Those That, At a Distance, Resemble Another (2019)

 

Director: Jessica Sarah Rinland

An Abstract Candidate

 

Here's where it took its first breath.

The best way to describe Jessica Sarah Rinland's feature length documentary, which will be called Those That... for abbreviation, is to compare to an older work of Rinland's, an Argentinean-British multi-media artist. Black Pond (2018), a micro-feature, is set around Elmbridge Natural History Society on a pilgrimage the south of England. Toads in the darkness establish the first shot of the film, as older individuals study the old trees of the forest, collecting moths, all whilst Black Pond is clearly shot on film by Rinland, and refers to more than its gentle tone suggests, eventually quoting Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers¹, Winstanley a Protestant religious reformer, political philosopher, and activist whose Diggers group he co-founded occupied formerly common land that had been privatised by enclosures. Black Pond is also very English in a whimsical way - examining fungi whilst carrying samples in a Tesco supermarket plastic zip tie bag - whilst adding surreality even by accident, in documenting people in work that is not commonly depicting in cinema, sniffing conifers to identity them, one even smelling like pineapple.

Alongside the sound design being of importance between the films - the clatter, chatter and noises of bats in the dark when being studied and examines in the palm of one's hands - a line of dialogue from the Elmbridge society really exemplifies what Those That, At A Distance, Resemble Another's own modus operandi is, that "If you want to see something, hold it close". With her own hands among those creating onscreen in her film, marked out deliberately with pink nail polish, Rinland's own course in the film, her face obscured and her hands as the others the focus, is to begin copying a replica of a tusk. This tusk was poached from a female elephant in Malawi, and donated to the Natural History in London, back in 1900. The film, working with Harvard’s Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, hides a lot of the information for context on all you see, all the vignettes, until the end of the film in a large text narration. Shot between multiple museums in Brazil and England, the film deliberately strips the context until the ending, focusing on the craft itself, the hands and voices of the other ceramicists and preservationists the cast alongside the work they are preserving, studying, or recreating copies of.

Creating casts for museum objects - painstakingly - has an inherently surreality to it, including going as far with her tusk for RInland's project onscreen to have its damages recreated. Even if it was a source of concern for the preservationists who did so, explained that it is obviously not their job to destroy, the replica we see onscreen, up close with its working area the backdrop, even had a significant fragment where it would connect to an elephant's mouth broken with a hammer, and then glued back on with animal based glue, for accuracy. The replication of damages, of glue jobs, has a perverse air, yet early in the film the lineage of the copy to its original, like strands of inherited DNA, are emphasised in the narration and dialogue, the copy co-existing as important as the real one. In real life, Rinland's copy sits side-by-side with the original, donated to the Natural History Museum in London².

The one moment, at the beginning of the film, where howler monkeys are introduced to the wild again, does feel contextually different, the one non-artificial environment in the Tijuca Floresta in Rio de Janeiro, a forest in Brazil conservation. However it elaborates on this idea of lineage, in the form as much as the DNA, of that which comes from the older, be it the offspring of the monkeys or the tusk's replication to the original. Likewise, the techniques within the film are both older than one would believe as newer technology as 3D printing also exists. The irony is not lost with the mould and case process done in the film, which would be appropriated and used by Europeans in the 1800s onwards, comes from Peru 2000 years earlier for making panpipes, influencing the craft in an entirely different region of the globe. It is neither lost how colonialism marks the world, as it is own historical DNA, the tusk Rinland working on having its own history. Another segment shows the still problematic issue of ivory smuggling even in the centuries after today, where a chipped game box which is painstakingly fixed, beautiful on the surface with its white and black design, used ivory confiscated by poachers for the repair before the material used was packed away¹.

The hard work is shown in close up, from the tracing of images on an Amazon funerary urn to new clay pots being crafted, but you still have the lives of these artisans and preservers depicted on screen nonetheless. Conversations are casually overheard and recorded, such as discussing a young daughter now less interested in cartoons and more into nature documentaries, including one of how elephants are like ballerinas in their ability to "hear" through their feet and walk differently as a result. With Latin music on the radio constantly, the lives of these people are experienced if rarely seeing their faces. Sound design, as in Black Pond, is a prominent piece of Those That's creation, from the intimacy of these sequences to bird calls being spliced into the scenes of work on the soundtrack.

The film does, in truth, evoke those of museum instillations. The one significant difference is that, with the craft in what is depicted onscreen and in the soundtrack as carefully considered, the form of the film is as important as the content. This comparison is also not out-of-place as, alongside the tusk itself, there was also a book connected to the film². A museum installation in itself is as much an art form, one I respect as much for their sense of being in presence of them in an environment outside of a cinema. I can see Those That, At A Distance, Resemble Another have its segments separated into installation pieces, but it is truly the virtue of Jessica Sarah Rinland's that the actual film as is also works as cinema. With its seemingly distancing effects actually focusing one on the importance of the work onscreen, it becomes cinema of the senses in feeling the intimacy and hard work on display in painstaking detail.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Contemplative

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) The Earth shall be made a common treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons. I hate none. I love all. - Gerrard Winstanley and The Diggers, 1649. As quoted in Black Pond in its ending onscreen.

2) Taken on the MUBI article on the film Not All Objects Are Silent: "Those That, At A Distance, Resemble Another", by Madeleine Wall and published on April 6th 2021.