Part of COMBAT BREATHING

COMBAT BREATHING: READ MY DESIRE, PART 1

Film Notes

READ MY DESIRE, PART 1
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.

Marlon Riggs
ANTHEM
1991, 9 min, DCP
“Every time we kiss we confirm the new world coming.” This is one among many of the defiant phrases voiced in Marlon Riggs’s experimental and agitational music video, which politicizes black male homoeroticism through its African rhythm-informed combination of socially charged images, symbols, dance, text, and spoken poetry. Produced during an era marked by state-backed cultural repression, neoliberalization, and an escalating HIV epidemic, Riggs’s audiovisual manifesto calls on its viewers to “pervert the language” – an act it reflexively performs through its appropriation of a popular and desire-inducing commercial form for the ends of black queer revolution.

Valentin Noujaïm
OCEANIA
2024, 24 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Set in the apartment complex of a quiet French suburb, Valentin Noujaïm’s short film revolves around the entwined personal and socio-political yearnings of its teenage diasporic protagonist, Najib. Upon learning of the passing of an elderly Algerian neighbor from his mother, Najib takes the keys to the deceased man’s apartment only to discover a world of unanswered questions, from letters penned by a former lover to archival videos of pan-African cultural festivals, and other ephemera. An ode to the often-unconscious drives of desire, OCEANIA gestures toward the oblique modes by which past struggles are continually carried on but also transformed by newer generations.

Michelle Parkerson
ODDS AND ENDS
1993, 28 min, DCP
ODDS AND ENDS is a pioneering work of science fiction that capaciously mobilizes the speculative dimensions of the genre to center black lesbian militancy and futurity. The campy intergalactic fable unfolds in the year 2096 – by way of striking allegorical correspondences with the conditions of the fascistic present – in which a cast of black women warriors wage a battle against “ultra-right-wing clones” who seek their annihilation. Michelle Parkerson’s new-age short uncovers psychic and fleshly sites of desire and sexuality within revolutionary movements through its lead character, Lieutenant Loz Wayard, a courageous young amazon, who learns the price of passion when her beloved Sephra takes on the ultimate sacrifice for the struggle.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.