Playroom (5): Weekend & Wind From The East

A road accepts the day and denies the destination, imagine. Cars repeat politeness as patience becoming a monument. A sounding horn confesses that speech will not be enough. Bodies in vehicles learn that the community of travellers is only the choreography by which solitude pretends to be public. When the camera begins to move, what it records is not progress but the long arithmetic of delay. A woman leans into the window of a stalled car and offers a sentence that expects to be refused. A man studies the distance between his foot and the pedal as if distance could be reduced by attention. Along the verge a child counts exhaust plumes the way earlier children counted the bells of a church. The day acquires the weight of a verdict that never needs to be read aloud. The sequence has the inevitability of weather and the cussed hilarity of a queue. We are informed by the landscape that the accident is not the event. The event is the obedience of those who remain. The film that knows this teaches it without congratulating its knowledge. It allows the jam to become a treaty, binding strangers through patience and contempt, signed in fumes.

A room has its own law. A voice arrives that prefers instruction to confession. The people on screen are no longer characters but bearers of their own scripts. They work with slogans as one works with furniture when a move is overdue and the van has not come. Somewhere a reel of theory feeds another reel of images and together they produce a dialectic that knows how to tidy up as it speaks. The fields through which the camera passes receive a catechism. The lesson is not the point. The point is the learning, or rather the appearance of learning, which permits a community to believe itself assembled around a message that can be repeated without ever being completed. The voyage from spectacle to manifesto is plotted as if the terrain could be mapped in an afternoon. The people who speak borrow the tone of comradeship in order to measure how far speech can carry. It carries as far as the next cut. Then the air changes key and the question begins again.

In one register, then, there is the procession of metal and habit that turns a countryside into a complaint. In another, there is an instruction in how to rescue the image from its complicity with the day. The complication is that both registers occur together. The anger that accumulates slowly in the queue belongs to the same era as the pedagogy that wishes to accelerate the end of queues altogether. It is tempting to deliver verdicts. It is more useful to remain where the films remain, in the narrow zone where people forced into each other’s company are offered a language for what cannot yet be shared. A tongue without a grammar develops in the smoke. Ownership of the words is disputed. The last thing that can be agreed is that everyone is already late.

The story that insists upon itself in traffic accepts no heroes. People are introduced to each other by the exchange of insults. The insult is valuable not because it punctures pride but because it confesses proximity. When a woman clambers across the bonnet of the car in front the gesture has all the delicacy of a sexual handshake. When a man allows another car to push his bumper, forgiveness enters the assembly line and takes a seat. We do not see the moment when the queue converts into a community. That is because it does not, not in the old sense. It produces a community that has no confession to make and no oath to demand. It exists as the interval between a handbrake released and a foot pressed down on the accelerator. It survives as long as it is not declared. That is its unwelcome grace.

Elsewhere the classroom has no walls. A field is chosen. A slogan is rehearsed as if it had only recently been taught to speak. The instructor knows that a principle should be repeated until the ground has memorised it. The listeners know that they were recruited as audience reluctantly by the camera and enthusiastically by hunger. The lesson delivered is about the right way to make a film that matches the right way to change a world. The lesson received is about the distance between rightness and bodies. We watch because watching is a labour that still permits mercy. We listen because the voice that instructs has the courtesy of disagreeing with itself. The dissonance is not a failure. It is the only proof of seriousness.

What holds both situations together is the camera’s refusal of secrecy. It treats the jam as a ritual and treats the lesson as a rehearsal. It assumes that the day will continue after the day. It does not behave like a judge. It behaves like an organ of attention that has elected fatigue as a method. The images are relentless, and this relentlessness confers dignity upon everyone. In the queue no one deserves more time than anyone else. In the field no sentence deserves more applause than another. That equality is not the equality of law. It is the temporary justice achieved by the sharpened boredom of the apparatus. The justice is not grand. It keeps the minutes.

Between the queue and the lesson there is the walk. People walk because walking is the last verb that cannot be privatised. A couple crosses a field and argues as if speaking aloud were a way of calculating the price of a future. A man runs with a loaf of bread as if bread were the only argument the century has not yet refuted. A woman slows down so that a camera can reach her face before the face has abandoned the moment that made it sensible. The road used to connect organised points. Now it collects unorganised minutes. The field used to be a resource. Now it is a space in which theory can remember that it belongs to bodies.

A question becomes necessary. How do people keep company in public without asking for a declaration that would betray what brings them together. The answer appears as a series of refusals. A young man in a car that refuses to move refuses also to describe his anger to a journalist who requires description as a proof of reality. A woman who prefers to stare at the trees refuses to become the witness that her neighbours would have her be. A child refuses to cry in the key of the day. These refusals are not heroic. They are measures. A person protects a small share of silence because the silence is the only proportion of truth available that the camera can carry without turning it into a speech.

Meanwhile the voice that teaches in the field refuses completion. It asks whether the image can help or hinder and then refuses to choose because choosing would be a way of agreeing to leave. It explains that propaganda is a betrayal of the mind and that art is a betrayal of action and it has the good manners to be wrong in both directions so that the wrongness can be lived with. People nod and their nodding is a way of allowing theory to survive being tested by weather. The nod is not assent. It is the permission given to a tone to remain part of the afternoon. The birds are not asked to leave. The microphone is not asked to perform a miracle. The camera keeps still enough to be forgiven.

Towards evening a car burns by a ditch. Fire demonstrates a lesson the era already knew. Destruction moves faster than persuasion. The camera does not worship flames. It practises the old craft of counting. One minute of burning is recorded as one minute of burning. The fidelity is an ethics at once severe and tender. There is no music. There is smoke. Smoke does the work that speech cannot do, which is to insist that a surface is becoming a volume. The queue around the ditch recognises this without demanding ceremony. Neighbours shift slightly and by this adjustment agree to be neighbours for one more minute.

When night approaches and the road is still a room it becomes clear that speech will learn another life if it wishes to endure. The community that has refused to name itself begins to resemble those small assemblages that sometimes gather around a damaged table in a damaged house after the police and the reporters have gone. People do not ask names. They report minutes. Each minute is offered as if it could not tolerate an owner. Someone speaks and what she says has already left her. The adjacency of bodies and the sequence of sounds produce an alliance that would be destroyed by an oath. The movements of hands serve as transcription. The camera pretends not to envy hands.

At the same time the lesson that started in the field discovers that it cannot end. It has no term shorter than night. People keep returning to the same insistence, that a film must be made according to the politics it claims. Every insistence opens a corridor rather than a door. The corridor is lined with mirrors that return the faces of those who speak with slight corrections, enough to disturb a conviction, not enough to produce a different person. The group is held together by differences that are impolite and the impoliteness has virtues denied to good manners. The camera agrees to be impolite. It lingers. It interrupts. It records the pointless clarity of disagreement and presents it as the only credible index of a shared labour.

The work of walking and the work of talking begin to coincide. Breaths are measured aloud. Distances are rehearsed in sentences that remember the price of petrol and of bread. People who usually meet only as drivers discover that they possess legs trained by the city to be discreet. The legs learn an impromptu rhetoric. They carry anger modestly and hope without decoration. Every stride registers the fact that community happens where step meets step in accuracy. That accuracy cannot be held in a speech. It can only be practised. The film knows this and leaves the space for it, the way a careful typesetter leaves white around the words that cannot be spoken yet.

It is possible to mistake the patience of these scenes for indifference. The opposite is true. Indifference is the heat that rushes to desert a share. Patience is the cool that keeps a share from becoming a property. In the queue patience permits a fragile courtesy toward minds about to break. In the field patience allows a sentence to become the instrument of its own critique. Neither is sweetness. Both are craft. The camera practises this craft until time itself begins to look like a person who must be treated with kindness in order to continue.

A person falls. There is no melodrama. Others come close. No one owns the rescue. This is the closest we come to a proof. What holds the people together is the refusal to assign the act to anyone’s biography. The fall belongs to everyone because it cannot be explained and therefore cannot be transformed into a credit. The effect of the scene is not to celebrate humility but to show how the absence of an owner produces a truth. A community without confession appears for a minute and then leaves thus preserving itself.

The lesson has a companion in the city in which a man recounts an accident to a room that requires accounts to prove that speech can be domesticated. He supplies facts and the facts refuse to accept the limits of facts. He offers memory and memory prefers to arrive as air rather than as document. The interrogation turns into a rehearsal for estrangement. The man’s narrative does not fortify his identity. It reduces ownership until the voice becomes merely the channel through which the day recognises itself. The room learns nothing. The learning occurs in the interval between sentence and breath. These scenes are useful not because they resolve a case but because they propose a method for surviving the compulsion to testify. The method is a grammar of acknowledgement. Say what occurred and then allow it to leave you.

The film that diagrammes the queue practises the same grammar. It allows images to speak themselves and then to leave. It refuses to tie a face to a thesis. It refuses to give the day to a single mouth. At times this refusal looks like contempt. It is a risk. Without the comfort of ownership the audience is asked to remain equal to a weather system rather than to a hero. Many leave. Those who remain learn what waiting can do when waiting refuses to be revenge on the present.

The other film makes its risk explicit by arguing into the image, by carrying questions like equipment. It does not expect to win the argument. It expects to keep company with this apparatus of will long enough that the machine will be made honest by fatigue. The most beautiful passages are not the loud ones. They are the minutes when the voice pauses to permit the field to retain its horizon and the people to remain bodies. When the voice returns, it does so with a slight surrender in the tone. That surrender is hope. It says we can still disagree in public without purchasing a leader.

Put together, the two works offer a map for a social art that does not mistake problem for plot. The traffic jam is not a symbol of decadence. It is a school of shared humiliation. The field is not a sanctuary for rhetoric. It is a studio for reusing words until they no longer announce innocence. The ligature between them is the way both accept the impossibility of a common declaration that would not become property. What holds is the practice of meeting without oath.

Late in the day the queue thins. Gaps appear. Engines try to remember how acceleration feels when it is justified. People drive away with a sense that their faces have been taken and replaced with more accurate versions. The field empties. Someone picks up papers with slogans on them and discovers that slogans have the texture of fallen leaves after an indifferent rain. The gaffer tape from the microphone sticks to the fingers. The sound recordist wipes the foam with a cloth and listens for the last sentence, which will not arrive. The failure to conclude is the form of respect delivered to an hour that refuses to be converted into proof.

The films refuse nostalgia. They do not propose that the past had better queues and nobler lessons. They allow the present to draw its own itemised bill. The items include rage without destination, theory without appetite, hunger, breath, faces, children, fields, smoke, tired teachers, patient mistakes, the few glances that behave as though they were not being observed, the small rescues that were not reported because reporting would have made them untrue. The sum is not paid. It is carried forward to the next day.

If there is a crisis, it is not a lack of fervour. It is an excess of voice. The queue speaks with every horn and every insult. The lesson speaks with every certainty and every revision. The task of the films is to place enough quiet in the scene so that relation can remain relation without being damaged by declaration. There are minutes when they succeed and the feeling is not exaltation but relief. The camera stops acting like a witness and becomes a neighbour. Viewers stop acting like jurors and become people whose work is to stand nearby until the smallest share of life is no longer afraid of them.

A word about cruelty. Many moments refuse pity precisely because pity would turn the minute into a spectacle purchasable by a single gaze. A dead figure on the roadside receives as much time as the children in a field. A friend who betrays a friend receives the same duration as a tree that keeps its leaves in a draught. This apparent indifference is an ethic. It trains the eye to stop demanding prizes. It allows the real to stop protecting us with mood.

Across both works the undertone remains constant. The community that matters is the one that cannot confess itself without lying. It occurs while cooking and walking and listening with partial attention and holding a tool and being held by an instruction that would hurt if it were read aloud. It occurs while sitting on a bonnet with your feet on the bumper of the car in front and knowing that your boots will not be forgiven. It occurs in a field when a voice tries to shepherd bodies into meaning and the bodies agree to wait until the voice has finished before they move toward each other. It does not occur in a scene where a leader speaks from a platform. It does not occur in a speech in which a film explains its use. It does not occur when the day is turned into a proof.

If one asks what these films offer beyond their method, the answer is time that has not been emptied of company. The road that goes nowhere becomes a place where the poor are not alone for the length of a shot. The field that breeds ideology becomes a place where thinking can appear as labour rather than as glamour. The camera keeps a pace that can be matched by breath. This is not a small gift. It is the only gift that does not humiliate. An art that refuses to force the day into confession allows us to inherit the day without debt.

We may think of a man interrogated in a strange room about an accident that news will not carry. He answers as he can and the words leave him as he speaks them. He is made to understand that testimony belongs to the institution now. The extraction of truth is no longer his vocation. This insight, harsh as it is, frees him for another duty. He can keep company with what happened, not by owning it, but by providing it a wintering among his hours. The jam offers the same duty. The lesson offers the same duty. Keep company with what insists upon staying near and do not turn it into the currency that buys your innocence.

People like to ask whether such films succeed. The only success they permit is the permission they give to a certain kind of attention to continue. After them, one walks differently toward a stalled car and differently toward a speech. The difference is nearly invisible. It consists of an extra second spent near something one would ordinarily have used. In that second the possibility of a relation that does not wish to be avowed entirely is sheltered. The second is not a halo. It is an aperture. Through it pass a woman raising her voice to be heard above idling engines, a man sharing bread with someone he will never see again, a teacher who admits that a lesson has failed and continues to teach because failure is the only condition in which instruction is sincere.

We do not need more agreement. We need neighbourhood. The queue and the field provide its minimum form. They show how the day resists organisation when organisation wishes to buy confessions in bulk. They show how a camera can perform the work of an absence rather than the work of a law. They show how words can be used until they grow polite and then, in a better scene, how silence can be placed where a sentence would have been an offence. The work these scenes do is domestic in the oldest sense. It cares. It tidies after itself. It allows the room to remain capable of hosting whatever happens next.

Nothing guarantees that the next day will be less crowded. Nothing guarantees that the next lesson will learn how not to be a sermon. What these works guarantee is that there remains a way to keep company with both without doing further harm. The method is simple. Give minutes to what will not pay you back and refuse to organise people into a truth they did not ask to share. If a future wants us, it will find us talking low, standing beside vehicles that pretend to be bedrooms, counting breaths in a field where the wind keeps moving the script, balancing the grace of having nothing to sell with the obligation to refuse to leave.

The titles on the spines sit patiently on a shelf. They recall that one contains a road and a day in which bodies learn to be adjacent without false consolations. They recall that the other contains a pedagogy and a landscape in which speech learns that it cannot redeem itself by volume. To consult them again is to remember how a camera, like a good neighbour, does not ask for an oath and does not grant forgiveness. It asks only for duration that can be returned to those who lent it. The films repay that debt with minutes that did not exist before they took responsibility for them. The rest is our work, which is to remain with each other in the unglamorous light of a present that has not chosen us and does not need to, and to do so without demanding that the meeting be called anything more flattering than time spent well together in a place that would rather be somewhere else.