Online screening

He Thought He Died (2023) by Isiah Medina is screened online as part of this digital publication from 12 July to 12 December 2024.

English closed captions are available.

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Interview

MEMORY AND PREMONITION

Andrei Pora: At the start of He Thought He Died (HTHD), we are presented with a set of 4 x 6 photographs which Sam (Kelley Dong’s character) flips through. The photos depict places and situations that will feature throughout the film while images and sounds of the works being crated are interspersed. These photos could be Sam’s own, artefacts from the painter’s archives, or they could be spectral transmissions from the film yet to come. The sequence and, on a larger scale, the whole film retreats into itself and the idea-material of the archive while simultaneously centrifuging outwards. How do you reconcile these two diverging trajectories vis-à-vis montage, Agnes’s dual role as contemporary art gallery and historical art museum, and the larger question of future and potential in a culture that seems to have lost the ability to imagine one. Is the future found in the past?

Isiah Medina: I don’t think the future is found in the past. Start with the present, in the present of creation. Declare your axioms, silently or aloud, and make things. And if something of the present feels off, you go back into the seemingly immutable past through this present, to construct a history of how you got here so time can catch up with itself. It takes some vision to transform a past into a history—a history is something you can act on, it’s a process different from the past’s immutability. You posit a personal history of your medium when you desire to get involved in a process concerning its future. So many histories are given—by academies, museums, corporations, any number of online writings—but the personal history an artist creates is quite different, not given but created. In the process you begin to stand on a transformed immutability. And if it’s not working you can interpret again because the interpretation has practical aesthetic consequences.

Sometimes you look for tools in the past and you don’t find any that respond to your historical present so you need to have the courage to invent. The future is not in the past. In this case the future is where it always has been: in the actuality of making art. So don’t fall for critiques of immediacy; even improvising in the immediacy of creation is within a chosen history, absolutely mediated by the risk of the present. It’s always people who have never invented forms and who never will who say it’s impossible and put a primacy on going back to study and mediate further. There will always be non-artists telling you art is over—it’s simply part of the game, like how there will always be reactionaries in politics or sophists in philosophy. And thus we have to struggle eternally, continuously inventing new forms of our fight.

MISE EN ABYME

AP: Another recurring theme in the film is the void of the self and the various containers or sets that a self could be represented within, whether it be the work, the archive, documentation. During the planning stages, we talked about how you wanted to incorporate your own personal archives into the film and blur the boundaries between institutional, personal and even online archives. In one scene, Loren (Andilib Khan) and Sam (Kelley Dong) discuss “evil geniuses“ while Loren is surrounded by what appear to be multiple paintings of herself—one is even a painting of a painting. The painter is so enamoured with their own genius that even the act of painting their own painting requires representation. In this situation, the “evil genius” is the “ultimate individual”—the aura of personality that gives them both cultural and capital value. What happens when these parameters of self, reality, and images are dissolved? Can they be dissolved? Can a radical individuation be achieved rather than reifying the egocentric ideals of individual/genius?

IM: To be honest, I like genius. I don’t think it’s an evil idea. Art wouldn’t interest me if genius didn’t exist. I like when art is exceptional, I get bored if it’s merely cultural. And I think painting one’s own painting within your painting is part of being an artist, the ability to self-represent one’s own history of representation. Rather than being egocentric, it’s what allows an artist to truly zoom out. It’s how one becomes oneself in relation to others. For example, perhaps in his earlier works, Brian De Palma would visually quote Hitchcock and Godard, but quite quickly he starts quoting his quotes. And when he quotes himself, he begins to experience artistic autonomy from his models. And then he quotes himself again and again, each time slightly different, with new variations, finding new forms of questioning, organizing space and materializing one’s apperception, in excess to Hitchcock or Godard. But you don’t get to autonomy without copying your copy—it’s how you involve yourself in a history, in a tradition. It could be a tradition of genius. All genius means is that art exists as an exception to culture and exceptions give birth to their parents. If exceptions don’t exist then reality is finite and I prefer to think reality is infinite. De Palma is surprising because I didn’t realize all of that was in Hitchcock and Godard, and they didn’t know either. But De Palma knew, he at once discovers and invents his parents.

I think self, reality, and images are dissolved all the time when you’re making art. But there’s not just one form or pace of dissolve, but different parts of the frame may be more dissolved than the other depending on the situation. There’s an uneven development of dissolution. One radically empties oneself out to look at reality and images, being and appearing. And sometimes the form of appearing is so radical it changes being itself. I’m more interested in the idea of resources being distributed so more people have the chance to experience their genius rather than limiting the idea of genius as some evil, white straight male thing we need to get rid of. A lot of people don’t have the time to dissolve into reality and images like that, they dissolve into their work or their family or the state or some sort of boring bitterness that masks itself as nuance. We can always dissolve but we should desire to dissolve in a different way. I think the dissolve into the tradition of the genius isn’t the worst, because tradition in this case is already a tradition of exceptionality; exceptions to the past traditions, or what may now appear as rule breaking will, in the future, look like the making of new rules. We’re always ready to talk about the genius of the studio system, the genius of the school system, the genius of the festival system, but I think there’s nothing wrong with dissolving into a system of genius.

There can be a “systematicity” to genius, which I think is what philosophy generally is, a rational conception of how one can become an exception to ourselves, if only momentarily. It’s to say you can be inspired by someone’s work where they found a way to be exceptional with regards to their models, and themselves, and demonstrate a new form. Is that so bad? What I find to be much more oppressive is the idea that there is no exception in art but recognizable cultural practices that we can collaborate to express the same forms again and again. Genius just marks out an idea that you can leave your models and freely express your thoughts and in time find out what those thoughts even are because our own mind isn’t readily available to us. Thinking is not a given, it’s exceptional. There’s nothing more oppressive than the destruction of exceptionality. All oppression in some deep sense is trying to destroy something exceptional. Something that doesn’t fit in the rules and laws of the world, “genius” is just one of many names for what is destroyed and humiliated daily. There are other words. I don’t even know what individuation would mean without genius. Like, of course, in some deep sense, we can individuate everything, but if not for the idea of genius then probably for the idea of the world as it exists—so we’re individuating just to be an easily countable part under the rule of law.

SUPER MARIO, GODARD, HITLER

AP: Over burgers, you brought up how in Super Mario 64, Mario jumps through paintings to enter different worlds. The inside of Bowser’s Castle is much larger than the architecture we see outside. But by doing so, paradoxically, each item becomes its own world full of multiplicities of meanings, collisions and syntheses in relation to other worlds. I’ve been reading recently about how one of the largest, unresolvable points of contention in art history between the academy and various avant-gardes is on where art is situated in relationship to life. The academy/institution insists that art needs to exist within clear autonomous frames and boundaries to be understood, while the avant-gardes say the opposite: art needs to be inseparable from life for it to have any vitality and effect on the real world. How do you see art within these contradictory parameters? Is it possible to be both within and against?

IM:  The twentieth-century dream of losing the distinction between art and life has been replaced with a lack of distinction between work and life. So we have to remember that when we say “art” we are talking about artworks. And artworks, like works in politics, or science, or love, are exceptional to our lives. They don’t merely continue our life as it is or repeat representations we already have. If it’s not exceptional and merely repetition then it’s culture and not art. There are some great artworks that I remember experiencing for the first time, and I haven’t stopped experiencing them, consciously or unconsciously, since. And if one really thinks there is no necessary distinction between art and life, then art is not a place of exception, and when you have nothing but unexceptional art then the most you can desire is to curate this archive of junk and endlessly contextualize to find its cultural value. If everything is art, then a contemporary example of a fusion between “art and life” is posting on social media, producing value through a form of curation for free, but I like art because it subtracts you from the social. That’s why in the creation of art the artist experiences a concrete freedom, and because of this subtraction, some artworks retain a feeling of surprise when we receive it, the surprise of an asocial freedom preserved. Art creates the measure by which we judge its distance from previously drawn frames and boundaries. It creates a new form of measure.

I just think it’s a mistake to say it’s the institutions themselves that provide this. I dislike the idea that whatever we want to still call “experimental film” can only exist in the university system, or in a festival system, or if “experts” with degrees introduce it or mediate a Q&A period. I truly detest when I go to the cinema and someone introduces a classic film and immediately starts spoiling it with their interpretation, it’s ridiculous! Not everyone in the audience has seen it and I find it terribly selfish. It’s understood that not everyone wants a guide or a headset to wear in a museum but it’s not a choice for some cinema screenings and I find it very disheartening. It’s one thing for an artist to introduce their work (though many I know would prefer not to), or for someone to speak after the film and offer the audience the choice to stay or go. But the normalization of non-artists introducing work they don’t have a part in is as dangerous as the ads before the movie, as if cinema is of a piece with school and commercials. I think there’s a cognitive value of surprise when encountering an artwork, and as an artist, first impressions are key. Art can change your life in the silent way you introduce yourself to the film, and in doing so introduce yourself to yourself. It’s precious. The film itself is enough, mediation beforehand is a poison. It’s when everything that’s not cinema starts to intervene, the star system, the school system, all of it returns with a vengeance. Of course, I’m guilty here answering these questions, but we artists take part in these things as one of the few ways to get money and means to make the next picture. But let’s not naturalize this form. All you need to do is show the film, preferably in a movie theatre, and no one will lack any proper context and be confused. The only real context is an artist’s previous work. So make more movies. Movies will always be the context for other movies, exceptions will be the context to measure the next exceptions. Artists will make work and show it so they themselves can finally see it, and some other artists may see it, or maybe even some scientists, activists, or lovers will see it. And you may work with some of these people to make more movies. That’s all that really happens.

As an artist, I want to experience the joy and freedom of that autonomous space that exists in the moment of creation as much as I can in this brief life. But life feels short more or less because of political inequality—I’m not sure if it’d feel as short otherwise. When we pose the couple “art and life”, “life” always appears underdetermined and unclear as a term, as if art feeds on life. But our life includes other forms of thinking than art such as science, politics, even love. “Life” from the viewpoint of art then becomes a hodgepodge of our unconscious ideas about science, politics, love, and its debris. In the worry that art does not have “vitality and effect on the real world”, it’s simply the fact that not everything in the world involves beauty as its form of change. Some things change when we question what’s good (politics) or what’s true (science). We shouldn’t overextend art or else it will look more ineffectual than it actually is, but I would also say the same thing about politics, science, and love. It’s empty to say everything is politics, everything is science, everything is art, everything is love. There is no everything. These four forms cut themselves out of any pretension of everything, inventing their autonomous spaces and boundaries outside of the institutions that secretly or not so secretly feed off of them. In a way, when art and “life” fuse we get culture, when politics and “life” fuse we get the state, when science and “life” fuse we get ideology, when love and “life” fuse we get family. Life shouldn’t be so beholden to one form of thinking. But when these forms of thought remain a cut, an exception, the world can be effected, because then it’s clear that culture, state, ideology, and family were just the finite residue of an infinite cut. The collapse of categories makes change impossible. Fusion is death. Cutting lets life live. A good movie, in my understanding, shows life riven by these cuts.

AP: We’ve talked in the past about your complicated relationship with Godard, working as a Filipino-Canadian in film, and the assumption by the surprisingly conservative experimental film community that because of your background, your films must be entirely citational. At the TIFF Wavelengths Q&A after the premiere of HTHD, you stressed how your positionality forces you to engage with class and grammar—ideology is implicit in the form. Is it possible for these historically hierarchical and discriminatory institutions of film and art to truly change in ways that move past the symbolic?

IM: I think it has already changed. I own my equipment and that’s not symbolic. Yes, sometimes my films play at festivals, sometimes I get money from institutions, but it’s only sometimes. As a filmmaker I will take the resources I can but these are all extra. In the end I can always make a movie. It only seems impossible if your mind is still colonized enough to want to move to Hollywood and make a particular type of picture and watch the Oscars, and if being some sort of journeyman/craftsman is still a fantasy, sure. Maybe it all seems impossible in a world of discrimination. But if you let that go, cinema is still utopian, and more importantly, utopian in the present. I appreciate George Lucas saying he’s an experimental filmmaker and that he looks towards workflows of the future. Pedro Costa is always looking back at all we lost, and he has disdain for the term experimental. So it depends what direction you’re looking. There’s no other time I’d rather make pictures than now. I’m not an American nor am I a European fantasizing about American industry, or, for that matter, a Canadian fantasizing about joining an American industry. Your production model must be historically specific to where you actually live. The images of your dream film may be tied to antiquated production models and all that implies—your dreams may not even be your own. Transforming one’s dream is more liberating than holding to a dream of the past. Experimentation with production models can give you back the ownership of your dreams.

I don’t mind doing the camerawork, the budgeting, the editing, choosing the costumes, going through each prop. I like the fact the labour isn’t so divided and I don’t have to answer to anyone. I don’t have my fingers crossed that one day I’ll have resources to make movies from the twentieth century, I don’t even have my fingers crossed that I’ll have the resources of other filmmakers who work in this country in the present. I simply don’t want to make those movies. If I was given the resources by institutions to make those movies, then I’d feel less free as an artist.

I think if we let go of the models of bland European auteurs and compromised American craftsmen maybe we’ll have a new cinema this century. And I don’t think my relationship to Godard is complicated in any pejorative sense: I’ve been moved by his films, and because of that I have my affirmations, critiques, and creative misreadings and so forth—all relations to your medium should be self-consciously complicated and contradictory. We shouldn’t lessen the value of the symbolic because it’s our encounter with contradictory symbols that propel us into making art. There is so much that has yet to be done with cinema as a form of thinking, there are beautiful forms to invent, ways to comprehend our time in frames and cuts, and the tools are available. Time should be spent making art. We’re not free because there are institutions, institutions exist as ossified freedoms. Freedom is first, institutions are after, in the same way infinity is first, and the finite comes after. So rather than ask if these institutions will ever change, continually affirm the logic of your freedom. Don’t wait for someone who exists to be late.

AP: As the world outside our artistic bubble moves closer to privatized and blatantly exploitative models, the wholesale dismissal of public culture, and towards what is increasingly looking like fascism/neo-feudalism, what role does the artist have in this emerging world? Yeezys, tanks, and allusions to stolen Holocaust art appear in HTHD. Kanye West is the prototypical “evil genius” of our century, and his totalizing practice mirrors Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Couple that with his recent statements, and alignment with fundamentalist Christianity, his position as artist seems more and more relegated to that of decorator for the coming monoculture. Do artists still have any power and agency, or relevancy even, to enrich or make change in a culture that only respects capital?

IM: Many artists do have power. Behind every genocide there are always some poets in support. You’ll find that some filmmakers give money to the IDF or they are arms dealers on the side. You’ll even find people who in their teenage years were poets and later they became slavers. Chinua Achebe, in reference to Arthur Rimbaud, said that poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. Unfortunately today we see the many revelations of musicians in many genres around the world being involved in sex trafficking. In fact there are many failed artists who cannot invent new aesthetic forms so they give up and openly choose fascism. I’ve met some. So, some artists have power or are at least obsessed with it, vengefully hegemonic in their attitudes. But the artists who interest me link the beauty of art to the just and the true, rather than power. The force of power keeps things in their place, despite all spectacle, whereas the just and true can destroy and reorganize the place through an encounter with exceptional beauty. In the realm of art, I think ideas of power and agency are merely the finite debris of the infinite processes of truth and subject, in the same way culture is always monoculture, a figure of oneness, a finite result of the infinite movement of art, a figure of oneness that must be destroyed again and again through art’s multiplicity.

In terms of Ye, I think some of his artworks are still worth encountering. Unfortunately it’s our job as committed artists to decide which fascists are worth our time. Sergei Eisenstein thought Walt Disney was worth thinking about, and he completely triumphs over Disney by the time he makes Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, but he definitely worked through Disney as one of the many steps to get there. It’s often just one or two things worth pulling out and tossing the rest. Don’t get caught up in silly mental gymnastics and start consuming all of American culture with fingers crossed you’ll find a way to flip it on its head in its entirety. But again, in the way I started this interview: make things first. You’ll find them if you need to re-explore certain works and their usefulness to your historical present and artistic problems. Maybe you won’t need any of this, you may have all the tools you need without having to reach back and make some pretty history for the sake of it. Don’t ever start making art worried about “will this change anything?”, “does my art really have an effect of the world?”, “do I have power?“: this is the genius malignus. Rather one should start by making something and asking if it’s beautiful and true. The consequences of truth last forever, whereas power may only last a century or two. Eisenstein’s October is almost a century old and it looks fresher than ever, feeling almost cut-out from history, whereas Fantasia is already looking creaky. The beauty of a true classic will outlast every moneyed, eclectic curated collection, cutting itself out in the process. And when you put what I’ll call the “cut-outs“ of our history side by side, you start to see what eternity looks like, a sort of motion study, one cut-out at a time.

May 2024, this interview was edited for clarity.

Biographies

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Acknowledgements & Credits

This interview documents Isiah Medina’s film He Thought He Died curated by Andrei Pora and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2023.

Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

ISBN-13: 978-1-55339-711-3

Author: Andrei Pora with Isiah Medina
Commissioning curator: Andrei Pora
Coordinating curator: Sunny Kerr
Digital development coordinator: Danuta Sierhuis
Copy editor: Anniessa Antar
Photographer: Andrei Pora
Design: Studio Blackwell

Citation:
Pora, Andrei with Isiah Medina. Three Questions: He Thought He Died. Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2024.

© Agnes Etherington Art Centre 2024

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