A Common Sequence (Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser)

I saw this film when it premiered at Sundance last year, and took some rough notes, which I edited and intended to publish as part of First Look coverage, where the film played again. That didn’t happen but I wanted to get this posted because I think this film has had a bit of an unfair reception. I’m sympathetic to those who are disappointed in the more conventional form of this film relative to Clark’s more exciting avant-garde work, but I think it does its own think quite well. It’s interesting to compare the fairly clear logic with which this structures its disparate materials with the much more oblique montage of those other works. The approaches are perhaps not as completely different as they seem.

A Common Sequence (Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser)

Mary Helena Clark has been one of the most productively challenging avant garde filmmakers of the past decade or so, crafting dense and challenging works like Orpheus (Outtakes) (2012), The Dragon Is The Frame (2014), and Figure Minus Fact (2020) which circle around one or more thematic or visual ideas, utilizing both original and found footage, offering no easy answers but richly open ended meaning. A Common Sequence is Clark’s first feature length film (and first co-directed work, though collaborator Mike Gibisser has been a photographer on her previous works), and it's a major shift not just in length, but in its adoption of an essay format. The film is in three parts, all concerned with the human colonization of the natural world, the closing of the commons, and the removal of plants and animals from natural and public spaces as they’re converted to material and intellectual property. The human culprits range from those with relatively benevolent intentions (nuns farming salamanders to create healing syrups) to much more sinister ones (the Department of Defense).

Clark and Gibisser explore several related instances of their themes, structuring the film as a triptych that follows patterns of human migration. They begin in Mexico, where the depletion of wild salamander populations by human collection is complicated by the state’s intervention into the affairs of indigenous communities in these areas in the name of conservation. From there we follow the path of migrant workers from Mexico to the US, where they work collecting genetically modified and patented apples on land that was stolen from other indigenous people. These workers are being replaced by also-patented machines designed to harvest apples more efficiently. In the third section, other machines are sequencing the genetic material of indigenous people themselves; meanwhile machines are being taught to learn and build in their own right, replacing human understandings of the value and ethical use of knowledge and nature with entirely functional ones. Someone gets to “own” and control each of these material and informational technologies (even if indirectly in the case of human DNA).

The approach bears some resemblance to the materialist essay films of Harun Farocki in its concern with technology and political economy and in how it brings several apparently distinct sets of material into productive relation. But where Farocki's films usually proceed by laying out their materials and methodically tightening the net of rigorous analysis until the complex connections emerge into clear view, A Common Sequence works almost in the inverse, starting from a focused viewpoint and spiraling outward both thematically and geographically, accumulating and layering ideas without reaching a clear conclusion. The artists are less interested in answering the obvious questions that are raised around capitalism and colonialism than in developing those questions and raising new ones. It implicitly asks, for example, about the relationship of the filmmaking process itself, as a recording and collection of patented data, to these other forms of recording and manipulating natural and human subjects—is the film itself a form of colonial knowledge? Can humans interact with nature in a way that doesn’t presume the world exists for us? Can artists? What does it mean for our understanding of work and art and ourselves when workers (including artists) are being functionally replaced by artificial intelligence?

These questions are familiar, but here they aren't posed sharply as pragmatic political issues, but poetically. The artists are interested in the murky and fluid boundaries of use, ownership, and exploitation. They rely as much on aesthetics as on information to underscore their themes, and the film's style borrows as much from slow cinema as from essay film and documentary. The remarkable shot that follows the opening credits, lasting nearly ten minutes, shows fisherman working in total darkness, the dynamic field of view illuminated only by their headlamps. Gorgeous architectural and landscape shots are used throughout, and while there is voice-over narration, it's used sparingly, allowing many scenes to unfold at length and with only ambient sound. It's through aesthetics, too, that Clark and Gibisser manage to conclude the film without pretending to neatly tie up its ideas. The final shot mirrors the first, showing the same fisherman and a pack of dogs beginning in total darkness and gradually emerging into bright daylight as the sun rises above the mountains and haze on the horizon, suggesting a hope that humanity might share the regenerative properties of the salamander.