It's Coming It's Real, 2022, Experimental Short Film
“Imperialism breeds an imperialist sensibility. A safari of images.”
- Martha Rosler
"The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather, it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness."
- Theodor Adorno
I began this project while recovering from a traumatic brain injury sustained during a peaceful protest in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Myself and a few dozen others were relentlessly clubbed by riot police while taking a knee at the head of a march in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. I spent the next two years unable to walk straight. This film began as a question: how is it that Americans - people born, like every other, free of violent intent - come to accept, and even desire, violence on behalf of an imperial project?
Subjectivity (the form of an individual consciousness - a 'Subject' - in its understanding of itself in the world) is produced, is sutured (stitched together), via the barrage of representations in which it is immersed. The identity of the imperial Subject - who willingly accepts the empire as legitimate (pays taxes, votes, etc.) and or desires violence on behalf of it - is formed in the context of the spectacle of representation which is disseminated by the American state and its propaganda apparatus. The film is structured so that every image and cut contain a metaphoric or metonymic link, often multiple and overlapping, in a signifying chain that simulates imperial Subject formation via its deconstruction. It is not coincidental, for instance, that an advertisement for bananas is intercut with the scene of a fighter jet cockpit in a Hollywood film and an image from the 1953 CIA coup d’Etat that overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala in order to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company by maintaining their murderous subjugation of the Native people. The question is whether a banana is simply a piece of fruit one finds on a supermarket shelf or if there are a set of social relations, soaked in blood and hidden from view, that exist as the condition of possibility of the banana, as well as a propaganda industry that replaces the actual context with a set of representations that allow the banana to magically emerge as a beautiful abstraction, the 'banana' which appears to us a self-evident fact. This process, 'commodity fetishism,' results from the relentless drive for capital accumulation. It produces an alienated and stupefied consciousness, incapable of acting with political or moral agency, which remains passive in relation to or actively desires violence on behalf of the American imperial project.
Thank you to Michael Gira (Swans) for supporting and inspiring this film.
1st PRIZE BEST EXPERIMENTAL:
27th Annual Rhode Island International Film Festival (Academy Award, BAFTA and Canadian Screen Award Qualifying)
BEST EXPERIMENTAL:
24th Annual Denver Underground Film Festival
15th Annual Arizona Underground Film Festival
OFFICIAL SELECTION:
27th Annual Slamdance Film Festival (Academy Award, BAFTA and Canadian Screen Award Qualifying)
29th Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival
18th Annual Independent Film Festival Boston (IFF Boston)
9th Annual FilmQuest Festival
21st Annual Melbourne Underground Film Festival
10th Annual International Video Poetry Festival
18th Annual Another Hole in the Head Festival
6th Annual Esto Es Para Esto Exhibidora de Cine
6th Annual Bucharest Short Film Festival