The series Hands-On: Two Films by Jessica Sarah Rinland starts on MUBI on April 5, 2021 in many countries.
In 1900, the tusk of a female elephant poached in Malawi was donated to the Natural History Museum in London. Over 100 years later filmmaker and artist Jessica Sarah Rinland begins to make a copy. With this tusk Rinland opens up a synecdoche of both preservation and the nature of reproduction. Working with Harvard’s Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies and having played at Locarno, TIFF, Viennale, True/False (amongst others), Those That, At A Distance, Resemble Another is one third of a larger project, which includes the actual elephant tusk and a book. Split between multiple museums in Brazil and England, Rinland slowly documents her work as a ceramist recreating this tusk, while also filming the work of the other ceramicists and preservationists. Close-ups of Rinland’s remarkably durable pink manicure creating the tusk gives the film its focus on the labor of reproduction, and eventually reproduction. Tirelessly working on the impossible task of creating something as close to the original as one can get, Rinland’s film wrestles with the inescapability of man’s influence.
The film opens with an epigraph of sorts, a brief text about the relationship of a replica to its original. All animals are replicas of their predecessors, linked by DNA. Any art that would depict an animal would be an original piece, but also a reproduction of the animal. It also mentions that the Latin root of the word original is orior, which means arising or being born. Rinland quickly shifts to a scene at a howler monkey sanctuary in Tijuca Floresta, Rio de Janeiro. Off camera, we can hear two sanctuary employees delight over Kala, one of the howler monkeys' new baby. This is the only time we’ll spend in the wilderness, and while this scene stands apart from the rest of the film, it marks Rinland’s concerns with preservation, whether biological or manufactured.
Rinland’s project is methodical, and we see the slow process of the tusk being created, arising out of dust and clay (and a 3-D printer) to be born. The work of creating a copy involves more removal than addition. Rinland’s hands remove the excess dust with a vacuum, slowly carving away excess materials in an extreme close-up, this process being more about the materials yielding than any force from the ceramicist. The amount of excess material used, clay for imprints, bubble wrap for packaging, sponges for cleaning are as intimately depicted as the duplicate tusk itself. The work is deliberate, and we spend time with Rinland as she completes the many steps involved. The focus is not simply on the tusk, however. Also in close-ups, Rinland documents the work of others, someone replacing a piece of ivory from a chipped game box, someone slowly tracing out the images on an Amazon funerary urn, new clay pots being made by Brazilian artisans. In an interview with Film Comment, Rinland calls the work that the preservationists do as entering “a process of embodiment,” where they must replace the items while adhering to the process of the original artists, separated by decades or more. The focus on parts of the body isn’t new for Rinland, with her focus on faces in The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior) (2016), and on hands in Expression of the Sightless (2016) and Black Pond (2018). We rarely see the actual preservationists, or have any context for where this work is taking place. Instead, the focus is on hands, documenting the many steps of creation, choosing a tactile means of narrative. The relationship is about the worker and their object, the many times they measure before cutting, making sure each tracing is exact. Here, the process of discovering the means of labor comes through the act of reproduction, the preservationists invoking the ghost of the creator to maintain their original work.
To counter the close-ups, Rinland’s soundtrack, a mix of non-diegetic naturescapes, and the bustling space of the archive, makes what could be a sterile and repetitive film full of life. Rinland features conversations of her team or the preservationists chatting idly, or humming along to music. As much as her work with this tusk is about the wonder of something being born, it’s also, for the preservationists, their day jobs, and the repetitive minutiae of their work can be mundane. This isn’t meant to diminish the work, but rather reinforce the relationship between the museum employees and their objects, the necessity of their skills and knowledge. The stories selected here are also about nature and replication—a friend tells the story of a child who wanted to be a tree, so he stood very still with branches in his arms. Another is a story about their child’s obsession with nature documentaries, and how elephants only travel at night, and can hear vibrations through their feet.
Rinland is as interested in her item as she is in the process as a whole. There are discussions on how materials are preserved, and the many means of doing so. Many of the artifacts the museums have, both biological and non-biological, were preserved by worms. The mold and case process, which is done by eye, was invented in Peru 2000 years ago to make panpipes, and in turn Europeans started using this method in the 1800s. 3-D printing, plaster casts, and lasers are also used to gently remove the stains of time, and there’s an x-ray to look inside the finished project. At one point Rinland asks for her tusk to be smashed so she can repair it, much to the conservators' chagrin, and even with all this technical innovation it is best repaired with animal glue. Rinland will also explore the archives, we’ll see replications tucked away under desks and overflowing on shelves, rows and rows of collapsible shelving, the actual tusks wrapped up in bubble wrap, tagged and shedding.
Rinland’s pink nails act as a punctum (Rinland uses “pink nailed ceramicist” as one of her many credits, and her own nail artist is also credited), a sharp contrast to the whites and grays of the materials she is working with. A shot of an elephant’s eye, the only part of an elephant we’ll see outside of the tusk, is cross-cut with her hands covered in cracked grey clay, the pink varnish matching the eye. A pink manicure has been historically coded as feminine and frivolous, and depending on the kind of manicure, often restrictive with certain kinds of work. Rinland’s nails survive, and are one of the many ways she plays with what is delicate and what is durable. They also draw a connection to a different kind of labor, that of an aesthetician. The gradual grinding away of a previous coat of shellac, the application of many layers, q-tips and sponges, is another kind of slow detailed process to create something smooth and without cracks. Her nails mark her presence in a film that is predominantly anonymous, or at least not particularly concerned with living humans. These artificial perfections are always created by a self-effacing human touch, and Rinland puts herself, as both filmmaker and ceramicist, as much of a subject as the tusk.
Though the duplicate nature of the two tusks is made explicit, the film documenting this process is also a copy. The use of photography to capture an image of the howler monkeys who move too fast to have a clear view of, the 3-D printer to create the tusk in the first place, the x-ray to see the seed and the crack in the ivory tusk, the grain of the 16mm stock that Rinland uses, all highlight the ways technology allows us to do more than we could biologically. Early in the film we see old catalogs of artifacts, themselves now needing to be preserved. All tools, like the slip casing process from 2000 years ago, building on what came before. The kind of reproduction Rinland does, whether what’s depicted in the film or the film itself, is a document of how we shape and are shaped, of all our technical developments.
The majority of exegesis in the film, and the credit to the many conservationists featured in it, exists in the end credits. Much like a piece on display in a museum, the contextual information comes at the end, and off to the side. That there are different museums on the other side of the planet, that the epigraph is inspired by Certified Copy (2010), that these artifacts and animal bones have traveled miles from their homes to British museums, with their long histories of pillage and colonialism, are all revealed after the fact. The names of all the preservationists, conservators and ceramicists come at the end, their work presented earlier without them. That the ivory used to repair the jewelry box was confiscated by poachers, and then after the repair, packed away. It’s an interesting choice, and certainly not a wrong one, for Rinland is able to immerse us into the work while still paying due diligence to what’s been done before. In the credits we learn that the tusk she made was donated to the Natural History Museum in London to live next to their original, the most recent reproduction of the poached elephant. All these items live in silence and the dark, and you can access them, if you know to ask. Though the two tusks are housed together in the quiet archives, Those That, At A Distance, Resemble Another ends with Os Tincoas’ joyous “Deixa a Girar Girar,” for not all objects are silent.