Tomorrow, Hedged in by Today
A brief analysis of spiritual mediumship in three films by Suneil Sanzgiri
How do you create closeness to a place you have never been? How do you map together the historical, political and social context your ancestors lived through or died within? How might you resist historical erasure and collective amnesia by reanimating ancient gods?
In his trilogy–At Home But Not At Home (2019), Letters From Your Far Off Country (2020), and Golden Jubilee (2021)– Indian-American artist and filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri employs digital media and technology to contact his ancestral lineage and speak back to history by posing open-ended, hard-to-answer questions as consistent speculative motifs. Each of the films in the trilogy centers upon Sanzgiri’s diasporic identity, his familial history, the social, cultural, and political contexts of his ancestral lineage and his nostalgia for Goa, his paternal ancestral home.
At Home But Not At Home (2019) is Sanzgiri’s first attempt contacting the dead.
In the film, he maps together fragmented threads of Indian political history through archival footage and familial history through his father’s memory. Viewers are immersed in a variety of visual and sonic elements, including excerpts from Indian New Wave/Parallel Cinema films, desktop screen recordings showing correspondences between the filmmaker and a drone videographer, aerial drone of Goa, 3D Animation, glitch geospatial landscapes of Goa, 16mm footage, family archival photos, historical still photos, desktop screen recordings, and text on the screen.
His aim is to answer the question: How is identity constructed when diaspora is at a distance? Sanzgiri is not in Goa and has never been to Goa. He uses archival photographs and footage, Indian cinema, drone footage, and digital technologies to feel more connected to his ancestral home.
The film opens with a screen recording of a roaming cursor digitally exploring the lands of Goa, India via the Google Maps application. In the “scene,” viewers see young Indian men in a white jeep on a red clay road surrounded by lush green trees and bushes. At the center is text that reads the geographical coordinates of Curchorem. The cursor acts as the camera, panning and tilting the image around to reveal more of the environment these men exist within. As the “camera” tilts, we see an uncanny image: the bodies of men are distorted and glitched. Feet are digitally sutured into the sides of heads; knees disappear underneath torsos; faces are cut in half and faded.
The voice of cultural theorist Stuart Hall is sonically overlaid in this scene. The audio excerpt is from a 2009 interview with Les Black, Hall speaks of diaspora as a “loss” and a temporary yet regretful type of displacement. Other than his voice at the beginning and end of this film, we are not formally introduced to his scholarship on cultural identity and diaspora. Instead, his voice and thoughts become an omniscient presence which frames Sanzgiri’s search for home at a distance and the sense of diasporic nostalgia.
Diaspora is a loss. It’s not forever. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do something about it, or that other places can’t fill the gap. But the void is always the regretful moment that wasn’t realized. History is full of what is not realized. And I feel that whenever I go back. I think I am home, but not at home.
What is the regretful moment for Suneil Sanzgiri? What is the void, the gap he is attempting to fill? The cursor tilts our gaze upwards, toward a digitized sky. We see the rupture of the geospatial image–the point where the 360 Camera lens overlaps the other. The opening scene ends on this point, which becomes an allegorical opening into Sanzgiri’s excavation of diasporic identity, decoloniality, and home.
In Letter From Your Far Off Country (2020), Sanzgiri feels closer to Goa. The film opens with a landscape of a cluster of digital mountains and valleys. The cursor returns as a spectator to adjust the digital rendering of mountains from different views. Shashi Sanzgiri recounts a memory in which his grandfather shares the origin story of the Sanzgiri name and reveals that the family migrated from Bengal to Goa. The digital rendering of these mountains becomes the background as we see a screen recording of Sanzgiri texting “Dad” about the Kashmir-American poet Agha Shahid Ali who wrote the poem “Dear Shahid.” “It’s a letter addressed to himself from somebody else telling the news from his home in Kashmir. It was written in the 90s so after the uprising in 89 when I was born.”
The next scene is of a cursor typing in “don’t tell my father that i have died” in the Youtube search bar. Sanzgiri explains the opening stanza of the poem to his father before another voice takes over and reads the actual poem.
Dear Shahid, I’m writing to you from your far-off country.
Far even from us who live here.
Where you no longer are.
Everyone carries his address in his pocket
So that at least his body will reach home.
Rumors break away on their way to us in this city
But word still reaches us from bordertown
Men are forced to stand barefoot in snow waters all night
The women are alone inside
Soldiers smash radios and televisions
With bare hands they tear our houses to pieces
As the words are spoken, text of the poem also appears as captions at the center of the screen on top of 16mm footage of scenes of New Delhi, India. We see rooftops of buildings and homes from the inside of an unknown building. We see men and women working. We see a tapestry of clothes of various colors and patterns strung up on lines and swaying softly in the breeze. We see blurred, bright colors that have motion. We finally see a close-up of the hands of the man reciting this poem grasping an open book as he paces.
Finally, we see him, a tall young Indian man wearing khakis and a green striped sweater. He is laughing sardonically, bitter sadness shrouds his face, as he reads the poem. There’s a bandage over his right eye. Behind him are students, also bandaged, sitting on stairs, standing, watching him as he performs.
The student’s performance of this poem is as breathtaking as it is heartbreaking.
In the final film, Golden Jubilee (2021), Sanzgiri is no longer “at a distance” from his ancestral home. Rather, he is inside of it–virtually and physically. The opening scene is of his father recounting his sighting of Devchar, an ancient spirit that is said to protect the workers, farmers, and the once-communal lands of Goa (Sanzgiri, 2021). As his father recounts this memory, we see a 3-D and volumetric virtual rendering of this memory–of the ancestral home, his father as a child, and the spirit Devchar peering into the home. The scene is from the perspective of Devchar, who floats down from the sky and walks into the home. Throughout the film, we hear Devchar recount the history of Goa, before and after the Portuguese occupation.
When Spirits Speak, What Do They Say?
Mediumship is a spiritual gift that allows the living to receive messages, instructions, or warnings from the dead, some ancestors and others spirit guides or guardians. Through the invocation of spirits through divination practices, rituals, song or other spiritual tools, the living may become possessed and channel messages through their bodily form. With them, spirits may bring reminders of debts owed, caution against rash decisions, encouragement for the downtrodden, disapproving tirades for the stubborn, or any other urgent messages. Behind these messages is the intention to bring balance and justice to both the living and the dead, for there is none without the other. While the spiritual tools that enable the living to speak to the dead vary across cultures, religions, and spiritual practices, what remains consistent is the need for the living to obtain devices to mediate communications with ghosts, ancestors, specters.
Sanzgiri engages in spiritual mediumship by reanimating the archives, juxtaposing the personal with the historical, and skillfully applying digital technologies to create virtual altars for specters of the past to feel closer to his ancestral land as well as unearth similarities between past and present political unrest across the South Asian diaspora—the assassination of Gandhi; Goa’s independence from Portuguese colonial rule; the Goan liberationist movements–and juxtaposes them against modern historical moments, like the 2020 Shaheen Bagh protests.
Throughout the films, the filmmaker’s father, Shashi Sanzgiri, becomes a conduit to a past, a history, and a land that the filmmaker himself cannot physically reach or fully claim as his own. As a result, Sanzgiri creates a heterogeneous tapestry of visual texts that speaks to the push and pull of diasporic nostalgia, the sense of always yearning for a place you have never seen.
360-Video, 3D imaging, volumetric capture become his tools of ghostly digital communication to mine the archive and illuminate how the present communes with the past. In doing so, he blurs distinctions between past and present, history and personal; home and distance.