“The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being / ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children.” The opening stanza of Audre Lorde’s poem Power (1978) was written after the acquittal of a white police officer who killed a Black child in 1973. When rhetoric does not seem adequate to address social injustice, Lorde devotes herself to poetry so the nameless can be promptly named and thought.1 Curated by Inge Coolsaet for argos, the short film programme “Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other?” responds to the ever-present police brutality by rejecting futile rhetoric and underlining the urgency and affective power of audio-visual art. This potentially intimidating viewing experience may unsettle viewers’ expectations, but it can also transform the apathetic spectator into an active, reflexive watcher. Across the six works, the violent apparatus of the police force is conceptually, visually, and artistically dismantled. These scattered visual forms of violence constitute a permeating tension; we watch with alertness because in ambiguity lies danger.
Some titles in this programme examine the regulatory power of the police force through an interplay of fiction and reality. This tactic is effective largely due to the overwhelming appearance of the New York Police Department (NYPD) in various fictional imaginations. As argued by sociologist Cecil Greek, the predominant depiction of the NYPD in Hollywood screenplays often produces a monstrous image, particularly a “rogue monster” that prioritises ends above means to get situations under control.2 Both 1 (2001) and Plot Point (2007) engage with a suspending moment when the NYPD—as a singular monstrous figure—is about to get loose. In 1, Shelly Silver neatly tucks the power of the aggressor into her sensual tape. The slow-motion camerawork is accompanied by two tracks—running simultaneously—from Miles Davis’s improvisation for Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958), seducing the viewer into a familiar yet inexplicably bizarre territory. The split-screen image shows nearly unbearable close-ups of the cops’ faces, ears, eyes, and teeth, as if they were warnings of a beast. Through it all, a lingering one-liner is imprinted on the images. As the last word of this message surfaces, the unsettling seduction ends, at least within the poetic frame.
In Plot Point (2007), Nicolas Provost wanders through downtown New York, observing whoever falls into the frame of his hidden camera. Through meticulous editing, Provost singles out a few key “characters”—figures standing almost still against the flow of many passers-by. For fifteen minutes, we are given the voyeuristic privilege to construct a narrative. The sombre orchestral score, remixed with the city’s soundscape of sirens, traffic, and footsteps, accentuates a haunting anxiety. A news vendor shouts, “When your life is miserable, read the news, it’ll be worse,” alluding to the financial recession and the public sentiment in flux. We’re reminded that the constructed cinematic tension derives from a depressive undercurrent in the real world. As the film rolls on, a full-scale police operation unfolds, indicating that the “plot point”—a critical event that alters the storyline—has already arrived. The law enforcement then moves forward as a single unit—a bickering and buzzing rogue monster—against an unknown, unseen, speculative crime, exemplifying Provost’s subversive dramaturgy that challenges the assumed hero-villain dichotomy.
Diverging from the atmospheric tease in 1 and Plot Point, Scott Fitzpatrick’s Trigger Warning (2017) is instead a de-sensationalised take on the systemic abuse of power in law enforcement. Fitzpatrick made the film based on a list originally published in the December 2016 issue of Harper’s Magazine, which plainly lays out objects mistaken by the police for guns during shootings of civilians in the United States since 2001.3 Over a steady, unsettling rhythm, the gritty imagery claustrophobically frames these everyday items, dismissing our urge to check them closely. An uneasy and unjustifiable proximity is revealed between objects’ presence and the absence of armed violent acts. The displayed objects, from a Foucauldian perspective, become evidence of how the police, as an institution, exercise state power to govern and discipline the population’s life. Aligning with this proposition, one way to read the closing image of hands in Trigger Warning could be, “you got nothing on me,” a direct statement and reference to police misconduct. The subject of the interpretation can also shift to “I have nothing on me,” in which case the empty-handedness becomes a gesture of civil disobedience and resistance to hegemonic governance.
With Giverny 1 (2017), Ja’Tovia Gary also interrogates the legitimacy of the police force imposed on the body. The year before she made the film, Gary stayed in Claude Monet’s gardens in Giverny. She learned about the police killings of both Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana, as well as the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Creating Giverny 1 was the artist’s immediate response to this perpetual displacement of Black bodies. Shots of the canonised gardens are jammed up by analogue animation, archival footage, and distressing live recordings. Gary’s own body also constitutes part of the disruption, as she gazes back at us and screams amid the positioned tranquillity. When the artist exits the frame, all those glitched traces settle into a monotone beep. The question remains: What happens when the dissonant screaming stays unheard and eventually exhausts the oppressed body? Almost as a response, in Contraindre (2020), an indifferent voice narrates: “I am alone, suspended in a vacuum, and my story is written without me … endlessly.” The French artist duo fleuryfontaine created this 3D animation based on recent incidents of police repression in France. Visually, the soft-tone colour scheme, the supposedly safeguarded urban environment, and the neutral human figure disturbingly contrast with the physical and psychological violence during staged police arrests. Contraindre re-enacts an embodied tension that runs through this programme, one that is between the witnessed unwarranted violence and its systemic normalisation and impunity.
Unsurprisingly, such tension also manifests within the virtual world-building. In his witty desktop documentary Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? (2021), artist Grayson Earle accidentally uncovers that some rules encoded in the video game Grand Theft Auto V are immutable, even though the simulation suggests abundant possibilities for reconfiguration and disruption. It may seem underwhelming that the film only skims the surface of the embedded ideology, considering we do see the artist hovering between browser tabs looking for answers outside the gaming context. Yet, Earle’s coding investigation manages to make the issue of police accountability accessible to a general audience. The film also actualises what critic Eneos Çarka describes as the process of “re-seeing and reinterpreting” media, an iterative practice increasingly evident in the rather appealing subgenre of desktop documentary.4 Given today’s media-saturated and networked environment, it is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that we expect more counter-rhetoric video work on systemic violence and repression through experimental approaches that latch onto digital aesthetics, an anticipation that perhaps attests to Lorde’s words that, “for there are no new ideas […] only new ways of making them felt.”
