The Future Cinemas of Air Conditioner

Film curating is an out of body experience. We live in future cinemas, in the minds and hearts of speculative spectators. We experience their potential traumas and ecstasies, taste their disgust, or worse, boredom. Film curators are fortune tellers. Film programming, however, is less future oriented and very much about the “now”. Blockbusters, greatest of, regional focuses are the stuff of film programs. Their focus on what is presently desired make them sometimes feel retrospective, or at the very least, familiar. I recently experience a wonderful moment in the cinema where an artist turned a programming opportunity into a curatorial one. Arsenal in Institute for Film and Videoart in Berlin invited filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese to present a film program as part of their Filmmakers‘ Choice series. Filmmakers Choice asks directors of films that are in distribution with arsenal to select other films from their collection for a screening event (Mosese's feature-length essay Mother, I am Suffocating. This is My Last Film About You, premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2019 and is distributed by arsenal). Mosese went off script and paired a film which is not in Arsenal’s distribution (Air Conditioner, 2020) with one that is (Monangambeee, 1969). The result was “Resilient Cinema from Angola,” a program that worked on such a visceral level that it has stayed with me and further informed my questions about the differences between curating and programming.

To programme is to plan. In its literal sense, it has to do with the ordering things; a practice of scheduling, scheming and setting stuff in place. Curating comes from the Latin cura, care; programma, a proclamation. That is not to say that there is not care taken in the ordering of film programs or that care is somehow exclusive to the practice of curating. However, the etymology of each word suggests a quantitative versus a qualitative approach. Peter Bosma differentiates film curating as work that deliberates on a question, where programmers are ‘custodians of cinema culture’ who focus on collections: of newest, most popular (and the antonyms of both in the name of “heritage”). [1] Film critic Jennifer Borrmann cites her mother’s VHS collection of musicals as her first experience with film curation. Each tape, organized by genre, time period, theme or personal interest, was like a mini- film program. [2]

The juxtaposition of Air Conditioner alongside Sarah Maldoror‘s short film Monangambeee was productive in thinking about form and legacy. Maldoror studied film in Paris and apprenticed under Gillo Pontecorvo while he directed Battle of Algiers in 1966. Featuring Angolan liberation fighters as actors, Monangambeee illustrates the terror and awkwardness of armed conflicts in the colonies. The film ends with a montage of black-and-white images of soldiers from the revolutionary army fighting in Angola. Air Conditioner begins with black-and-white, still photos, the work of artist Rui Magalhães. This transition through the cinematic treatments of photographs in the “Resilient” program felt seamless and inviting. Fradique’s film, set in the city of Luanda while under siege from above, also connects to the armed conflicts in Angola. Matacedo (José Kiteculo), a veteran soldier in the revolutionary wars, is now a well-respected security guard, handyman and unofficial mayor of a complex of apartments interwoven through a system of lively alleyways. The speculative space of Matacedo and his colleague Zézinha (Filomena Manuel) centres around the immediate neighborhood: a tight and intimate maze where echoes carve through space and private vignettes are waiting around each corner. The plot of Maldoror´s short film Monangambeee is concerned with language and understanding. Air Conditioner also speaks a secret language though its haunting soundscape. What we experience in these scenes is the space between privy and privacy; between eavesdropping and dropping in. One senses that no one sense is predominant for understanding of this world of the film.

The care in pairing these two films results from intimate relationships. Mosese knew Air Conditioner from 2017 where he and Fradique both took part in the Realness Screenwriting Residency, an incubator program in South Africa for African screenwriters. Fradique has since written a text about Monangambeee for Cinelogue, a curated streaming platform and archive. He insists that it is Angola’s first short film (Algeria stands in for Angola as it was filmed it during the conflict). As Fradique mentions in the historical context of his article, the Berlin Conference in 1884 was a definitive moment in the carving up of Africa for European exploitation; Portugal’s occupation of Angola was no exception. Watching the “Resilient” program in Berlin felt like a return of this gaze, a protest in pictures. Of Maldoror he writes: “She believed that cinema and poetry form a path to build a more just world, and so do I.“ [3] The meeting of film and poetry, like the meeting of films in a program curated with love, has the potential to change our minds and hearts. This experience is part of Air Conditioner; a film whose past screenings haunt its future cinemas.

[1] Bosma, Film Programming.

[2] Borrmann, “Kinofilme: Sehen Statt Glotzen.”

[3] Fradique, “Monangambeee.”