The Purpose was to Document the Other Side

I can’t help it. Time crunches up against itself, into a circle. It is impossible to write about a work of art without writing about the world around it, around me as I look at it. My world and THE world are the thick snowglobe liquid the artwork swirls around in, floating on invisible currents. That’s just the way it is! How unfair, to try and write about an artwork in the world when the world is very weird.

I can’t separate an artwork from the world around it, the world around me. It’s atmospheric, we swim around in it. That’s the scene, the snowglobe liquid. It makes sense, it matches, it feels important to declare it, nail it down in advance.

Two weeks ago Laisul Hoque sent me an unlisted YouTube link for his film, The Purpose was to Document the Other Side. 15 minutes, a tight discrete pocket of a story. In 2004 Laisul’s dad bought a camera to document his journey through Europe, capturing footage for his family at home in Bangladesh, because they couldn’t come with him. Twenty years on, Laisul’s mother comes to visit him in London for the first time. He, the artist, uses the same camera to document her visit. That’s the premise, the inciting incident. They go to Big Ben, the London Eye, the Shard, Tower Bridge. They speak to each other like friends, like two adults, they speak about the pain that exists between them. They do not tiptoe around each others’ feelings, but they are caring for each other in this honesty.

We hear Laisul’s voice from behind the camera, asking his mother to tell her story, to collaborate with him in making this film. She gets to be the author, the narrator, the protagonist too. Her hand reaches out. She talks about her own mother and upbringing, the ways in which she was hurt, the things she passed down. It’s difficult to hear because pain is complicated, complicating. She is describing the outline of her hurt in a matter-of-fact way, past tense. But there’s a looming present tense manifestation in the distance between them and what fills the space. She describes the artist’s upbringing by proxy. That’s the collaboration, what she says, what she doesn’t say, the way the camera communicates what’s between those two things and bridges the gap.

Some of the footage is shot close up and immediate, camera lens as spinning eye. It is unweildy, dizzy, too close and tight and zoomed into a pinch for it to be clear. We are looking out from somewhere around the artist’s chest as he refastens a safety pin at his mother’s wrist. Then in other moments, the footage is further back. It is mediated through a screen, the camera blurs and pans over a small, grainy handycam flip out display. We watch what’s happening through this protective layer. The footage sounds further away in these moments too. There’s no signal that this switch will happen back and forth. It just flips, like the film is flinching. At one point, the camera focuses in on handycam playback zooming in on a phonescreen that’s filming Tower Bridge — three layers intervening in my attempt to behold the bridge (phone, handycam, my own laptop). But still, the bridge is there. Linking one side of the river to the other, a route to take, a way to carry your body through the distance.

Film can rearticulate things, repeat and rhyme through time or geography. Film can rearticulate time itself. The footage repeats on itself, speaking something aloud in the images, something that maybe can’t be articulated in words. The same shots appear through the lens, through the handycam viewfinder, background for a conversation about anger and violence. It raises a lump in my throat. This film’s dialogue is subtitled in English, spoken aloud in Bangla and the language illustrates a gap I can’t articulate in words either. The distance between my Dada and Dadi and me, the gap of the generation in between us and what went missing. The outline of a hurt I can’t articulate to myself, let alone rearticulate for an audience. I flinch. Maybe images and gesture fill the gap where pain reduces language to a kind of flimsy dust.

The film is a tight discrete pocket, 15 minutes but there are three acts. Care, candour, closure. The first two are between the artist and his mother, the last third is abstract and disembodied. The film closes with footage from the artist’s father’s journey through Europe, the camera’s original purpose. I felt something come loose, but I’m not sure what it was. I think it’s not for me to know. I want to preserve some sense of mystery, an opacity, this film contains so much vulnerability. But through the third act, Laisul’s mother articulates a kind of loss. Her son, the artist, moved to London from Dhaka. There is now a physical distance between them. While this flm attempts to close the emotional distance, there’s something about the yawning gap of continents and oceans that feels like a dull thud full stop. Something tearing.

The film closes with the camera in the artist’s mother’s hands. Laisul asks her to spell out MOTHER with the camera. She writes with the lens, with the space in the distance. Through gesture, through image, something is spoken aloud to fill the gap. Time crunches. A letter, a line, a bridge for them to carry their body through the distance and over on to the other side.