A Sad, Sad Ghost Picking at the Hairs of Their Knuckles is a durational fiction film, a three-hour work of self-positioning, a film about an abstract me. However, I do not find it of substance to discuss the faculties of the film itself, but rather the context through which the film was made. Outlining a thesis for which the film can speak — this is of importance. I will not speak for the subjectivity of others, and the film, itself, speaks for my own. Therefore, I ask questions: Can we study formalism through a historical materialist analysis? Can this study open up manners of seeing a dialectical materialist survey of image-linguistics through our era of the cinema? When we speak of affect in the cinema, are we speaking of the narratological relations between diegesis and spectator; or are we speaking of the psychoanalytical evocations that the form of an image holds, as, then, extrapolated by the spectator? What is narrative in the cinema What can it be? What is performance in the cinema? How has the apparatus of a camera shaped its form? What is time in the cinema? Is it not the foundation upon which all else comes? I, here, have a matrix of thoughts and theories and observations that embolden the filmmaker to scrutinize their positionality as an artist and as a labour organizer. A filmmaker’s imagination is more closely tied to the ethics of production than ever before. The responsibility of an artist is that of history, of people, and of temperateness: a respect for oneself, the filmworkers here to help create the work, and the audiences it will be exhibited to. The film, A Sad, Sad Ghost Picking at the Hairs of Their Knuckles cannot be the endpoint of the politic and philosophy present here, but merely a gesture towards a people, the beginning of a process that will unfurl over a lifetime
