I, Movie

Blickwispern.

I.

Rewatching 88:88 by Isiah Medina again and again is like whispering with someone you love in bed at dawn. The film presents what might be called an ontology of whispering.

II.

88:88 as both a film event and a film title event presents an opportunity to get the event of the film and its reception right the first time. As Medina whispers early in the film, ‘do you really think it is impossible to love someone on the first shot, on the first try?’ to which Anne answers ‘ . . . but it should already be reinvented . . .’.

III.

Does a whispered question constitute a different modality to a voiced one? Close to prayer, somewhere between silence and hermetics but also official speech, the whispered question (‘do you really think it is impossible to love someone on the first shot . . .’) beams straight into the watcher’s ear, and the first shot when Medina asks it cuts to Anne shooting with a T2i. This shot of the shot when the whispered question is asked of whether it might be possible (impossible) to get falling in love right for the first time (‘on the first shot’) is itself a Blickwispern (‘whispergaze’).

IV.

(What if the childhood of language could hear that? ‘but its me talking to anne asking her if its impossible to make love work on the first shot the first try’. It’s I.M., immaculate conception, on Fb dm.)

V.

It may well be that the best way to ‘watch’ and ‘follow’ 88:88 is not to become its fan and hagiographer, as such, but to push and super-formalise the spacings of its event by continuing to think it and rewatch it, and that just this situation, which the film might then name, would become what it feels like to watch it—what it means even—and therefore help whatever its continuous movement now creates. At least double secret, and hushing. Watch the film so that it does not stop becoming an event, so that it remains unstoppable. Hush hush.

VI.

There seems to be a discrete pre- and post-history of 88:88 stretching archived on the maker’s Facebook, Tumblr, public and secret Twitter account histories and favourites, and in various screenshots of hidden or no longer existing posts to be found on co-creators’ sites. The film’s global release on MUBI coincides with a global availability of its genesis, still live and ongoing to an extent in Spring 2016 [the time of writing—J.T.], as if the technogenesis of the One were, for once, for now, visible.

VII.

What’s your real movie?

VIII.

Another great but in many ways scarcely comparable sotto voce moment in recent cinema is the long whispering scene in the middle of Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2014). What’s memorable is not only that Owen Wilson, who always whispers in his films, is here given full whispering reign and for nearly five whole minutes whispers to Joaquin Phoenix, but that Phoenix then joins ranks with Wilson and they collapse into mutual whispering for another five minutes. At the centre of Inherent Vice is this pair of comic and sussurative prayers. The scene of contagious whisper may be taken as a homage to 88:88. The modality of whispering, which is elusive and subsidiary in the history of inscription, seems in fact to be divine and contagious in nonsubtending and addending ways. How has it been muted?

IX.

In a super arguably counterintuitive way Medina’s film constitutes the unique chance of an epochal pectoriloquy.

X.

Hear yourself whisper.

XI.

————

XII.

Let us whisper warnings into the ears of the most intelligent, suggests Baudelaire in a line murmured in Walter Benjamin’s ear in the Arcades Project. Medina’s film—which we can begin to suspect is one of the first films not to be one—acts as the type of whisper Baudelaire recommends, as if whispering dangerous nothings in the shell-likes of the most intelligent people on earth. It combusts and shakes intelligence itself, making it dubious, and juddering the sense of how everything ‘got us this far’. The ‘most intelligent’ is whispered out. 88:88 makes the full plasticity of thought available to everyone and yet also super-dissolves all literary hooks in advance, by including them, and so is beyond counter-reactionary; it marks the counter-reactionary’s fade.

XIII.

What is eight times eight? It is the same thing as whispering.

XIV.

Whispering is a child’s question and a question of the enlightenment that always keeps the child in play. There is small film by Medina’s friend Alexandre Galmard on YouTube called ‘dusted march’, a bit more than two minutes long, a movie made as a ‘birthday present to Isiah and Anne’, and yet also seemingly part of 88:88 without being just its unressurectable sublated part. It consists mostly, after a firm silence, of what sounds at first like (but is not) child’s speech, a girl—nameless at least provisionally in the space of the film—who delivers words seemingly written by Alexandre. ‘One with with. One with without.’ The words are perhaps ‘philosophical’ at least conventionally speaking though they are hardly conventional philosophy or even philosophy at all. The child-girl-without-child-girl speaks them and it is the definition of a movie: moving, a real move. It’s perhaps an Anti-Parmenides, probably pre-Parmenidean, but definitely one singular voice. Perhaps very young children might speak out our hardest words, and not be harmed. The Galmard film is part of 88:88 but there is no fratricidal part-whole relation between the films at all, it seems. It is a free zone of permission, a temporary safety. The ‘girl’ asks ‘how would you want me to read this . . . . what is the sounding of this sentence . . . . shall I read it again’. Are you sure you want to read these words? Are you ever sure of taken permission?

XV.

There is always the event (film) and its movement (which may become an ism and its drowning out). There is always the larger embargo whereby the event is folded back onto itself, emptying out its singularity into the holding bay of history. Monet becomes impressionism, Marx Marxism, Derrida deconstruction, Zachary German Alt. Lit., de Man the ‘de Man affair’, and 88:88 something like whispercore (but not at all, not yet! what a reduction!). The event of the event holds back before these almost inevitable movements, and perhaps one quietly insists that 88:88 names the event of this holding back. What if we get reading the film right from day one? What if reading comes right away?

XVI.

The same question is how does one give oneself over to the movement of one’s own disappearance. It is as if 88:88 makes its history in advance, by avoiding it. Perhaps it is a film people cry and think about in whispers inside rather than admire noisily (admiration implies an impoverishment and the inability of the viewer, who is also able—posterity is no longer there as a class difference and an implied impotence—to not not repeat). The film does not have to pronounce an eco-suicidal logic that may be wrongly trending explicitly because it assumes it through telepathic whisper, for example in the traces of Kieran Daley’s article ‘No More: Pyrrhonism and Non-Philosophy’ which goes about as far as can be imagined in thinking to liquidate a world not for us. The event 88:88 names—rustling—is affirmation of being the first people to go, to go extinct, but to go beyond this. Whispering this event, as event and new axiom of infinity, I can say, clearly, ‘I am the first person to go extinct’, and follow the movement of the film (not its becoming-movement) in the fidelity and love of extinction. I’m ok, I’ve been here. I’m telling you it’s infinite.

epekeina tês ousias

XVII.

One needs more than remembrance and repeating and aesthetic ideology, one needs the immanence of whispering. What is the system that whispers this film, the syntagm that rainbows the film, the film that begins the film? We may note here, before the film as such, in the pre-history of its title, which also belongs to all those who make with Medina, that there is a colon (‘:’). Very few films contain the gravity of punctuation, perhaps, and the title event 88:88 might be what Frank Ruda calls a ‘pure name’, a first pure name. We are dealing with a whisper act in art, with is to say the cut, or the cut of the whisper. The whispered tongue. The tongue that whispers with itself. And yet the whisper is clear cut enough to be out loud, the whispering gallery is real (Walker, Goes, Yoon, Bahadur, Galmard, Tupitsyn, and so on). In a sense the film already does not need to be seen or heard or be one, and by that same movement of sense this film is one and says ‘now watch only one film, this one film is all you need, stop watching for now’, and repeat. Colon-silent, or blinking (‘:’), Blickwispern of the punctuation mark hidden in the context of the title. Even before it begins, then, in the title, 88:88 is whispering. The form of the film comes before film, and so needs no introduction. It has in it the form of iteration before the alterability of any form. It is something so unrepeatable it breaks off any possibility of being logged into the form of being repeated in advance. In this simple sense—a child’s sense—it names an absolute break in still ongoing irreversible logics of simple extinction, and with no endearing chiasmus (unless we blink).

XVIII.

Stop thinking.

XIX.

In the primary aspiration between human form and its others—whether it goes by inversion, double inversion or extended arabesque—a decision has already been made in favour of form, and yet what 88:88 prefers is to interrupt and confuse this fetishistically achieved respiration before it begins. This is the sound of cinema, and the sound of this film alone, and, since to listen to a whisper in a film is already to listen to a world metallically absolutely unmoored by social coordinates, we have already shown ourselves that we can survive ourselves many times over and what remains now is to stop thinking enough to whispergaze this. The whispergaze of this aborted movement shows that even there where we will be extinct we will be there.

XX.

Only whisper it.

Whisper it

Only

On the Street

At Dawn.

XXI.

88:88 is ultralight beam cinema.

….

Cinematic braille meets light braille.

88:88 is the ultralight beams of the childhood of image language.

I dm’d w/ Isiah Medina, I’m never going to fail.

Ultralight cinema.

When Owen Wilson whispers we have a kind of

comic diagram of the depth of our situation/sussuration.

Blickwispern,

00:00,

Ice Blink Luck.

‘It is like an equivocal whisper coming from nirvana.’

Whispering as a sacred modality,

‘now-time’ (Jetztzeit) of the dialectical image and its ‘tiger’s leap’.

Benjamin: ‘The war and the constellation that brought it about led me to take down a few thoughts which I can say that I have kept with me, indeed kept from myself, for nigh on twenty years. . . . Even today, I am handing them to you more as a bouquet of whispering grasses, gathered on reflective walks, than a collection of theses.’

XXII.

The colon is an interruption, the total decision and commitment, to this time, even if we are already extinct, all of us already, having been here to be ok (‘if all i ever had was this moment i would not want’), not having to be again to be ok, to this time, next time, to do things, this time—and this needs to be shared—the colon is shared by Medina and one does almost not even need to see the film, which one will then want to see more than any other. The title is a formalization of this decision which has never been available before because we have never lived before in the concrete consciousness of being already extinct (and not just dead). You understand 88:88 if you commit to the decision in the beginning. You only see the colon if you believe in it.

XXIII.

Imagine any movie as any other movie. Unique replacement. The film is a forecast without interest in harrow or horror, a numerology without suspicion. One of the few references to whispering in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project comes on page 878 of the English edition:

The whispering of gazes fills the arcades. There is no thing here that does not, where one least expects it, open a fugitive eye, blinking it shut again; and should you look more closely, it is gone. To the whispering of these gazes, the space lends its echo: ‘Now what’, it blinks, ‘can possibly have come over me?’

What the translation conveys is that ‘whispering of gazes’ translates the German Blickwispern, which impossibly contains the blink (‘:’) and the whisper in the same word. The blink of the title whispers throughout the film, and whispering is a blink.

XXIV.

Hush and husher: the architecture of 88:88 is replete and capaciously trans-infinite. It is possible to rewatch the first five minutes repeatedly and still not saturate the blanks. Vereinfachung and the young girl who got younger and younger. Screenshot, nothing else. Stave. There is no thing here that does not splice across text, image, sound, whisper and straightaway regenerate a new viewing. 88:88 is the principle of non-exhaustion under conditions of one-off extinction. Now what, the images think better than us, now what?

XXV.

The whispering wind, animal softness of whispering as opposed to the clamour of aesthetics, this is a whispered cinema which forecloses poetry and art: the screen shot, the repeated judder, the black-out, the silence-drop, a string of techniques that seem to have been developed not just by Medina, but by Galmard, Walker, Tupitsyn, Dixon Baker—as ensemble. 88:88, as FUF (forever unidentified film), seems to be contained by an immanence and aimance (friendship + love) of other films connected to it, some of them containing Medina, some of them seemingly partly made by him, some of them which seem to have been made by nobody. Next to the enclave fetish of online life the film harbours a principle of compulsory last glissade sweetening.

2016, Spring