“I HATE YOU ALL.”
So begins Gangsterism, Isiah Medina’s latest film. Lest one doubt his sincerity, the poster is tagged with a statement of intent: “Depiction = Endorsement.” Both sides of the equation being balanced, there can be no separation of art from artist, form from thought. Medina is credited as producer (alongside frequent collaborator Kelley Dong), composer (alongside Alexandre Galmard and Kieran Daly), cinematographer, editor, writer, and director. The “YOU ALL” is nigh all-encompassing; the “I” could only be Medina. With Gangsterism, his finest work to date, the auteur makes the stakes of this confrontation, and of his project as a whole, crystal clear.
Gangsterism’s plot—as ever, in a Medina film, more of a sparsely drawn scaffold for his ideas—concerns the relationship between Clem (Mark Bacolcol) and Ez (Kalil Haddad), as the former, a filmmaker and a gangster, tries to get the money he is owed by various collaborators before embarking on his next film project, all the while sniffing out a potential leaker in his midst. The real subject, as ever, in a Medina film, is the making of a film, indistinguishable from the thinking of a thought, the living of a life. If these various projects are to move from notion to action, they must be indivisible. “Take filmmaker out of your bio,” one character says, “and put it in your life.” The new world struggles to be born, but if Medina is to play doula, depiction will equal endorsement.
The crowded field of obstacles to accomplishing any of these goals (life living, thought thinking, filmmaking) has rarely been identified as directly as in Gangsterism. Money, critics, landlords, film festivals, language writ large: through Medina’s lens, they seem to form the many fingers of an ever-tightening grip over the figure of the artist. If previous films have centered on a lack of money, Gangsterism is the first to despair of relative wealth, likely a product of the Canada Council for the Arts grant, which Medina received for the film. “I felt so rich of world when I had no budget,” Clem laments. Money is the force constantly frustrating, interrupting, and terminating thought. An early scene shows Clem angrily repeating to some unseen hanger-on: “That grant money is for the film!” One heartfelt story about love and process is bookended by the question: “Is it the same email for e-transfer?” But a kingpin amongst independent filmmakers is just that; in one later scene, a door opening interrupts a rehearsal: “We’re here for the viewing,” a real estate agent announces. Rich for the month, broke on the first. Society in general, far less Toronto specifically, is not built to support those whose labor is, so to speak, intellectual.
And then there’s the critics, who, since 88:88 (2015), have taken Medina to task for his dialogue’s allegedly po-faced academicism. “With its style,” one commentator in Gangsterism tells Clem of his film, “no one will be able to understand it. And a movie about racism should be easy to understand.” Medina’s dialogue can, admittedly, feel like something of an echo chamber, with the auteur’s best bon mots divided up amongst a cast of shell-like characters. Gangsterism will undoubtedly satisfy these priors, but, five features and twenty-odd shorts into this project, I don’t find myself questioning his resolve. “Let’s please get something done before history ends again,” Clem tells Ez early on. The real estate agents and the arbiters of good taste are of one mind on thinkers like Medina, determined to foreclose the marginal space still afforded to those who prefer to do their thinking aloud.
His project is not to skirt these mounting obstacles, nor to make work around the margins. Medina has been accused of being many things, but modest is not among them. Inventing the Future, the title of Medina’s 2020 sophomore feature, could easily title a survey of his oeuvre to date, and in Gangsterism, we witness the full flowering of something like a new language. There’s a certain family resemblance with the Godard of the 1980s, but a point of origin for the spirit of the work might rather be In Praise of Love (2001), a framed poster for which sits prominently in many of Gangsterism’s sets. With that film’s abrupt cut from celluloid to blown-out miniDV colors for its final 30 minutes, Godard asserted that a new digital cinema had arrived, whether we were ready for it or not. Medina accepts this as a challenge, developing a cinematic idiom that shirks all debts to the dominant 20th-century modes.
At a test screening for one of Clem’s films, he shows his director reprimanded for discounting the legacies of Griffith and Ford. “You need to read Tag Gallagher and Shigehiku Hasumi,” a critic instructs him (surely Medina overestimates the literacy of his critics). “Knowing them is one thing,” Clem retorts, “and accepting them is another.” The first principles and building blocks of the hegemonic cinema can be bypassed, as manifest in his approach to shot-reverse-shot in the subsequent scene. Clem sits facing March (Charlotte Zhang), an editor, who sits in front of a window in front of some train tracks, her gaze perpendicular to his. She tells a story — about a white male director mistaking her for his cab driver — in a shot from above and slightly to her right, showing the tracks behind her. Clem is introduced mid-sentence, when Medina cuts to a mismatched shot from over his shoulder for only a few frames. These shots don’t converse politely so much as Clem’s seems to interject, with Medina repeating this same alternation once, twice, three times, until a third shot is introduced, from in front of and to the right of Clem. If classical shot-reverse-shot form observes conversational propriety, Medina’s flickering approach demonstrates a cinema capable of moving at the pace of thought — ideas which fit jaggedly into one another, not flowing so much as butting heads.
This pattern of transitioning between shots via flicker is repeated throughout Gangsterism, and the viewer learns to anticipate these strange rhythms. But if the form is to be free, it must be in a state of perpetual reinvention. Medina then introduces a close-up of March fidgeting with a pen hooked to her shirt. This slight movement is sonically paired with a metal creak. Quick alternations ensue, and a train — emblem of Griffith, of Ford, of New World expansion — rushes past out the window. Nothing can grow stale in Gangsterism, the old forms are too close at hand.
There is some antecedent for Medina’s approach at the editing table. In Film as Film, the collection of Gregory J. Markopoulos’ writings, which sits on Clem’s bedside table in Gangsterism, the mercurial auteur spoke of a like-minded system of interspersed frames preceding a cut. Of his new form, the young Markopoulos wrote: “This system involves the use of short film phrases which evoke thought-images. […] The film phrases establish ulterior relationships among themselves; in classic montage technique, there is a constant reference to the continuing shot: in my abstract system, there is a complex of differing frames being repeated.” In Twice a Man (1963), as in Gangsterism, these interpolated frames straddling different shots layer atop one another faster than our eyes can shed them, triggering new connections that are felt before they are understood, not received but invented.
One does not stand outside of thought in Medina’s work, but within it. Ez names Griffith’s cross-cut the wellspring of an insidious separation in cinema: “The cross-cut comes to convince yourself that you are distant from world history.” If such ideas can seem academic, Medina’s script relentlessly ties them to the present moment. Ez continues: “Dodging the algorithm, you realize: Meta wants you to look at the world through the eyes of Griffith. […] If genocide is seen in a cross-cut, people will develop an inner distance that will prepare them to participate in a new world war against their own interest.” During the speech, Medina overlays an eye-shaped matte that seems to blink between at least a dozen other shots. As Ez continues, his image is stopped while a semi-transparent overlay continues. His words are sporadically muted. To simplify an undoubtedly more complex set of relationships between sounds and images, one might feel in these moments the forces of thought-termination nipping at Medina’s heels. But his point will not be missed. Ez repeats, several times: “I’d rather speak and offend not with content, but with grammar. I am grammar.” In Gangsterism, the right to think is a privilege Medina refuses to relinquish, and an active battle with forces seen and unseen in which auteur and viewer are not observers, but participants.
Between the fingers of a clenched fist, Medina’s form is ever-nimble, inventing a future from the jaws of the past. Clem reflects on those mental separations that permeate so many stale forms: “Philosophers get a pass for racism because it was the racism of their time. The masses are always in the streets precisely to refuse the racism of their time. Gangsterism will not premiere as part of this year’s TIFF slate, but rather with Contours, an independent Toronto screening series. Though presumably cut long before recent scandals revealed the festival’s at-best-ambivalent relationship with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, one of Gangsterism’s lasting images shows a TIFF lanyard hanging opposite an Israeli flag. Gangsterism is thought unfolding in an everlasting present moment — one that’s altogether hostile to any such project — with Medina denying any and all footholds that might offer the separations of convenience.
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