Mind Map for
What the Owl Knows
A film review
Subaltern - Stuart Hall (cultural theorist) on diasporic identity. The right to not have to reveal, especially for artists of colour.
These messages/words within the film.
Etymology - the root of words. Racialization intersected with art and aesthetics. Ambiguity using imaginary and fictional storytelling devices.
Main themes for the Otolith Group – Technology – Post-colonialism – Cultural Identity – Globalization – Science fiction.
Mythopoetic contrasted with ordinary life. Poetics and political. Hermeneutics – Kodwo Eshun
(Suspended `` ____- - ___.___/
The juxtaposed staging of the metropolis shows dusk setting in with mottled pink and purple skies, while fables are read aloud. The words “Not Yours” are repeated throughout the film’s 50-minute run time. Capitalising certain words, as in the line “The inaugural Speech of the Raven King”, brings to life imagined allegories. “The Fable of Pigeon and Owl” is read aloud while night dwellings and the rest of the usual nocturnal crowd are seen.
The relationship between the camera - operated by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, otherwise known as The Otolith Group - in a study of a painter who is studying her painting, is one of intimacy through prolonged attention to detail and formation. It feels as if it is recorded at eye-level, inherently placing the viewer in the action of seeing. Neither an object nor a person, the camera feels operated in a way that displaces traditional cinematic devices. In the same sense, Yiadom-Boakye writes about fables, as heard across the film, in which crows observe and engage with anthropological “characters”. Instead of a holding gaze it takes you to “narrative mystery”. I am familiar with Sagar and Eshun’s previous film which inspired this one, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another, where the first part of Etel Adnan’s poem Sea is read aloud in the confines of her apartment while facing away from the camera. It motions towards Adnan’s hands as she holds the realm of language intimately. In both films the artists are faced towards worlds they are building, with their backs to the camera. It is something that Eshun cites when talking about this point of view in which a person’s back says a lot. I notice that their often-tender approach to drawing attention and significance to well- crafted worlds, whether poetry or paint, helps to create their own world away from post-colonial and neo-colonial descriptions.
The film’s second half has the absurdity of Yiadom-Boakye’s fable of the “Deeply Skeptical Pigeon” who is antagonising the owl. The divisive part they each play in this dramatisation, amongst the bustling menagerie of creatures in the dead of night, eventually ends in Pigeon’s own demise, seemingly brought about through their own wrongdoing. It is an interesting contrast to the methodical solitude of being in the studio earlier in the film. It suggests the theatre of the political has a zoo-like unfolding. The Otolith Group are adept at “getting under the skin” by utilizing science fiction to speak to the global effects of political structures in Western society. Towards the end of the credits, a sense of time begins to settle in despite the sequence’s recursive use of dusk and dawn. As the film ends, the weight of time reaches an outcry, as the catastrophic environmental changes on the centre stage of the empire begin to feel cyclical.