It wasn’t till that evening that the Coca-Colas were back on the shelf and we had a reason to walk up the slope. A litchi[1] tree hung from the sky and a woman washed vessels in the thicket. The occasional pickup trucks surprised me like sudden glyphs appearing inside a familiar video game. They reminded me of the world beyond the research station, and that the tropics were hot because their natural ecosystems had been flattened by plantations.
The upper hill was grassy and occasionally cool, if one knew how to position themselves in the loamy shade. The warm cola turned to soap inside my sandy throat. The villagers were certain that the elephants would cross the river in a few days, because there was little to eat on the other side of the hill. We had spent a week looking through our footage and there wasn’t much left to do but wait.
‘My stomach needs a tub of curd. I’m tired of drinking down the food here.’
We had been over this many times. I was still irritated about your obsession with the harvest sequence – I didn’t see how we could film it as anything besides a montage and still maintain the pace of our narrative.
The farmers lived in thatched houses, and a few of them built concrete bungalows, if they could. The rubber trees had begun to yield, but the people didn’t paint their homes. I thought about the room on the top floor of the station, overlooking the teak trees, its high ceiling and salamander specimens pinned to the wall, and how I liked sitting beneath the sunroof – watching the langurs[2] crack open fruits.
‘Did you think about what Gulshan asked you?’ I said, stirring my bottle in the air.
‘I don’t think a film needs to say something. I just want to show life.’
‘I don’t know. It’s still their place.’
There was a route behind the plantation that took us down a muddy stream, leading to the station’s kitchen. We liked hopping across the rocks and pressing our toes into the mudbank. A whistling thrush peered down a branch, pondering a song as you staggered in your tight jeans. The minerals in the region made your hair fall, so you carried a water sprayer on our excursions. Everybody at the station told a unique joke about how you ‘perfumed’ your hair in the middle of the jungle.
‘You know when we were on the jeep the other night?’
‘Hmmm.’
‘It’s strange how it’s so normal that we don’t talk for hours when we’re on the road.’
‘I never fall asleep either.’
‘I was thinking about abstraction in art. And how…painting a formless collage still reflects our ways of relating to the world. Like, there’s no way you can deny that a mustard yellow emerges from warmth, as in a field, a bright yellow from explosiveness, as in the sun, or blue from freedom, as in the sky or water, red from something alarming, and so on. So, abstraction encourages a deeper imagination of form. It’s unnecessary, and false even, because it doesn’t obliterate our perception. Besides, everything in nature exists within a form and system. The spirit of existence isn’t fragmented like how art may tell us. It is actually evolved and interconnected, unlike abstraction that isolates feelings and depicts them as absolutes. Though the nature of chaos may leave us in a fragmented condition, I think abstract art distances us from the elements of life, especially with their elusive titles and artistic statements.’
‘What about…’
‘Just playing with colours? Then that’s all that abstract art should be, a childish occupation. It can depict meaning even if it lacks representation, but it doesn’t feel real. It’s a language invented by artists for other artists.’
You had trailed away from me over the course of your speech, ‘til you were on the other side. A jackfruit tree overlord towered over the mound of grass beyond the water’s curvature. You leaped out of the stream and settled in your favourite spot, looking down at the blurred valley and the stony station nestled in the monotonous green. I wanted to say something but the sound of the giggling water stopped me.
The idea of abstraction reminded me of Fred Kelemen’s thoughts about film.
‘…if you take two colours, let’s say a certain red and a certain yellow and you put them side by side, and then let’s say you take the yellow away and you put a certain blue beside the same red, the red will completely change. It will behave differently, but not because the red changed, it’s because of the relation.’[3]
Kelemen says that one ‘cannot create ideas.’ That filmmaking often tends to become a search for possibilities that can create one’s ideas. A film was about discovering the unique relationships amongst elements, rather than pursuing the isolated ideas projected by those elements. I was agitated about how you wanted to film the villagers harvesting tapioca from the forest. You believed that it would reveal a dimension of their tradition, regardless of their mindless agriculture. I couldn’t help but think that our film lacked intention, like a satellite roving across a new planet – it was curious, naïve, and uncritical.
There was a seminar in the coming month called Tree Frogs and The Monsoon. Gulshan, the director of the research station, had asked us to join his team on their expeditions and photograph different species of frogs. He wanted us to present them at the seminar along with portions of our ongoing film, though he was mildly aware that our story was more about the human condition. The station occasionally ventured into studying patterns of human cultivation and their impact on the feeding habits of hornbills, cicadas, frogs, primates and other tree dwellers; but they seldom represented human beings. While our project entailed a visual and scientific collaboration about changing animal habitats, your argument was that ‘change’ could scarcely be portrayed in the absence of the tribal people’s narrative.
I watched you skip across the stream, saying that it would be more comfortable to wash our clothes on the banks than in the courtyard outside the bathrooms. There were days with no electricity, network or water. Fuel was hard to come by and sometimes we walked for hours before we reached a village; there wasn’t much to do there but listen. Each day felt long enough to be a month.
The researchers never stopped working. We sometimes carried their lunch from the canteen and ate with them between experiments. The lab was stuffy but it overlooked the stream and they let us edit in the corner if we didn’t attack each other. The place had inspired me to start a journal of illustrations. My drawings were artistic versions of zoological diagrams – eviscerated insects, jaws and musculature of rodents, gills and brains of fish and intestines of wild boars. I sat on the porch of the station. The humidity urged my body to exercise, while you disappeared to keep your evening routine.
That night after dinner, we strolled along the compound wall and talked about Lav Diaz’s Evolution of a Filipino Family, an eleven-hour long film that follows the lives of farmers in the Philippines – amidst political strife, distress, migration and economic hardship, shot over nine years with the same actors. Epic films about indigenous people weren’t a new phenomenon. The German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger finished Taiga in 1992, an eight-hour documentary about nomads in Northern Mongolia. John Marshall made A Kalahari Family, a six-part series about Namibian history and the myths and struggles surrounding the ‘bushmen,’ filmed over fourteen years. But it was rare that such films weren’t made by outsiders. Maybe the locals found it unnecessary to document the triviality of their own lives. Or perhaps it was their priority to survive that made ethnography seem pointless. A teacher once told me to remember that we storytellers always benefited far more from the people’s stories than they ever did.
I watched you put a cigarette to your mouth. You hated your room and we occasionally stayed up in the lab when the researchers worked all night. Sometimes they took a break and we drank a bottle of pineapple wine, talking about the horrible cities. But we mostly rolled about on our beds and tried to fall asleep, despite the mosquitoes and the power-cuts. The forest mingled with the plantation and a mix of cackles and croaks enlivened the dark mounds of bushes beyond the station. The stream hurried further down the slope, where the rubber groves turned into rice fields. I sat down beside the pathway and looked up as you crunched your unlit cigarette.
‘I was thinking…’
‘Hmmm.’ You seemed to anticipate what I was going to say, and sounded as though you didn’t want to hear it.
‘I was thinking that, since we’re anyway going to photograph tree frogs over the next few weeks, apart from our current film work…why not just film the frogs as well. That way, we’ll have a good amount of footage to make a film about tree dwellers and maybe we can even present it at the seminar, instead of showing what we’ve shot so far. I think it would satisfy Gulshan.’
You shuffled to the other side of the path, like how you had crossed the stream. And then you wandered back, searching for a glimmer of moonlight. I had known you long enough to understand that it was your way of saying okay. I also knew that you didn’t want to talk about it, and that you would stop sulking when we got back on the field. I offered you a matchbox but you didn’t want it. You just needed something to chew on.
[1] Also known as lychee.
[2] A genus of Old World monkeys native to the Indian subcontinent.
[3] Masterclass with Fred Kelemen, Golden Apricot, 2016