Burn-in: ‘Banel & Adama’ (2023)
A photo of a disfigured fish recalls last week's film and the terror of an animal eye.
This short entry is not about a new film, but something in the world that drew out feelings from a film I already wrote about. I’m calling it a “burn-in”: something that has lasted in me and became part of me after the film ended.
I included some images that have haunted me recently, but they opened my thinking for this entry. They are very upsetting, so I put them at the end.
The other night I saw an arresting image of a disfigured salmon that brought me back to the dead bird in Banel & Adama. Björk shared the image in protest of fish farming in Iceland; it shows a salmon with her face torn off, pieces of flesh clinging to scales and her mouth blown open. She races towards the camera; her fins are blurry, like she will swallow us screaming, and her whole face looks like a brain. I felt this image in my legs and the sides of my spine as I tried to sleep; when I think about this fish, a rack stretches my limbs and I squirm.
Another image of the same fish shows her at a distance, floating along near the net with none of the previous urgency. Her tongue is out again and it makes her look sick and playful. She is like an alien with an unfurling petal head, and behind it I can see her little eye. In my entry on Banel & Adama, I wrote about how the dead bird’s little eye brought me to tears; it was so gentle and still so alive as Adama buried her in the sand. The salmon’s eye is much more terrible for its ambiguity: it plays with an outstretched tongue, wide with a “blegh!” like Beetlejuice’s snake face; it pleads for mercy; and it doesn’t say anything. How am I supposed to feel for this being who shows its fear in a language I can’t understand? The eye doesn’t respond, but leaves me fumbling, afraid and so sad, and I beg for the face which might express even less if it hadn’t been eaten alive.
In Gettysburg, I saw a photo of a survivor of the battle whose jaw a shell had exploded; I felt the same stretching in my legs when I saw that stubble still grew, though the war had turned his face to liquid. Like with the soldier, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fish no matter how I wanted to turn away; her eye demands attention but, making no statement, only suspends.
See other films from: 2020s | Senegal
See other burn-ins.
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler