Jem Cohen

By Brett Story

Lost Book Found (1996), Instrument (1999), and Benjamin Smoke (2000), the first of Jem Cohen’s films that I encountered, were all made between the years 1996 and 2000-the apex of the antiglobalization movement, the early (more idealistic) dawn of the internet era, the last years of my teens. I was perhaps primed to be Cohen’s audience: my world was a post-punk music scene steeped in DIY aesthetics and anti-capitalist longings. I first saw Jem’s images projected behind the Montreal ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor in a dilapidated theatre during a $5 sit-down show and was bewitched. These were the films that taught me that what we call documentary can be musical, poetic, strange, and tender, and that feeling, however inchoate, could also be part of the record.

But two decades on, it’s actually Cohen’s more recent works that most impress, perhaps because the culture has shifted so much. From the semi-fictional Museum Hours (2012), to the experimental cine-essay Counting (2016), to the elliptically political Newsreels (2011/2012) that he made during the excited months of the Occupy movement, Cohen has continued to make films that, in their very cinematic language, offer a riposte to the commodification of everyday life at precisely the moment when protesting the commercialization of art has come to seem unfashionable, even futile. If Cohen’s films don’t exactly offer images of life after capitalism, they do at least resist the forms of attention demanded by capitalism. (Cohen responded to an email I sent requesting writing about his work with a screengrab of an Amazon review: “Watching the film Museum Hours is like watching a stranger’s horribly dull and horribly long vacation video, including a seemingly endless ‘scene’ of a museum guide talking about art to visi-tors, people walking on a street or through a field or shopping at a flea market.”) Fuck the attention economy, his images say—a brave stance in an era of visual gluttony.

Like me, Cohen has always been interested in the promises and betrayals of city life. In Lost Book Found, his beloved New York bends to the will of real-estate capital as a narrator takes a quiet inventory of a rapidly changing city. That was in the mid-’90s; by the time Cohen collects his international urban wanderings into a tapestry of detritus and wonder in Counting, neoliberalism has had two more decades to subsume the landscape to its totalizing logic. Lost Book Found and Counting echo each other with the ache of longing for a public space not always colonized by advertising, or police officers, or both. Museum Hours, meanwhile, is suffused with the kind of tenderness I’ve always been a sucker for: friendship as opposed to romance, detour and encounter over the conclusive narrative journey, melancholy over nostalgia.

While Cohen himself admits that it is “tricky to attend to the disappearing world without leaning on nostalgia and sentimental-ity,” the current climate crisis demands nothing short of a great collective reckoning with disappearance-which makes Cohen’s aesthetic questions also urgent, political ones. Can we grieve and have longings without glorifying a romanticized past? Can registering loss offer a pathway to collective power? Cohen’s attention to ruins and debris as evidence of a social world in flux, a world of our own doing and undoing, demonstrates commitment to attachment itself. No, not everything is expendable. No, not everythingis ironic. Our material environment narrates our history back to us. The future is what is happening now. And an image can be an index of our capacity to love.

It means something to see images full of love. Love for the inconsistencies of light refracted through the emulsion of a film strip; love for the freaks and the outcasts, the lost and the ex-pelled; love for music that clangs with anger and dissent; love for the city and its ghosts; love for an old painting hung just so on a muted wall in a quiet room; love for the friends that die and those that don’t; love for the kids and their rebellions and their refusals to conform. That this love is rendered so often in colour, what Goethe once defined as “the deeds and sufferings of light,” tells us that images matter, and that they matter politically. And so we continue to make them, little bulwarks against the ravages of profit and plunder, against the fiefdom of the dismal sciences; reclamations of our dreamworlds from the bosses and the bankers and the landlords all.