An Everlasting Itch for Things Remote

FM: That’s cool, especially because an epic novel is usually focused on the movement of a hero or an anti-hero. And what keeps happening in both the film and the novel is that the story of the hero is constantly being interrupted by these very self-conscious scenes of a bunch of people making shit.

WT: Yes, exactly! We thought that showing people making shit was the best way to explore James’s concept of the motley crew in our own process. I was also very inspired by the shifting formats of chapters in Moby-Dick, and I tried to emulate that by mixing documentary, archival and narrative styles in the film. I remember the first time I read the book, it took me a while to stop searching for the story and realize that the richness of the diversions was the story.

FM: Yeah. On a certain level, everything is driven by Ahab’s obsession with self-repair or self-fashioning or whatever you want to call it. But at every moment, the actual mechanics—the social mechanics out of which his story becomes a minor derivation—are constantly being replayed.

WT: I like that parallel. A lot of times when we were rehearsing, we did these activities, like “sweeping the ship deck.” I don’t know why sweeping became the thing, because we only do it for like three seconds in the film, but whenever we didn’t know what to do in rehearsal, we’d be like, “Let’s practice sweeping together.” We were watching old films of sailors, and I was so impressed by this mentality that no single person moves the ship—everybody together moves the ship. Early in our research, Laura shared this passage from Mel Chen’s Brain Fog, and we were really inspired by that concept of “becoming together.” So we were thinking, “How do we get into a state where, by the time we’re shooting the film, we all feel like we’re moving as one?” Even if what we’re doing feels inconsequential.

FM: I think the only thing that could ever save cinema from itself is the fact that you can’t do it by yourself. You can pretend to write a novel by yourself, you can pretend to write poetry by yourself—it’s always a lie, but you can bullshit yourself into thinking it was only you. I used to think montage was the reason cinema became the dominant art form of the 20th century—how it mobilized this very specific relay between stillness and motion, confinement and expansiveness. But what if it turns out that the most fundamental thing about cinema is that it’s irreducibly collective? Of course, that doesn’t keep people from denying this.

WT: Or creating hierarchies which obliterate the collectivity.

FM: Yes, it’s always a cast of thousands, so to speak.

WT: That’s what I feel Moved by the Motion [a multi- disciplinary performance collective] does really well. Inside of our process, each of us contributes something we’re good at or something that we love to do. I think for Tosh [Basco], it’s how the movement communicates the storytelling; for Josh [Johnson], it’s about creating the languages of movement; with Asma [Maroof], it’s a similar process through the music; and for me, it’s orchestrating how all these things fit together. Although our roles may bear external markers of hierarchy, we don’t work that way internally. We lean on each other for decision making—we need each other because none of these roles make sense without the others.

LH: You really feel that in the film. The sonic is as important as the visual, the gestures, the performance that you see unfolding in the tableau vivant. I appreciate what Tosh has said about how you foregrounded the fact that it was a performance. And there are more layers within that when a film screening has a live orchestra playing, and it becomes a performance all over again with an audience.

FM: Yeah, and I also realized that Tosh was arranging, or creating, these syntactic units of movement, this language of gesture that she’d been working on with Josh. You can see specific motifs of gesture, such as a spiral.

LH: I remember that being the first question Moved by the Motion posed: What gesture could serve as a kind of syntax for this story? And it was amazing that you actually began the film with that as a central gesture. It became a key movement trope that set the stage for what follows later.

WT: It’s cool to look back on that now, because the film is so layered with a really dense collection of imagery. Now, I can kind of map out every decision to a series of conversations and processes, but it didn’t feel that clear at all when we were making it. We were in a “brain fog,” and we had to trust the process of accumulation.

FM: One of my students is reading the book we made together, Who Touched Me?, and I showed her some of the images from the performance in Amsterdam, in which people are all tangled up in ropes. At one point, Tosh has you wrapped up in the ropes in a big hug. It made me want to go back to your earlier films and look at Wildness [2012] again. There are obviously important variations and developments, but there are also motifs that run through your work, such as touch and embrace and color. There’s a club-like atmosphere in the hold of the ship.

WT: An important thing that connects Moved by the Motion’s collaboration is that we all, in some way or another, come from the club. That was our shared childhood.

FM: Exactly.

LH: That makes me think of the blubber at the beginning. It gives form to that connectedness that you’re trying to show, which comes across in the ways that bodies are woven together. There’s something incredible about that.

FM: Yeah, the medium becomes palpable. Ordinarily the medium of our connectedness would be the air, and it’s hard for that to be palpable enough for people to get a sense of it. But the air becomes thick in Wildness, and the music becomes in some ways the medium. And then, yeah, the blubber. It’s almost like the ether.

LH: They were all swallowed up by the ocean before, right? But you have scenes of the ship’s crew interspersed with scenes of the ocean and the end where they come together, where that absorbs everyone.

WT: Everyone except Ishmael, the narrator as the lone survivor.

FM: Well, he got what he deserved.

LH: This morning I was thinking about the scene at the end where Ishmael and Pip are together. Ishmael goes to the surface for the coffin, to live, but the camera instead follows Pip down to the bottom. That’s genius. After Pip takes his first plunge, he comes back and no one understands what he’s talking about. Ahab’s always saying, “I like hanging around you, but I don’t understand you.” And to center that in the narration—Pip’s voice as a language that is incoherent to everyone else on board—is brilliant.

WT: When our writer Sophia [Al-Maria] and I were working on the script, we didn’t know that Pip and the Sub-Sub were the same character until we got toward the end of the writing process. It just kind of came out from all the thinking and discussion. In adaptation that always feels the most rewarding—when you don’t have to change the story, you just change where you’re looking. To rewrite would be to claim that there’s a better version, instead of taking what already exists and thinking, “Instead of going up, let’s go down.”

FM: Just modify your angle.

LH: Shift your attention.

FM: Cock your head a little bit.

WT: Yes, and I’m wondering now if this method of filmmaking with the rear projection also enhanced or forced that for us, because we couldn’t turn around unless we chose to. It was so complicated.

LH: I’m reminded of the famous essay by Stephen Heath on narrative space where he describes the early tableau film, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, and part of his argument is that when you watch all of these people moving through a static screen, the narrative is almost incomprehensible. It is difficult to understand it as a narrative, to locate and track a central action. Your film defies that argument and refuses the kind of watching that goes along with classical narrative film. It invites and cultivates another kind of looking.

WT: Do you think we were defying it? I wonder if we were just abiding by it and that forced us to deal with its constructiveness because every time we did it, it required so much effort.

FM: You defied the hegemony of it, the necessity of it. The easy quickness with which people take the default position, allowing only a very narrow conception of what makes sense. And it’s not that the narrow frame is dispensed with; it just becomes one possibility among another set of possibilities. And it feels like a lot of narrative cinema decided to dispense with a lot of other possibilities in order to give that one pride of place. Technically, you left the shot/reverse shot behind because it was a luxury that you couldn’t afford; but there’s this weird way in which luxury is a necessity in a standard movie. But you were like, “Well, we can’t afford to do that.” And suddenly, all this other stuff opens up. Laura, does Heath talk about the relationship between narrative space and the shot/reverse shot?

LH: Well, more than the essay I remember watching the film with my students, who were not familiar with the nursery rhyme it is based on, and nobody could pinpoint exactly the central character, or track a central narrative pinned to that character.

WT: That’s interesting. Is it because the camera isn’t moving?

LH: Yes, and because there’s so many people moving back and forth, weaving through the space. It begins in a fair, a carnival scene. I guess what it suggests is that you could go back and view it and find something else, if that’s not the only thing you’re looking for.

FM: Right, and in a standard movie opening with a crowd motif, the moment of clarity is when you locate one face, the face of the protagonist, the face of the hero, and you think, “Oh, this is who I’m supposed to be paying attention to.” Then the next shot is seeing what that character sees, in reverse. So you observe the one who then becomes the primary observer. It never occurred to me that the mechanism is expensive.

WT: Yes. It’s very expensive. You sacrifice a lot for it, and not just in cost, but in all kinds of narrative complexity.

FM: You’d give up a lot of continuity, right? Because you cut in one place and have to retool everything, and everybody has to take thirty minutes or however long to wait.

LH: Harun Farocki has an essay about workers leaving the factory, and he’s saying that it’s in this moment that a collective formation becomes visible. After that they disperse and become individual persons. Narrative film follows the individual person home and it’s the protagonist. Film becomes a story about just one worker.

WT: It’s interesting to think about the necessity to construct individual personhood, how cinema generates its logic and keeps us hooked and caring and following the story. In our film, there are points of view, but I tried to make it slippery.

LH: That’s the tension James is interested in. Ahab is the individual, and it’s sort of his story, but—

WT: Everything is oriented around what he needs or wants.

LH: Yes, but that’s totalitarian, for James. The mariners, renegades and castaways are the counterpart that absorb and reconfigure the life on the ship against the grain of Ahab’s monomania.

WT: I know you’ve done a lot of reading and thinking about James, but I’m curious about what brought you to the lecture you gave in 2019, which inspired me to make Moby Dick in the first place. Why Moby-Dick, for you?

LH: Our friend Fernando Zalamea loved Moby-Dick, and he wrote a book about art in the Americas. Moby-Dick was a central example of what he was interested in—this kind of experience where you plunge into the abyss and it reconfigures your thinking and makes it possible to think and understand things in totally new ways when you rise back up. And you all looked at Wai Chee Dimock, who also wrote about Moby-Dick. That was on my mind when in the film you say, “All there is is beginnings.” It’s that openness, the fact that anyone can jump in and restart the story—

WT: That came from Dimock, actually! She talks about the book as an “open-ended network for future input,” which our Sub-Sub-Librarian quotes. I think that’s what every movie should be. This also brings us full circle, to the conversation between Fernando and you as well, Fred, as you both were thinking around whales. It’s funny how we began thinking about whales years before Moby Dick because of that line in your poem come on, get it!: “we’re whales.”

FM: Once again, this is about the unfortunate but totally important term “credits.” They shouldn’t call them the credits. They should call them the debts. Or the depths. Years ago, I was working on a project with Suné Woods, who makes beautiful images of Black women swimming and transfers those same movements to images of Black women moving on a bed underneath fabric. And it produced these amazing interplays between body and texture and fabric. It was a motif around the idea of a whale. She is really interested in whales and shares that interest with a lot of Black women artists and scholars. I’m obviously thinking of—

LH: Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

FM: Right. And in thinking about all that stuff together, this work is an extension.

LH: I’m still thinking through the question of what happens when Pip goes down and reemerges with a completely changed way of thinking that is somewhat incomprehensible to others. When I was reading the book this morning, it makes a point of saying the Sub-Sub- Librarian is also inaudible and incomprehensible. No one listens to the Sub-Sub either. So in a way, your film attunes us to this other form of sense-making that the book doesn’t translate.

WT: It’s crazy that it’s all there. I mean, I’m not saying it’s the right reading, but that there are many, many readings. And maybe that’s what the exercise of making a film is—it’s traversing through all these generations of thinking and just trying to make a through line. But that’s just one of many possible through lines.

LH: I like this idea of shifting what we see, attuning us to something different. And also of understanding the book as not just the book, but everything that grows from it, all of the conversations that it enables.

FM: Well, Melville loves beginnings. To me, the greatest opening of a novel ever is from Mardi (1849), which is another seafaring novel. It’s just, “We’re off.” We’re off. You begin with displacement, or a multiplicity of beginnings, so that there is no beginning. And logically, of course, there is no end, just an infinite series of chances. One shouldn’t speak about things in this way, but if you wanted to make an argument for who’s a great writer, I think one good way to make the argument is to judge them by the criticism they produce.

WT: What do you mean, the criticism?

FM: Well, the criticism of Moby-Dick is so rich and so varied. Melville must’ve been a bad motherfucker to be able to create a situation in which—

WT: People can’t stop talking about it.

FM: And I don’t mean criticism in the sense of, “Oh, this is so particularly perceptive.” It is just so weird, and inventive and deviant. People just go off with regard to Melville. They just can’t help themselves. And they say crazy shit.

WT: Including James—he quotes Melville fervently in Mariners, in almost equal parts to his own writing! It’s like he just can’t resist because there’s so much good stuff.

FM: On some level, it’s like, where can you go, but to Melville?

WT: It’s not even the thing, the object itself, but its reverberations that tell us something. It’s almost like you can’t look directly at it, but you can measure all the reverberations.

FM: Yes. Criticism is supposed to mean the intense payment of attention to an object. And the more intensely attention is paid, the more indeterminate the object becomes, right? The closer you look, the more indefinite it gets. Criticism isn’t devoted to the object; it’s devoted to the object’s disappearance, followed by the sense that one gets of the field into which the object disappears. It seems to me Moby Dick, your film, is another extraordinary moment in the history of criticism of Moby-Dick, the novel. And the monoliths around which the novel occurs or revolves. At the end, they just disappear into a whirlpool of their own construction. Ahab and the whale. They’re gone.

WT: Obliterated.

FM: And what’s left is everything else. What’s left is all, which is what Pip studies.

WT: That’s why he’s got so many books. His stacks, our extracts!

FM: And that’s why the container is what it is, which is an indeterminate thing. The blubber, that’s the medium. That’s the field. That’s what he has.

LH: Wu, thinking about where Moby Dick ends makes me want to know more about your later film Of Whales (2022). How does that work as a counterpart?

WT: Of Whales is even more overgrown than Moby Dick because it’s basically a VR computer game that’s generating imagery in real time. There’s camera choreography moving through an ocean environment, and there’s no end to it. It’s continuously looping, but every time it goes to the surface, there are different “events” that happen that are tied to the story of Moby-Dick. It was a total trip to make. With this game engine, I had no control with standard techniques like cutting and framing. It has a very different feeling, Of Whales, but somehow it became a release of everything I had to sacrifice in telling the story of Moby -Dick, because in the film we had to be quite precise. This was the opposite of that—no control, just atmosphere.

LH: It’s interesting to consider that Melville was obviously interested in the whale too, but not in the sense that you explore.

WT: I wanted the whale’s perspective in Moby Dick but actually, in the end, we didn’t quite achieve it. We don’t actually know what the whale sees or feels.

FM: You really only see the effects of the whale. We don’t have access to the actual whale; we can’t make the real intelligible. It never quite comes into focus. But there’s a sense in which we might say we know it by its effects. Obviously, you see the eye, but beyond that we see the whirlpool.

WT: On the day that we were supposed to film all the action scenes with the whale for Moby Dick, something happened and the VR system wasn’t working. There is one shot of the whale, but it almost escaped capture completely. But I felt okay about it. I thought it felt appropriate. After all, Ahab couldn’t catch the whale, so why should I?

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To commemorate this conversation and the screenings of Moby Dick; or, The Whale (2022) by the Performance Project at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles in November 2023, Ursula worked with Wu Tsang to create a custom record of two musical compositions from the film’s score, composed and recorded by Caroline Shaw and Andrew Yee. This collector’s item for Ursula readers, inserted into copies of Issue 10, marks the first release of musical tracks from Tsang’s film.

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Laura Harris is assistant professor of art and public policy and cinema studies at New York University. She is the author of Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (2018). Her essays have been published in Social Text, Criticism, The South Atlantic Quarterly and other journals.

Fred Moten’s recent projects include a poetry collection, Perennial Fashion Presence Falling (2023); an album, Fred Moten/Brandon López/Gerald Cleaver (2022); and an essay collection, All Incomplete (2021), written with his longtime colleague Stefano Harney.

Wu Tsang is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist. Her work crosses genres and disciplines, from narrative and documentary films to live performance and video installations. Tsang is a MacArthur Genius Fellow; and her projects have been presented at museums, biennials and film festivals internationally. She is currently in residence at Schauspielhaus Zurich, as a director of theater with the collective Moved by the Motion.