Solicit the evening star
On Sandi Tan's "Shirkers", second viewings and a poem for misfits suffering from spiritual isolation.
It’s that time! I’m happy you’re here. Alright! Friday public post here. we. go
Film rec:
Shirkers (2018) Dir. Sandi Tan
When I watched Sandi Tan’s SHIRKERS in 2018 I was in awe. The film is a documentary but it’s also a ghost story, a road movie, a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a whodunnit thriller. In 1992 teenage Sandi Tan shot Singapore's first-ever road movie on 16 mm with her friends and their enigmatic American mentor, Georges, who then absconded with all of the footage. 20 years later that footage is discovered and adult Sandi goes on a personal odyssey, re-examining her teenage life, reconnecting with her friends, and retracing George’s footsteps.
When I first watched SHIRKERS, it felt like being under a spell. The color saturation of 16 mm film, the mystique of a lost film suddenly found, the renegade spirit of Sandi and her rag-tag team of film freak friends who embodied the punk, DIY spirit of ambitious teens who fixate on solutions rather than problems. It was all so thrilling, beautiful, and haunting.
My initial takeaway from the film was a kind of delight in the candy-colored images and the indomitable spirit of Sandi and her friends in their youth. They were doing the impossible! They were kids making a movie in Singapore in ‘92! They chewed gum and chewing gum was forbidden! I’ll never forget the footage of Sandi’s bud and Second AC, Jasmine chewing the hell out of her gum every time she slated.
I remember the Vampiric presence of Sandi’s disturbed teacher, George, affecting me that first watch but I didn’t remember that dark energy taking me over.
I recently watched the film again at a screening in Los Angeles and I was struck by how much anger and sadness I felt this time around. After this most recent viewing, all I could think about was Sandi’s American film “Teacher/mentor” who groomed and manipulated her and then stole her innocence, youth, and joy by quite literally running away with her dream.
All I could think about was how twisted and unhinged this George person was. What a creep. What a nutso. He sabotaged his mentees’ dreams. Sometimes he stole their footage, sometimes he stole their equipment. He “lost” key pieces of their creations, lied about basically everything, and consistently made promises he never kept which you come to see as a disturbing pattern of his. I kept thinking about all the people, particularly all the women who are manipulated into serving some guru, mentor, or teacher instead of themselves. All the women who lose years of their lives to these assholes. All the women whose energy, vitality, and fearlessness are muted or worst of all extinguished because of some creepy, parasitic leech.
My feeling of overwhelming rage at George made me wonder (even though he’s dead) if he successfully ran off with the film a second time.
But then I remembered what Sandi shared in an interview with the Guardian upon SHIRKERS’ release. She said that George “didn’t produce anything. He never finished anything, ever.”
Sandi finished SHIRKERS. Maybe it wasn’t the version in her teenage head but she finished it. She made her film. It made me think about Maya Angelou’s quote, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Sandi freed herself with SHIRKERS. Maybe not all of herself feels free and no doubt the process was traumatic but it must have also been cathartic and transformational. Sandi got to exorcise her demons. She got to tell the story that had been buried inside her. George never did.
Trailer:
Listen to the surreal, phantasmagoric SHIRKERS soundtrack below.
At the Q&A I attended after a recent screening of the film in Los Angeles, Sandi mentioned she’d found Singaporean artist Weish (who provides the film’s haunting vocals) on YouTube. Sandi then connected with Isareali composer, Ishai Adar via SoundCloud and they built the sonic world of SHIRKERS using Weish’s vocals as the main sound design element.
A poem, as promised:
I read Carson McCullers’ debut novel “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” in eighth grade because my English teacher - a man named Clay who made chairs in his spare time - assigned it to us. I loved it, immediately. Even at 13, I felt a strange kinship with Mcculler’s characters, all misfits suffering from spiritual isolation wrapped in the emotional gauze of a Southern Gothic.
I wasn’t familiar with this poem until I stumbled upon this kaleidoscopic gem after daydreaming recently about McCullers. Enjoy!
Saraband
by Carson McCullers
Select your sorrows if you can,
Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile.
Adjust to a world divided
Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles
What natural alchemy lends
To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair
The lustre of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinth's fabled stare.
If you must cross the April park, be brisk:
Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar
Lest you be held as a security risk
Solicit only the evening star.
Your desperate nerves fuse laughter with disaster
And higgledy piggledy giggle once begun
Crown a host of unassorted sorrows
You never could manage one by one.
The world that jibes your tenderness
Jails your lust.
Bewildered by the paradox of all your musts
Turning from horizon to horizon, noonday to dusk
It may be only you can understand:
On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold
When the sky is a mild blue of a Chinese bowl
The bones of Hart Crane, sailors and the drugstore man
Beat on the ocean's floor the same saraband.
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