Cartouche

The second film of the series Narratives of Egypt (1984-87). In the form of the letter ‘X’ is a signature – a filmic equivalent of Cartmell’s name (which is reduced by exhaustive transcription to a simple X). X is the mark of those who cannot write, or who do not know their own names. Photographed over time against a backdrop of the Canadian Shield, X shows Cartmell’s son Sam running in slow motion towards the camera, and, in the film’s second half, away from it. The shape/structure of the movie is chiasmatic, part of the old avant-garde dream of creating movies that could be run backwards and forwards. The movie is in two parts that form an X.

Mmmm, that's sad

Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial projections for centuries, amply on display here in waves of armed crusaders, legionnaires, Mongols on horseback and biplanes issuing state edicts from the end of a machine gun. There are maps by the galore, drawn and redrawn as occupied territories are bartered in foreign capitals. Contemporary art activists Velcrow Ripper, Elle Flanders, Tamira Sawatzky, Dani Leventhal and others have generously donated their keen lookings and these have been blended with newsreels, desert spectaculars, historical recreations and intimate encounters. Mike Cartmell appears as the ghost of psychoanalysis, offering ruminations on killing the father, John Coltrane and why enjoyment is difficult

Mike Cartmell builds a cottage for Susan and himself. At least, I think that's what it is about. I wonder... I'll watch it and come back to you.

Video III of Cartmell's unfinished series Shipwreck Theory. Part of Shipwreck Theory I (The Reading)

Somehow in silence, I traveled home to here asleep, trying to think, to pull what I’d once felt out of the shadows. I had to make a leap into the not-yet- conscious, into the truth and absolution of images and sounds, toward the countenance of something still nameless. The only means of doing so was to find and found this thing. This nameless thing that emerges, as I do, again and for the first time, into the world, and will never leave it. This thing of love’s black sail. This foundered foundling thing. This thing of you. The gusts of wind were very hard and the night very dark, but our little whaleboat glided away like a thing of life.

Video VIII of Cartmell's unfinished series Shipwreck Theory. Part of Shipwreck Theory III (The Knowing)

Mike often introduced himself as a “filmmaker whose films nobody ever sees.” So... I didn't see this one. I can't write the movie overview. Sorry 'bout that.

Video V of Cartmell's unfinished series Shipwreck Theory. Part of Shipwreck Theory II (The Writing) A tale of Cartmell’s friendship with Mickus, sung up at the camp, the island getaway, the last mother, the picture divided as they were not, the lines of flight scrolling until Montaigne dies and then returns in order to birth the project of self-portraiture. The filmmaker practices death. Mike’s obsession with chiamatic doubling continues in the picture’s split, even as he heals it by running his touching comrade ode across it. “Even in your dying, and despite my state of wreckage, I was accruing benefits, coming closer than I had ever been to death, your death, watching you sink from the safety of the shore, and soaking up the knowledge to be had, the macabre poetry of it.”

First part of Carmell's Narratives of Egypt (1984-87).

Video VII of Cartmell's unfinished series Shipwreck Theory. Part of Shipwreck Theory I (The Reading)

Video I of Cartmell's unfinished series Shipwreck Theory. Part of Shipwreck Theory II (The Writing)

Video IV of Cartmell's unfinished series Shipwreck Theory. Part of Shipwreck Theory II (The Writing)

In verlan Ithaka is Kathaï. Just think about this for 2 secs. That's all I ask you... just 2 secs, you think about this.

Hope I will see you again!