographer reportedly committed suicide (a taboo topic) because of debt burdens. The clockmaker (a single mother) tells of her clients’ gendered professional expectations. Two women from Akhmim affiliated with a Coptic NGO are like soulmates “struggling together”.

The workshops of Beyond the Factory are not only haunted with the specters of the past, but also by the more immediate ghosts of the workers who left or stopped working, now possibly unemployed somewhere, invisibly, and who once - so we’re told - filled the workshop spaces, or the houses of entire villages, during a relative booming or in not-so-cruel times. These spaces often look frozen in older times, and from the rundown walls, old, sometimes decaying, portraits of the departed, stare into space.

White Hell (Ahmed Assem, Mahmoud Khaled, Omar Shash, 2018, 15 min)

Unlike Bassam Mortada's Waiting For His Descent (2014), the multi-director short White Hell never leaves the White Mountain where the limestone quarries are located. Their TV-worthy reportage is a reminder that documentary film (at least in North America and Western Europe since the 1980s) is a democratic tool that ought to be fought for. The camera swiftly alternates between indoor interviews and testimonies, clips of the stages of work enveloped in clouds of limestone dust in the open air, and tiny glimpses of leisure and friendship, as the workers take turns to sit in front of the camera to suggest a trial of… capitalism? The invisibility of an employer - a temporary owner who holds a lease on the quarry - or even a recognizable foreman, allows the mountain itself, and by extension, nature, to assume an evil Olympian presence anachronistically complained against in a cinematic forum of grievances.

If seen in this specific order of writing, the anxieties of Beyond the Factory become a precursor for the traumas of White Hell, which otherwise brings out the hellish dimension to the front, into the very title, with drudgery in a hazardous work environment taken to an extreme, horrific level. How then, wondered the programmers behind a screening of Mortada’s film, can a filmmaker look at this harsh reality amid the aesthetic temptations of the site? An important ethical question compounded by an accompanying temptation: it’s easy to make the limestone quarry workers look cool, as daredevil badasses flaunting their (cheap) sunglasses, scarves and hood-like headcovers, uncannily recalling the haunting images of defiant masked protesters amid clouds of tear gas.

If what saves Mortada’s film from falling into this pit is a focused relatively extended look at the social trauma and the protest politics of late Mubarak’s era, what does the job in White Hell is the formal interviewing technique, the generally gritty approach and the observant but not too observational camerawork. Instead of serving as a beautifying filter through a detached gaze, the whiteness of the hazardous raw material suggests nothing but death, in the same manner that cancer patient Amal Dunqul’s deathbed poem about the whiteness of hospitals establishes the sad irony: "All this whiteness reminds me of the shroud". The bliss of work and working with others, the pleasure, pride and consolation we see elsewhere, blushingly recede: identical, infinitely churned out hexahedron bricks are not what we had in mind when we thought of dexterity and craftsmanship. We’d rather be killed by robots and autonomous drones as some human beings actually were, wouldn’t we? After all, factory workers’ death or mutilation by machines - still in the Egyptian living memory - was easy to explain away by citing industrialization.

Although the end credits can make one feel uneasy with visual effects and melodramatic music that suggest a TV series, almost giving the workers the aura of dramatic characters, heroes or movie stars, this can also be the aura of martyrs, the credits being an early obituary.

Patterns from the Sun (Mohamed Taymour, 2019, 43 min)

The remaining two films are the most faithful - followed by Beyond the Factory - to the spirit of what the program proposes to call ‘design films’, apparently as a genre rather than as mere touching upon themes of labour, namely manual and artisanal work in this case. Coincidentally, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky has recently made the case for a recognition of a broader, transmedial genre that would also include these ‘design films’ as ‘process films’. (The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor, 2020, Duke University Press).

On the other hand, the two films are also the least politicized, with nothing of the grittiness and viscerality of the others—which never prevents politics from creeping in anyway, even if we watched them separately, but especially with all the films seen side by side.

I can imagine Patterns from the Sun as candidate for a non-Western version of Netflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design, that is to say it is the link in this program with an advanced society - a future society in the Egyptian case - coming with the luxuries of experimentally mixing work with art, science, technology on the one hand, and with privileged conditions of laidback creative independence where the artist’s studio seamlessly feels like home and vice versa.

The two designers are eager to make local handicrafts contemporary and trendy with their signature-in-the-making conceptual and spiritual touch of digital art. An emphasis on the work-in-progress mode, hybridity-oriented development of techniques and small-scale materials testing akin to an amateur R&D, all towards a vaguely anticipated potential end product and a brand personality, helps Patterns from the Sun to be a subtle, almost uncertain marketing tool, promising a more artistic than commercial form of the medium. (After all, some of the finest art films were originally meant as propaganda.)

Likewise, the films’s unhurried pace and contemplative mood effortlessly translate its subjects’ desires and attitudes: George Farid’s ambient soundtrack, with its serial patterns, has a 1980s New Age vibe to it; the interior and exterior wide shots of the expansive workspace and the unspoiled spacious landscapes convey the need for time and space, and also offer a study of ergonomics―bringing the already pathetic or outright horrific workspaces featured in the film program to new light; the 28th minute’s kaleidoscopic visuals express the amazement of scientific discovery and fascination with possibilities.

The more-than-merely-reconciliatory adoption of home-as-workplace-and-workplace-as-home, a “work as lifestyle” philosophy in practice, and the enjoyable fusion by choice of working time with leisure time call for a revision of our allegedly emancipatory notions about freetime, but also an update of existing sober analyses. In her artistic research about work and leisure in Hong Kong, featuring conversations around a tile-based game with a retiring letterpress craftsman, Elaine W. Ho explains that a special working-from-home arrangement “allowed a generation of housewives, their children and their neighbours to find a dynamic balance between affective labour and economic survival,” but wondering, “where does that leave us today in the negotiations between the private and the public, between work and leisure…?” She elaborates:

The ‘putting-out’ system of domesticised labour and cottage industries are often described as a form of proto-industrialisation, but without trying to be nostalgic about what a new cottage industry could look like today... the answers must lie somewhere in the rewriting of the work and leisure balance… (“Getting Lighter, Still Labour-Intensive”, How to maneuver: Shapeshifting texts and other publishing tactics, Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi, 2020)

In the final analysis, what the spirituality and inspiration mantra of Patterns and the ritualistic “work is worship to God” ethic of toilers in the other films have in common is, well, Human; Human created into hardship to sweat for bread, Human as a transformative mediator between God and raw material as in a Salah Jahin poem: “O, iron! There is a spiritual thing about you!” Work emerges as an inescapable necessity for one or another reason, be it a strenuous and backbreaking dead-end job or a coveted career requiring cognitive effort. Meanwhile, unemployment is looming, together with the feared twin specters of irrelevance and inability to work―sudden death. Even the tranquillity of Patterns is disturbed by invisible craftspeople, whose livelihoods are threatened (and cultures are endangered), burdening those who have a place under the sun with their wishes for being part of the future.

Cairopolitan (Aly Soliman, 2021, 19 min)

Produced by the brand name that gives the promotional short its title, Cairopolitan shows us very few examples of their craftsmen at work. The name reveals an often suspicious wistful fondness for the long-gone ‘cosmopolitan Cairo’.

Cairopolitan capitalizes on the tropes of Masr Zaman (“yesteryear’s Egypt”), popular online, in what seems to be a self-conscious phase of cultural iconization that allows for the familiar ahwa baladi (Egyptian café) wooden chair to be rediscovered as vintage, and thus eyed by, say, antique shop owners who may soon buy as many as possible of those items to store away for sale at an opportune moment. Any such object is thus redeemed from daily use for an afterlife as a collectible object on display while still in use within trendy interiors, if not for mere decoration in the loneliness of a boutique’s shop window. But Cairopolitan’s million dollar business idea was to sell the icon without the object: the said chair is meticulously copied, camelcased and trademarked as CoffeeChair™ and sold in miniatures; an infinite supply of commodities is tapped into.

While a dozen articles can be read in serious American publications about the quintessentially globalized, ubiquitous, arguably more practical, and utterly banal Monobloc (also an inspiration for Cairopolitan’s PlastiChair™), it’s through a very brief oral history by a craftsman in Cairopolitan that Egypt’s more elaborate and enduring equivalent gets its overdue rehabilitation if not a newly-found appreciation.

To put it in more general and less abstract terms, the idea is to transform the objects functionally, or strip them from functionality altogether (as is the case with the chairs), so that they metamorphose into toys, accessories, or souvenirs. However, the ablution structure at the Mosque of Ibn Tulun is shrunk, cast, and copied as pencil sharpeners, but also at the same time as something akin to a religious ceremonial object, falling into an ambiguous area between sacredness, worldly use and profanity, a curiously twisted postmodern example of Walter Benjamin's modernist equation of cult value replaced with exhibition value at the heart of mechanical reproduction. Cairopolitan’s inclusion of TulunArt™ miniatures fits well with the choice of the coins magnified into coasters (Coinsters™). Specters of prohibition and illegality are inadvertently and amusingly awakened, while a very deep joke (given its source) is made, if unwittingly: a joke that poses questions about the nature of authenticity and the legal, ethical, artistic and economic limits of imitation, and nods at all that’s presumably kitsch in Beyond the Factory and the extant figures of Ramses II including the ones yet to be discovered. The recurrent elements of banality and emotional conflict again creep in when a craftsman talks of occasional, normal boredom, in the same breath professing his love for the job.

In "The Philosophy of Toys", Baudelaire saw the 19th-century children's play with dolls and toys as the universe of their search for a future individual identity. As an example of his mid-20th century Mythologies, French toys were found by Roland Barthes to prepare the French child to accept the adult world (one of a strong national character in their case), to become a user of it, not a creator or maker, unlike the case with building blocks. (Barthes’s enthusiasm for wooden toys made by older craftsmen is also noteworthy.) This lingering insult to children’s intelligence is what toy designer Cas Holman says (in an episode of The Art of Design) provokes her into action. “The ‘child’,” McLuhan reminds us, “was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense.”

How do we make sense of objects from the world of adults and older generations turned into toys of a sort that are not aimed at children? The question feeds back into others raised throughout “Makers in the Sun”; questions about working and not working, dreamfulness and wakefulness, childhood and growing up, ghosts of the past and specters of the future.

The Program: Makers in the Sun

A multi-leveled spectrality inherent in cinema, Derrida suggests, enables filmmakers (and also curators and programmers?) to "graft" more ghosts, more specific ones, into films ("Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida", Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, Discourse, 37.1–2, Winter/Spring 2015, pp. 22–39.). Mark Fisher builds on Derrida's hauntology by applying it to a turn-of-the-century sonic response in electronic music to a disappearance of future from sight, as well as to earlier British and American films that were haunted with this defeated future, a defeat of social democracy and communism beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. ("What Is Hauntology?", Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1, pps 16–24).

As the films of "Makers in the Sun" coalesce, people and things that populate them come and go from and into one another. The original hypnotic effect ascribed to the spectrality of cinema is reinforced by the hypnotic element in ‘process films’, placing the viewer in a mode of intense exposure to a plethora of specters. These Egyptian specters were promised many futures, demanded their own futures, and now assemble, along with their fellow living (as in “live-action”) countrypeople in these films that look in the direction of what might be future, while turning back. The garment printed with digitally processed patterns from the sun, hung outdoors as if it was laundry, is not a mere designer clothing prototype. Everything suggests that it is also an archaeological find for display in a museum or for a posthuman eye. It belongs to someone no longer and not yet here, from time immemorial, a distant future, or forever stuck.