Air Conditioner (Portuguese: Ar Condicionado) is a 2020 Angolan film directed by Fradique (Mário Bastos). The film was shot in 2020 in Luanda by Generation 80. (wiki)
Music: Aline Frazao http://www.alinefrazao.com/
One would expect everyone to at least try to bunk into the new wave of Afrofuturist or Africanfuturist (also in the sense developed by the black diasporic SF or experimental music – Detroit techno aquatic Drexciya world diving) that allowed such a plethora of both and new black Speculative Fiction literature to be written and published (for example Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon). I do not particulary care if this Angolan director was educated in NY or if Mubi – the place of art house small movies (for a small fee) was involved in its making and promotion.
I find that is it decidedly rare that new Afro- or African futurist narratives, histories, speculative worlds make it onto screen, possibly because they exist separately as music videoclips or stand alone movies without literary support. While I do not think in any way that rarity or scarcity makes things automatically more precious, I find it always an incredible surprise to see such a movie being made and circulated. You could call it an extended videoclip, but this is just the more reason to watch it. It is clearly an ode to Luanda city, but also, for me at least, it gestures towards the perfect mix in the sense of teaching us true cosmpolitanism while never giving up on the cosmospolitics of that particular place. Good riddance to the Euroamerican certitudes & obnoxious art house pretense.
It is a universal or dispersed planetary decrepitude, without pushing for the universality or for the so-called atemporal qualities. It speaks of weather, or climate change as it is experienced by a majority in an unmistakable way nowadays. It is climatic without spelling out climate crisis commonplaces. It is ultimately a drift or drop into high weirdness climax that never comes (to pick on a term from Erik Davies picked again from the High Weirdness by Mail catalogue), a jumble of vacous feelings of things liveliness or expenditure, changing natures that leave nothing unturned, including our dreams that seem to escape us & leave us stranded.
A prothean unforced becoming of outer and inner states, of moods like weather reports, or what recently in his last book Michael Taussig has termed Mastery of No-Mastery(MNM) or the ‘metamorphic sublime’. The people all around are changed without showing any significant changes on the surface, yet there is inexplicable things falling, while the representational bankrupcy is even more evident. Evidently Weather charts say nil about this. Climacteric scales have long tipped over and the rigorous and dire reports of the hottest year on record is falling on deaf ears each year, even if suffering and innumerable species (including human lives) are lost as each heat wave strikes. There is ample evidence yet there is also an inability and we seem ill equipped to gauge its full blown swipe.
Harshness does not exclude trembling atmospheric effects.
Air Conditioner starts almost in a pedantic way with a series of dictionary definition of Air, as flow as manner even as style and condition/conditioning – all of which seem to need redefinition according to new events, conditions and dysfunctionalities. Ie what the Global North bombastically deemed merely functional, highly competitive, adaptive and relentlessly improvable – turns out not to be. There is also a lack of ill intent, and the characters responses seem to always have some puzzled, semi-speculative understanding of this unusual situation. I said that this small movie does not claim planetary relevance, yet is speaks globally without shouting, directly murmuring.
It this the hum of the intelligent or sentient thermostats? Is it the dreams and longings of desperate attempts to repair what is un-repairable? You could blame anyone and find culprits, scapegoating is always on others, yet this does not lead anywhere. Or where it leads is one incredible meta-repair shop (not ‘charnel house of history’) – something that is both media museum, hacker lab etc Or a true semi derelict cyberpunk venue (not its Silicon Valley or maker space incarnation) where the mysteries of black-boxed technology don’t get just fixed but somehow scavenged and re-assembled in new and unsuspecting ensembles. Time travel might mean something completely different, it might mean to feel a gush of air, a fresh breath from a broken car AC or wash in the water condensed by all these ACs. The movie is local without being nativist, still it speaks in mysterious names, without explanation, yet it speaks to all – although the security guard is just a security guard, he is a sort of West African griot, a silent bard, a survivor scarred by wars of liberation of events that never get mentioned in the news and only obliquely adumbrated.
Somehow the ordering of events are all about violent interactions of people and objects or rather objects suicidal falling down to earth ground. A rain of suicidal ACs and dazed, always wary humans trying to disentangle and solve enigmas. Even if blaming the AC of ill intent, of exhaustion seems appropriate, one risks acting like a executor of the eternal boss command that just wants his AC back in good order and get on with the job. I cannot praise enough the wandering, meandering soundtrack which makes it even more of a contemporary desert of reality oasis.
TimeSpace Warps 