Sasha Han

Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was a foundational text in my entry into writing about film in university. If Mulvey's text was a kind of treatise, politicising the act of looking by examining power and gender dynamics, Sight and Desire (Eyes) is an evocation of looking from the perspective of an immigrant. Rajendra Gour completed his education at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) before settling in Singapore. Here, he spent decades producing content for government agencies, all while making home movies of his adopted country and family. He's largely regarded as one of the pioneer experimental filmmakers in Singapore. Sight and Desire (Eyes) takes us through a series of propositions reuminating on the expansive possibilities of site. More importantly, I'm not sure any other filmmaker has ever quite captured that protracted sense of confinement in columbarium-style towers of public housing (à la Kuo Pao Kun) that is suddenly alleviated by having somehow taken flight off a high-rise building - which Gour does buy flinging his 16mm camera off a building, which twists and turns as the ground comes up startlingly quickly. At a 2022 screening of his works, Gour assured the audience that it wasn't killer litter: he had concocted some mechanism that made sure the camera was caught right before it hit the ground.

The haptic image is enacted with incredible fidelity in this Pixelvision film from the Malaysian American experimental filmmaker and artist Azian Nurudin. I love that comment on Letterboxd which proposes that in this film, you can touch someone else with your eyes.