A Common Sequence (Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser, 2023)

More so than in the past (I think -- I'd have to crunch the numbers), notable experimental filmmakers are shooting their shot with feature films that, while certainly not conventional by any means, are a bit more accessible than their short-form output. For every The Grand Bizarre -- a film in which Jodie Mack retained the essential formalism of her earlier work, extending it quite logically to the long form -- there are five or six counter-examples, films that find artists who'd previously been most concerned with the textures and timbres of their material shifting their emphasis, usually in the direction of documentary.

It's not always a bad thing, and some of these films are fairly solid examples of the "hybrid doc" style that has so captured the attention of the cinerati. But as I think I've mentioned before, most of these films seem to share one common denominator. They take the actually quite singular work of Harun Farocki as their model. Farocki's films are often rather reserved in their documentary rhetoric, preferring to "argue" by insinuation and analogy. But they can do this because the footage is organized with an underlying rigor. His films (to borrow architectural slang) have good bones, and anyone curious about how Farocki structured his films ought to read his essay "What an Editing Room Is," one of the best theoretical statements about the materialist process of montage.

A Common Sequence retains very few obvious traits from Mary Helena Clark's densely poetic short films. Her most recent film, Exhibition, indicated a somewhat new direction, providing more textual exposition than her earlier work. I am not familiar enough with Gibisser's film work to make a similar comparison. What A Common Sequence does do, however, is glide over a very broad topic from three distinct directions, leaving most of the analytical relationships implicit or, at times, unclear. This is a film about biology, data collection, and corporate control, particularly as it relates to colonialism, past and present. 

This is obviously a subject that is as suggestive as it is urgent. Most discussions of the reduction of human beings to data points -- what Deleuze in his late work referred to as "dividuals" -- fall into the Western humanist trap of considering the category "human" to be a stable, even transhistorical category. Many other thinkers, from Hardt and Negri to the Critical Race theorists, have identified the problems with this generalization, but it has seldom been brought into conversation with the discourses of "post-humanism," "cyborgs," or AI. This failure helps global capital to occlude what is indeed meant to remain invisible: technology is not neutral, particularly as relates to the deskilling and replacement of the labor force. Brown bodies and the Global South are always on the front lines, taking the first and hardest hit.

In this film, Clark and Gibisser consider how bio-technologies and AI have impacted marginalized populations, and in some cases how they have tried to fight back. In the first part, we go to Mexico, where federal authorities try to control local fishing practices. But these Indigenous communities are not just "depleting" bodies of water; they are using breeding methods to repopulate the axolotl, which is nearing extinction because of the introduction of non-native species by the Spanish. Then, in the film's most thorough investigation, we learn how Big Tech and Big Agra are working together to teach massive multi-armed robots to pick apples, displacing seasonal workers. This AI involves, among other things, teaching the robots to recognize the irregular shapes of trees, apply enough force to pluck the fruit without crushing it, and even how to recognize damaged apples and discard them.

In the third segment, we meet Joseph Yracheta, a researcher in pharmaco-genomics, who works to bring the investigation into the human genome into contact with Indigenous scientific practices, as well as articulate possible modes of resistance to the capitalist commodification and patenting of the human genome. Yracheta begins quite logically from the historically grounded assertion that white / Western control over Indian lives leads to subjugation. So he insists that Indigenous peoples must take control of their own genomic data -- the new frontier of bio-power -- in order to insure that this knowledge is put toward survivance and sustainability, not private interests.

To me, this look at Indigenous science, as a research discipline and a way of continuing the traditional healing practices of the ancestors, is the most compelling part of A Common Sequence, because it's a topic I've never seen discussed before. I'm not involved in scientific discourse, am only tangentially acquainted with Indigenous politics, and I suspect others could learn a great deal from this groundbreaking work. Also, unlike the AI agriculture project in particular, Yracheta's work articulates a concrete form of political resistance, on a site that has not yet been completely colonized. 

In other words, there is still hope for a different future. This could have been the basis of a documentary all on its own, and the fact that A Common Sequence concatenates it with the other two topics means that we don't gain nearly enough knowledge about this work and its prospects. Thing is, if you look at Farocki's films, he didn't just propose possible connections between things. He understood scale, selecting different subjects and areas of inquiry that could be understood on their own as well as in relationship to one another. There was an underlying balance that insured that each subject explained itself and also, by proximity, explained something about the others. There is a lot to admire about A Common Sequence, but I'm afraid it doesn't quite live up to its apparent model.