“All images that separate us alienate us,” warns the unnamed narrator from Night Is Coming: Threnody for the Victims of Marikana (Aryan Kaganof, 2014), one of the many stellar short films found on the second volume of the Disruptive Film series, curated by Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner. Grainy, slow-motion handheld video advances painfully frame-by-frame, showing police raising their rifles against striking platinum workers in the South African desert. A maelstrom of sand threatens to obscure their line of sight. We stand uncomfortably on the side of the police as we watch them load and aim their weapons. Plaintive jazz plays over the sequence as the narrator states: “There is a fierce irony here: at a liberation movement internalizing terror and turning on its own population.” Ultimately, 34 workers will be killed, and another 78 will be injured.
The sequence’s imagery succinctly reveals the stark consequences that a limited field of vision yields. A visual gulf separates the police from those whom they are about to murder. Visual disconnection aligns itself with emotional disconnection, a requirement for any execution or practice that treats another person like an object. If anything, many of the short-form films from Disruptive Film, Vol. 2, attempt to repair and renew the image’s relationship to the viewer. They assert that only through a radically transformed vision can new ways of being and acting take root in the world and lead to more just futures.