CRIP TIME, Carolyn Lazard, 2018
“A soul as big as the universe wants to leave my body” – Kim Hyesoon, Autobiography of Death
The labels on the plastic pill boxes in Carolyn Lazard’s 2019 video CRIP TIME are worn down and becoming illegible from repeated contact. There’s a box for each day of the week, and each one is sub-divided into “morning”, “noon”, “evening” and “bedtime”, but the repetition of use over time has started to make these markers of temporal organisation fade. Shot from above, the video shows a pair of hands opening bottles of medication and supplements, and putting the different pills into the various compartments. It takes a full ten minutes to complete the task, and one senses that it has been done many times before, not just because the labels are getting rubbed off from repeated touch, but also because these hands move methodically with acquired muscle memory.
The word “crip” comes from “cripple”, and has, in recent decades, been reclaimed by disabled people with pride and defiance, in much the same way that the word “queer” is a reclaimed slur. In a world structured by ableist standards and values of regulated efficiency and compulsory productivity, the time that is inhabited and shaped and negotiated and claimed by disabled people messes with homogenised linearity, slows things down, and insists on dependency. It is structurally invisibilised and delegitimised, but it involves knowledge about other ways of being together in time. As Lazard put it in a 2018 lecture, “no one wants to get left behind but when we are all left behind maybe we ain’t behind any more; we can just turn it around and be ahead, or maybe we can all turn in multiple directions and obliterate the idea that we are moving in a singular direction at all.”
CRIP TIME is made from a single shot: there is no temporal compression, no selective restructuring of sequence, no manipulation of pace; just the time that it actually takes to complete this slow, repetitive, ongoingly necessary task of maintenance and self-care. Lazard has recalled that when they made the video, they were thinking a lot about Chantal Akerman’s adamantly slow, durational film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Akerman insisted on the often discomforting experience of real-time depictions that force viewers to sit through seemingly uneventful stretches of duration. While this approach might induce impatience and anxiety in viewers, Akerman said that she wanted to work with the felt experience of time’s materiality, rather than offering an escape from it. As she put it in a 2004 interview, “You know, when most people go to the movies, the ultimate compliment—for them—is to say, ‘We didn’t notice the time pass!’ With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass.”
Jeanne Dielman depicts a woman doing different kinds of domestic work in between sex work appointments in her apartment. “I think the work that disabled people do to live is also related to these other kinds of work,” Lazard has remarked. “And in some ways, the film was instructional for me in terms of how to explore these kinds of unseen, hidden, underemphasised, exploited, uncompensated forms of labour, these kinds of work that are not recognised as valid.” A different sort of film might offer explanation, commentary, analysis or theorisation, but with CRIP TIME, Lazard was interested in the idea that “You can literally just show it. You can actually force somebody to be in the real time of domestic labour and be like, ‘Damn, that’s a lot of work.’ And maybe you can’t really come to that revelation until you’re stuck watching it in real time.”
Lazard’s video is one of six works presented in Time Left over from Time, a programme we have put together with, and in response to, the Meno Avilys archives of digitally restored Lithuanian films and videos. Taking its title from an essay about growing older by the recently passed queer American literary icon Gary Indiana, the programme contains works from 1969 up until this year. With formats ranging from documentary to film essay to visual experiments in abstraction and vibration, the programme looks to works that honour sidelined imaginaries, enact rhythms of alterity, and express in-betweenness as an abundant commons. Foregrounding vulnerabilities, dependencies, and strategies of slowness and repetition, these works employ unreliable narrators, deliberate obfuscations, and various techniques for the disordering of normative timelines.
Capitalism is founded on the linear rationalisation and mechanical regimentation of time, facilitating the destructive exploitation of bodies and other natural resources through the ideologies of efficiency, productivity, and work, work, work. In different and sometimes not-so-different ways, the 20th-century project of Soviet society was also highly ableist, and obsessed with work and productivity. Artists, writers and filmmakers in Soviet society were expected to reinforce this hyper-productivism: when Andrei Zhdanov introduced the term Socialist Realism in 1934, he declared the new state-mandated aesthetic would be “against laxity, against loafing, against idling”.
Dreams of the Centenarians, Robertas Verba, 1969
One of the films we selected from the Meno Avilys archive is Robertas Verba’s The Dreams of the Centenarians (1969), a short documentary about old people in the countryside in Soviet Lithuania. “How old are you?” one of the subjects asks another. “I don’t know,” she replies, “as old as the world.” Soviet cinema was supposed to depict strong, young, heroic and hard-working bodies. It was supposed to be future-oriented and unambiguous in its celebration of unity, optimism and efficient productivity. Instead, Verba turned his camera towards old, frail members of society, as they sat around and made jokes, and shared fragmentary memories about the past, including memories of life before the Soviet occupation.
Verba is a founder of the Lithuanian poetic documentary film tradition. To get this production approved, he applied to make a film commemorating the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, with people who were also born in 1870, or thereabouts. But The Dreams of the Centenarians makes no mention of Lenin, and after the première, the film was censored for its inappropriate subject matter and “lack of optimism”.
While Soviet filmmakers received limited quantities of film stock, Verba understood that working with the elderly would require open-ended slowness and patience. For this film, as for other films he made with old people, such as The Old Man and the Land (1965), he would let the camera roll unsparingly, waiting for his subjects to speak when they were ready, and refusing to rush them or push them into any preconceived political framework. He eschewed the heavy-handed voiceover that would normally narrate things in a Socialist Realist documentary, preferring to let the centenarians speak their own words, in their own time. This was perhaps the most subversive element of his filmmaking: the refusal to align with the hyperlinear temporality set by a totalitarian ideology. Acknowledging different embodiments and their temporal multiplicities, he allowed the filmmaking to happen through slow processes of waiting and listening, and sitting with long silences, rather than through the logic of total legibility and capture.
Unimaginable Things, Henrikas Gulbinas, 1988
Henrikas Gulbinas’ mesmeric video series Unimaginable Things (1988), also from the Meno Avilys archives, comes out of a very different historical moment, as Lithuania was about to declare sovereignty and, shortly after, independence from the Soviet Union. During this tail end of the Soviet era, Gulbinas helped to introduce video recording devices to Lithuania by illegally smuggling equipment past the border for resale (he still runs an audiovisual equipment shop in Kaunas today). He was a self-taught artist with little access to video art precedents. Experimenting with a video camera, he found that he could generate strange images by holding the lens up to a glowing television screen during a broadcast. Using a lamp and a grid placed on the TV screen, he began to draw floating shapes and luminous abstractions out from the depictions of the broadcast media, later cutting out the moments he liked, and editing them together in dreamy sequences of colours and shapes that are completely untethered from figurative representation.
Time Left over from Time also presents Untitled (A Momentation 4 Saul) (2019) by Adam Farah-Saad (aka free.yard), a work that similarly deploys a vernacular recording device in a way that produces idiosyncratic distortion. Sitting upstairs on a double-decker bus moving through the streets of London, the artist discovered that if they held their iPhone up against the window, the image of the world outside would undulate with the subtle vibrations of the vehicle. Secret pulsing intensities are found within the drawn-out mundanity of a slow bus journey. “Momentation” is a term coined by Farah-Saad, in tribute to the pop star Mariah Carey, who incorporates the word “moment” into her eccentric vocabulary as she “refuses to acknowledge time” (in her own words). According to free.yard, a momentation is “a pronounced dwelling on the ephemeral—influenced by Mariah Carey’s queer disidentification theorisations of THE MOMENT”.
Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron), Cauleen Smith, 1992
Other works in the programme by Cauleen Smith and John Smith undo the hold of authoritative linearity while playing with autobiographical narration. In Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992), Cauleen Smith presents a “life story” as a gathering of ancestral lineages, personal recollections and historical fragments. The film begins with a white male voice chronicling events in the life of “Cauleen Smith”, but his dry, third-person account is soon interrupted by a voice that speaks, in the first person, as the Black female whose life story is being presented. Rather than simply setting the record straight, she ushers in a proliferation of layered voices and times, refusing to appear as a stable and transparently legible identity. “I stand on the shoulders of those who fought, died, sang, cried, worked, and lied to get me here, you are always with me,” she says, presenting a life story that spans centuries and includes travelling to Europe in the 1930s, reading books, making art, and dying in the Middle Passage. While delineating the invisibility of Black women over centuries within the narratives of official history, the work affirms an abundance of under-the-radar togetherness and dependency that stretches across generations, defying chronological orders.
Being John Smith, John Smith, 2024
Time Left over from Time closes with Being John Smith, an unusually personal, autobiographical work from this year by the experimental filmmaker John Smith. As with Dreams of the Centenarians, Being John Smith looks at processes of ageing and vulnerability that are often kept off-screen. Now in his 71st year, Smith reflects on changes in his brain and cognition; his recent cancer treatment and its lasting effect on his body, voice and confidence; and what it has been like to live with a name so common that he is virtually unsearchable online. He also reflects on what it’s like to try to make art in times of ongoing catastrophe. “I’m distracted by the escalating horror of world events and find it hard to concentrate on my work,” he says. He tells us he has come to accept that, as an artist, his early work is probably his best. But he also refuses any unified, linear narrative of gradual decline, rejecting the commonly held belief that, with age, people become more politically conservative, and instead presenting the ageing artist as someone with increasingly clarified political commitments.