...program notes from the 88:88 screening organized in Atlanta by Sarika Joglekar and Benjamin Crais
Program Notes for 88:88 (Isiah Medina, 2015)
88:88. These are the numbers that flash on electrical appliances once power’s been restored to a house. With 88:88, Isiah Medina gives a name to nothing. 88:88 signifies no money, no electricity, but also no time: a digital clock reads a time that does not exist, that has never and will never come. Yet, in giving it a name, Medina grants nothing a positive existence. It is not only a lack, but what the philosopher Alain Badiou calls a pure multiplicity or inconsistency: the “stuff” that is ordered and structured in the presentation of being. 88:88 or 88:88—an image that contains every possible readout a digital appliance can present (11:35, 02:50, 12:00, etc.). Nothing—88:88—thus becomes the ground from which all articulations can emerge, a pure potential from which individual existences are cut. After all, it is only a matter of orientation to conceive nothing (88:88) as infinity (∞ x 4).
“The one is not, the many are” recites Kieran Daly late in 88:88. Rigorously following this axiom, Medina’s film devotes itself to a restless multiplicity that refuses any synthesis into a One—a narrative, an argument, a format (88:88 is composed of iPhone screen captures, celluloid, digital, etc.). The film’s logic is one of subtraction and remix with audiovisual fragments sampled from numerous sources cut up and overlaid with each other. There is no temporal continuity (a One that could string together or unite all the disparate fragments of the movie); rather the prevailing tense is that of suspension: 88:88.
Can Medina’s film be considered a documentary then? For all its fragmentation and often hard-to-follow quoting of philosophy, its hard to think of a recent film more deeply rooted in experience. Conversations, often whispered, between lovers and friends make up much of the soundtrack—“We kiss only when the streets are empty” ; “My mom told me she wanted to jump off a bridge the other day”—while the camera records moments that only a friend could be privy to. Medina says in his director’s statement, “I love everyone in the movie, people love each other in the movie and that’s documentary.”
Much of what Medina captures of his community involves its struggle with poverty: evictions, jail time, struggling family members, etc. If Medina draws out a consonance between nothing and the beginning of creation and thought, never does he romanticize having nothing as a kind of ascetic ideal, nor does he separate philosophical reflection on suspension and nothing from the material reality of poverty (at one point, he samples Big L: “I wasn’t poor, I was po! I couldn’t afford the –or”). Late in the film, Medina equates 88:88 with imprisonment, with numerous 8s forming the material out of which a chain-link fence is constructed.
The philosopher Jacques Rancière, in his book Film Fables, writes that “documentary instead of treating the real as an effect to be produced [as in fiction filmmaking], treats it as a fact to be understood.” If 88:88 breaks with most of the conventions of documentary filmmaking practice, it does so to offer a re-visioning of the real. Its montage ignores the rules of spatiotemporal continuity that govern both our ordinary perception of the world and the rules of what constitutes an acceptable documentary to reveal the infinite. Or, as Medina quotes Badiou in the film, “to break with dogmatism is to remove the event from the ascendency of the One. It is to subtract it from Life in order to deliver it to the stars.”
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