'the nurse missed / my vein / & dug for it / it was a white light / a tin flame in / the forearm / fluorescent /sick vinyl / what else can i say / i opened / i cried / & the needle / drank'
Franny Choi, Turing Test_Empathetic Response
*
Digital video, especially what has been referred to as The Bad Digital Era, exists at an impasse. Used as a cheap alternative to film and retroactively praised for its scrappy, fuzzy aesthetics, it was both a means for conveying an intimacy that a classical Hollywood look wasn't able to convey and also a way to crank out as much miserabilism and mumblecore as possible. There is a certain level of familiarity that is cultivated when a filmmaker is able to shoot in extreme close-up for a long take, allowing the characters to talk in a way that feels unscripted, even if it isn't. More than this, digital video was associated with the home video release, meaning the stories being told felt as though they were meant to be experienced in a domestic setting, as if the characters in the film were not the unattainable gods known as celebrities, but rather people that you could invite into your home. The poor image quality was simply a way to liberate said image from the vaults of cinemas and archives, and bring stories about real people back into public hands.
With this layer of intimacy parcelled within the form, many filmmakers working with digital video in the late 1990s and early 2000s found themselves telling stories about fragile, anguished women. They would explore social realism by reckoning and negotiating themes of gendered violence (like Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-moi and Allison Anders' Things Behind The Sun), addiction (like Debra Granik's Down To The Bone and Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married), and, in the less severe but no less stressful examples, the horrors of social incompetence (like Maren Ade's The Forest For The Trees and Mary Bronstein's Yeast). In Anand Sudha's analysis of Inland Empire (2006), potentially the most notorious and elusive example of this type, he describes the cinematic camera being 'invaded by the device of home movies and cheap Internet videos' and how, instead of alienating the audience from the dark themes the film explores, this type of formalism morphs our perspective around 'a digital hyperspace not restricted by geography' and therefore not confined to the typical, straightforward emotionality of narrative cinema.
Julia Loktev's filmography is work of intimacy via longevity, positing that empathy can be conjured simply by following the routine of ordinary people. Her documentary work has had the privilege of following actual people with whom Loktev knows, lending the audience her eye and her social status via the camera. Moment of Impact (1998) follows the day-to-day of her parents, one of whom was disabled after being hit by a car and is now in the complete care of the other. Her most recent documentary, My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow (2024), is, by its title alone, only the tip of the iceberg in recording the lives of independent journalists working in Russia (who also happen to be Loktev's friends and acquaintances) as they work to maintain integrity and sanity in a country that routinely censors and imprisons them for reporting the truth, especially in regards to the war in Ukraine. Described by Loktev herself as 'a hangout film for the time of authoritarianism', it becomes an endurance test, not simply due to its 5 hour runtime, but because we see, in real time, how quickly an already restrictive government can turn on its people and force them to make life-altering decisions.
It is potentially too easy for an audience to grow fond of real people doing hard, admirable or potentially even dangerous work, so it's astonishing to me that Loktev's fictional worlds feel as lived in and complex as her renderings of the actual world. The Loneliest Planet (2011) is a film that attempts to negotiate the power dynamics and expectations of both heterosexual gender relations and humanity's relationship to nationhood and nature. Throughout the film, the audience is asked to wait, observe and interpret behaviour that is not dictated to us but rather shown in extreme detail, not always in close up, but always with an affection for the minutiae of people wandering around the Caucasus Mountains.
Predating the more visually pleasing fiction feature of Loktev's, Day Night Day Night (2006) details the two days and two nights in which a nameless woman will accept her role as a suicide bomber and attempt to set off a bomb in the middle of Times Square. The first half of the film shows this woman, referred to as She in the credits, in a hotel room as several masked men instruct her on what to do, what to wear and how to act when the time comes. The second half of the film, far looser than the first, shows this woman walking around New York, eating her last meal (two large pretzels with mustard and a candy apple, both of which she eats ravenously), and attempting to keep herself calm enough to actually go through with her deadly task. We're never really invited in to why she is going through with this, or the extent that she is being fuelled by her own suicidality. Loktev is asserting, maybe assuming, that spending enough time with this softly spoken, easily spooked woman is enough to compel the audience to hear her out. The film was criticised on its release for being too far removed emotionally from its subject to ever promote empathy, with one critic even going as far to suggest that the film was nothing except an 'exercise in sadistic immediacy'. So, why am I here identifying with a suicide bomber?
She, our protagonist, despite not having a name, has a face that we come to know well. For the first half of the film, it's really the only face the audience is invited to recognise. Everyone else is wearing balaclavas and other face coverings. It's not so much that She is the most human of the bunch, but that the organisation behind the bombing matters less than the cultivation of identity. She exists as a doll to be transformed into a suicide bomber. Her bare face signifies a base level to upgrade, to have her consciousness raised. She never dons a mask but she is feminised by the men who keep her in the hotel room, in what ends up being a strangely grounded and perversely funny makeover montage. Loktev plays with the idea of transparency, purpose and the malleability of identity, gendering the radicalisation process and rendering the woman at the centre as both a blank slate and the only human amongst them. Because she is both, she is ostensibly neither.
Just as there is a level of detail that can only be captured in close up, there is a level of mental instability that can only be captured using the scuzziest camera you can find, skipping with every movement, giving the audience every bump of the camera operator's wrist. You are very aware that someone is filming this person during the worst moment of their life, simultaneously mimicking the intimacy of a home video and the unease of filming the mentally ill and destitute without their consent. Loktev presents a prescient eye to immoral behaviour being broadcast on the internet for everyone to see.
By treating the camera as a kind of heart monitor, it's as if we are being given permission to weigh up this woman's actions, allowing us an active participation in the events unfolding, an intense privilege that comes with a lot of moral baggage attached. This is a film that allows a scene to run through the rhythms of a character who doesn't talk much, who is told to stay inside, and whose few assertions, (like the question of why she would set her bomb off if no one was around), are met with incredulous silence. Though people have argued that this type of filmmaking results in an icy distance from the film's protagonist as well as boredom, for me, it is specifically because these details are given the weight of the filmic gaze that She appears as human as she does.
The decision to die is a dialectic, both a reclamation of autonomy and relinquishing oneself to flesh alone. If you can't establish a coherent identity, or recognisable emotional world, if you can't get your goddamn emotions on your face or your words out of your mouth, you can rain down your blood and viscera on the inhabitants of New York City. The protagonist becomes a conduit for the abject attempt at making the internal corporeal, and Loktev asks us the understand this fragile plight. It is telling who is unable to do that.
*
Further Reading:
Conceving Ada (1997, directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson)
Everything Put Together (2000, directed by Marc Foster)
Teknolust (2002, directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson)
Pieces of April (2003, directed by Peter Hedges)
St Vincent, Digital Witness (2014, directed by Chino Moya)
Dennis Lim, David Lynch goes digital: Inland Empire on DVD | Slate
Lauren Elkin, For the Ugly Ones: The Spiky Feminist Anger of Virginie Despentes | The Paris Review
Devon Maloney, St. Vincent Has Crafted a Magnificent Mythology on Her Own Terms | The Village Voice