By Akinwande Jordan
You are cordially invited to the opera of eroticized pain. That’s what spills out from whatever device you watch Gozirimuu’s MORNING, MORNING. Heartbreak is a universal agony. It crumbles kings, priests, everyday men, and spies. Humphrey Bogart staring mournfully at Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942). Fredric Henry loses Catherine Berkeley to the frigid hands of death in Ernest Hemingway’s war novel, A Farewell to Arms. The subjects of MORNING, MORNING entwine their bodies in the bizarre mystery of consciousness with an aching so intense you could cut with a sword.
I HAD A DREAM LAST NIGHT JUST BEFORE FIRST LIGHT…
The recurring theme of the film is the lingering debris of a dying or dead romance. We are carried into a monochromatic world where the room and its objects are citizens of a no man’s land. Perhaps, a dream within a dream, a palimpsest of fractured psyche bejewelled by nothing but the clemency of quietness. Starring Gozirimuu himself and his friend, Ofunami — every performance is wet, pensive, and mute; no words are said, no words are required, only the subtitle cards from what is possibly a poem, pushing the narrative or the lack thereof into form. But the faces move, embodying the arthouse nucleus he’s obviously an acolyte of.
Haunting music accompanies the unravelling, the waking, the caressing, the eroticism, the retreating of bodies, the celestial disc ensconced in the architecture of the room. Cinema is about stories, but it’s also about time. It’s a chronal experiment about where time starts and when it stops (quote me on that). MORNING, MORNING has a duration of 8m12s, but that’s inconsequential to the movement of bodies in the film. What unfolds could have been in an hour or two minutes, but that’s the genius of a silent film beholden to dream logic. You can subject yourself to the carnality and frenzied noir of the film without caring that much for being told what is happening.
To say it’s a film only about heartbreak would be to grossly undersell the film, even if it’s a product of Gozirimuu’s own experience with lost romance. He plugs himself into something ghostly and primal. Of Aristotelian physics even; If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest at that instant of time, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless at that instant of time and at the next instant of time but if both instants of time are taken as the same instant or continuous instant of time then it is in motion.”
Gozirimuu and Ofunami remind me of Alma and Elisabet from Bergman’s Persona (1966) or team, Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied’s Meshes of the afternoon in this regard, two objects occupying space, constantly in motion as they juxtapose their painful sensations.
Needless to say, this film further expresses the need to pay attention to art that doesn’t necessarily seek the thrill of entertainment. You might be entertained by Gozirimuu’s eye for shots and his disconcerting attention to the subtle contortion of faces, but what brings to this opera of eroticized pain is anything but entertainment. You are here to understand the essence of heartbreak and the illogical march of pain in solitude.
