Afterlives

I

In the beginning there was colour
undivided by names only whispers 
Some breathlong marks scratching
the void         No figures not yet

Were there images before
the birth of the eye or the touch of Kino
Yes      there were images before the eye
made by hand     seen by feet

 The camera wasn’t born yet
But there were always photographs
frames             projections
moving still       like sounds 
without language

II

If word made the world
what was light doing

Light and sound like parallel rail tracks
Can meet only by the trick of the mind
But they must never meet
like lovers who live in longing alone

Before pixels before the binary
There were bodies that lived
by the grace of illumination
Photosensitive skins made real
by the touch of incandescent bulbs
and the pace of a running wheel

Bodies stitched by hand
vulnerable like the heart
frail to fluctuations of fire 
fungus and human folly

III

And then came the flood or was it fire
There’s always a flood    Or there’s fire
Always effects without causes
Always the progress of time
the will of god or some such
 But always an exodus 
the loss of homes shedding of skins
the letting gos the moving ons

Some new inhabitants to populate
the empty plot of screen
Perfect people cloud dwellers
Always some leftovers always the need
to clean up the traces of what lived

Always those who hold on to the undead 
scavengers of the underworld 
makers of songs and masks and toys 
Soul smugglers refuge of the refused

IV

Only those who are broken know
That images can sing without a story
That every fragment is a dwelling
That death is not final 
That afterlives live under
the nose of neat algorithms

That light can turn to picture can turn to sound
That cinema came from toys and can return to it
That these toys don’t just rattle
they speak

***

Note: All the images are digital scans of discarded, cut-up film-reels used by toymakers from Daspara village in West Bengal, used to produce a rattling sound in a toy that they call a ‘Katkyeti’. The toy involves a small stick with a red dial stuck to it which can be rotated to create sound. The inner mechanism of this rotation consists of a small flexible wire flapping against four pieces of film-reel. These pieces of film-reels were retrieved and scanned by filmmaker Yashaswini Raghunandan and form the basis of her film, That Cloud Never Left (2019). The scans featured here are a part of Raghunandan’s archive of Katkyeti reels. 

All images courtesy Yashaswini Raghunandan.

Prashant lives in Bangalore and works as a writer and researcher. Apart from reading and writing, he likes watching and thinking about films.