Burmese Days
Two channel HD Video Projection 17 min.
Karl Ingar Røys’ dual screen film Burmese Days takes its name from George Orwell’s 1934 novel drawn from his experiences as a policeman in the British colonial administration of Burma. In a later essay Orwell wrote of this time: ‘As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.’ The novel reflects the hatred of Imperialism Orwell gleaned from being a participant and witness of the apparatuses of oppression, exploitation and racism that constituted British colonialism.
Røys’ imbrication of his own work with that of Orwell is not just a matter of caprice and convenience. He mentions in an interview that he ‘read that in Burma many intellectuals later looked upon Orwell almost like a prophet’. This was due to the prescient quality of his later work, both Animal Farm and 1984 being seen as predictive of the authoritarianism of the post-colonial regime.
Røys’ Burmese Days opens with a typewriter being used to transcribe with great prescience the typists following day. The viewers gaze follows the industrial, machine age rhythm of fingers hammering keyboard to produce a document of the female typists tomorrow: an itinerary of breakfast, work at the type shop, lunch, coffee break and home. The typist’s account of her tomorrow reads like a self-surveillance report. This is a very Orwellian machine: a mode of communication being utilised as a tool to facilitate the administration of everyday life.
While Orwell echoes through Røys’ Burmese Days, the film installation is much more concerned with social conflict from the perspective of politically engaged Burmese cultural producers in the present. It maps attempts to intervene in the struggles against the military junta that has been in power in different incarnations since 1962 by artists, a documentary filmmaker, a rapper and a punk musician both before and during the painfully slow transition to what the regime terms ‘disciplined democracy’.
Formally, Burmese Days is a series of fragments. For instance, the screen juxtaposed against that depicting the typewriter is a study in the occasional ghostliness that street lighting can grant the metropolis, the strips of light serving only to blur the edges of darkness. Gradually a figure draws closer to the viewer. This is not in such a way that the camera is allowed to focus, as though the walker was too spectral to fully emerge. Ultimately, a defensive swagger is the pre-dominant impression left by this particular urban phantasm. Later in the video installation the two screens merge. The ghostly figure is revealed as the punk singer ‘Skum’ who puts the typist to another kind of ‘work’, transcribing lyrics such as ‘We are the urban rubbish.’
As with Orwell, when ‘Skum’ declaims his lyrics hatred of a kind is certainly not absent from this cultural expression of resistance to the state. While in this instance undoubtedly staged-though given Røys’ guerrilla filming method it might be partly a chance encounter-this kind of subversion of tools and materials is key to Burmese Days. Often, the tools and materials are the detritus that is left over from commodity production or cultural resources such as punk but also Burmese myth and careful language subterfuge that elide state and cultural monitoring. Burmese Days is concerned with both broken, forgotten materials and the damaged but undefeated subjects of socio-political oppression. The repeated lyric ‘We are the urban rubbish’ acts as a refrain throughout the installation, a thread that connects the fragments of Burmese Days.
In line with this, Burmese Days documents how cultural resistance is precariously balanced upon relatively scant political, cultural and material resources. The video installation does not attempt to do this didactically via the visual equivalent of ranting at the spectator. The fragile contingency of the ways resistance is expressed is emphasised over any sense of polemical certainty in the formal fragmentation of the video installation. Burmese Days does not have any easy narrative to follow or a sense of neat closure or completion at the end. The screens recurrently intercut each other, poverty and everyday life refracted back through cultural production and vice versa.
An awareness of the difficulties of cultural resistance and the haphazard ways that it can manifest permeates Burmese Days. Central to this is the way that material that is discarded, is refuse and trash or highly peripheral can be reused to express refusal.
In one sequence a man speaks animatedly of his experiences in prison during the military regime and how the prisoners continued to express opposition: If they did not allow us to use pen and paper we improvised with what we had. Using sharp objects like broken bricks to write on the walls [...]. This was our concept in prison. This is probably the degree zero of cultural resistance, when prisoners - the most excluded from conventional modes of expression - grasp at anything at hand in order to circumvent the constrained disciplinary, political and discursive strictures placed upon them. Just as political prisoners are considered trash by the regimes that imprison them so it is to the trash of ‘broken bricks’ that the prisoners turn. And it is worth noting that this is thought through, it is ‘our concept in prison.’ An impure and very materialist concept, since it begins from within that constrained space and uses the materials discarded by the prison against it in order to destabilize the reproduction of the prisoner subject. ‘Prisoner’ is a form of subjectivity sustained by disciplinary apparatuses but also discursive limits that modulate what can be expressed and through this enable the smooth functioning of the prison. Conceptual disruption with a ‘broken brick’ is a sabotage of the passive limits produced through both bodies and language within institutions such as the prison.
This account of discontent is a worthwhile reminder that cultural resistance - often relatively anodyne in the advanced sectors of capitalism and easily contained in the gallery - can also be freighted with real risk.
San Zaw Htway’s subversive use of the discarded remnants of bright, shiny commodities suggests there remains a potentiality immanent to the world not exhausted by the strictures of the state or the economic requirement that everything be bought and sold. This is dependent upon a tearing out of context - trash is no longer just trash - that reuses the detritus of the socio-political order as a means to resist. This reassembly of materials to express discontent is juxtaposed against the work of the street-sweeper Maung Oo at work. The latter is shown at night, filtering garbage in order to pick out what might be recycled and reused. There’s more than a hint in this juxtaposition that just as discarded materials retain a potential to be (mis)used as the ingredients of non- state sanctioned cultural production then those sectors of the population relatively surplus to economic requirements also have an unrecognized, constitutive potentiality and power. There’s a suggestion here that the commodity form as it effects both objects in the circuits of exchange and production as well as humanity in the vice of the commodity labour power needs to be ruined for different potentialities to emerge.
Throughout Burmese Days there’s a sense that punk - only discovered in Burma in the 1990s - has itself been scavenged and ripped out of the context of the cultural cliché dustbin by Burmese musicians such as ‘Skum’. Suddenly the anarchist politics and lyrics such as ‘We are the homeless and unemployed so we hate everyone’ don’t so much recover a validity - these sentiments are always valid - as acquire a new forcefulness in this different context, like toxic detergent packaging recreating an ancient myth.
Rather than featuring ‘Skum’ and his band performing, Burmese Days returns to ‘Skum’ reciting the lyrics in a more elegiac, melancholic way in different contexts throughout the installation. Alongside these shards of songs, Burmese Days concentrates upon accounts of the process of artistic production and descriptions of the materials, sometimes literally reused rubbish recycled into art. Burmese Days determinedly returns to the fragmentary, broken source materials of cultural production - the angry tiredness of Skum’s voice, commodity refuse, experiences of resistance and poverty- in a way that mirrors the damaged social environment.
Burmese Days situates itself in the midst of what seems to be an irreducible brokenness both in the world - the marks left by political oppression, pollution, the waste economy - and in the oppositional aesthetics this very brokenness helps to form. It’s illuminating that the documentary filmmaker Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi relates a story of tomatoes grown upon a heavily polluted lake being passed between the farmer’s children as emblematic of their life. The intent is probably to underline how inextricably tied to the agricultural products of the earth life is. However, read differently this story might suggest that the very polluted waste threatening life is also constitutive of it. It’s only with somehow inhabiting and using the waste and brokenness, both internal and external, that something might be salvaged in order to fight back.
In its fragmentary form, Burmese Days discovers a way to inhabit the brokenness it depicts but this should not suggest hopelessness. The fragment, as much as being an element broken and shattered from the whole, is also defined through its incompletion. In this incompletion is a potentiality that Burmese Days expresses through its attentive documentation of the vulnerable, broken and scavenged forms that cultural resistance can take.
John Cunningham