Part of COMBAT BREATHING

COMBAT BREATHING: READ MY DESIRE, PART 2

Film Notes

READ MY DESIRE, PART 2
Social orders are resisted and overturned not merely because the dominant classes create unlivable conditions for the dominated classes, but also because the dominated classes actively and transgenerationally imagine, prefigure, and desire the realization of alternative social relations that cannot be accommodated by the present order. Such disruptive, exorbitant, and irrepressible desires – often structurally designated as queer – are the focus of this program. “Read My Desire” invokes the work of philosopher Joan Copjec and echoes her formulations that desire precisely emerges from the divisions within the subject which cannot be reduced to social identity or captured by historical regimes.

Bringing together historical and contemporary works to explore cinema’s desire-producing capacity as well as the often-elided place of desire, love, eroticism, and sensuality in social movements and associated streams of cultural production, the program traverses multiple geographies and genres, including sci-fi, music video, mythical fable, narrative drama, parodic documentary, and experimental film. The selected works by Marlon Riggs, Valentin Noujaïm, Michelle Parkerson, Peng Zuqiang, Jumana Manna, and Naomi Rincon Gallardo theorize the function of desire in reorienting the horizons of liberation struggles and affirming subjectivities at continual risk of erasure.

Peng Zuqiang
SIGHT LEAK
2022, 12 min, 16mm & Super-8mm-to-DCP
Peng Zuqiang’s SIGHT LEAK takes as its departure point Roland Barthes’s visit to China in 1973, using the French theorist’s published travel notes and his renowned writing on love and desire as source texts for exploring the objective and subjective machinations of class and looking. Shot on black-and-white film, SIGHT LEAK brims with minimal haptic images, from framed close-ups of body parts to natural and urban landscapes sensuously sculpted by plays of light and shadow. In the film, Peng’s camera trails behind a local tourist who travels through different spaces and gatherings, seemingly never looking at anyone, yet always silently looking at someone. Counterposing foreign and local projections – whether they be filmic, ideological, or psychic – SIGHT LEAK subtly alludes to the problematics of homoerotic imperial (mis)recognition while holding out the possibility for desire to produce non-normative, subterranean collectivities.

Jumana Manna
BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION
2010, 21 min, DCP
This early work by Jumana Manna offers a portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, as manifested in gyms, body shops, and hairdressing parlors. Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING (1963), the video employs visual collage and a dynamic musical soundtrack as ironic commentary. Anger’s depiction of leather-clad bikers serves as a counterpoint to the social scene Manna portrays in BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION, that of stereotyped male “thug” culture in Palestine. Close-up fragments construct an eroticized and parodic montage of bodies, cars, and locations, intersected by snippets of often-humorous dialogue and a monologue about the art of a car wash. Psychologizing the characters while also being seduced by them, Manna’s conflicted desires mirror those of her male protagonist who drifts from abject rants to declamations of heroic poetry and unashamed self-praise.

Naomi Rincon Gallardo
PATLACHE ANT NEST
2025, 21 min, DCP
PATLACHE ANT NEST, the latest work by Naomi Rincon Gallardo, is a fable inspired by the image and description of an ambiguous figure called Patlache who appears in the Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century colonial ethnographic research document about Mesoamerica created by a Spanish missionary priest. The Patlache was described in racially coded and gender disruptive terms – as a filthy woman with a penis and body hair who practices lesbian love. Merging camp DIY aesthetics and surreal, indigenous forms of storytelling, Gallardo mythically rearticulates the archival capture of this figure in PATLACHE ANT NEST with a cast of costumed characters representing toothed vaginas, leafcutter ants, and a cactus. Over the course of the film, the Patlache character transforms into a dome-like architectural structure bearing an entrance that leads to an underground, patriarchy-free dwelling of lesbian sociality and flourishing.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

Introduced by Omar Alsayyed.