Film's Religious Algorithm

Abstract

This article explores Simone Weil’s concept of ‘affliction’ and the black poetics of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten in relation to two nonfiction films: Artur Aristakisyan’s Palms (1993) and Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black (1962). The films’ contentiousness springs from their provocative depictions of suffering, presented not as a social ill but as a defiant mode of being outside of institutional power. Supplanting the search for a cure with the search for salvation, the films transcend the socially-conscious logic of documentary in favour of a ‘religious algorithm’ of profound but recalcitrant weakness. As alternative ‘city symphonies’, Palms and The House Is Black’s municipal visions complement Hartman and Moten’s vivid accounts of insurgent black life in American cities.