Director: Sylvia Robyn Gionti
Writer: Sylvia Robyn Gionti
Running time: 3mins
Kids say the funniest things. Every aspect of our culture primes us to laugh at the innocent; simplistic way the minds of children fail to grasp our adult reality. But in some cases, this fresh-eyed lack of inhibition allows for someone to call out the nonsensical structuring of our world for what it is.
One of my favourite aspects of Sylvia Robyn Gionti’s work, is that she is able to tap back into that simpler time, to help us all reflect on the absurdities of the adult norms we have since been trained to take at face value.
In The futility of quitting smoking, Gionti used the Pixar formula (‘What if X had feelings?’) to satirise self-help culture, as a cigarette sits down for an interview, and seemingly berates itself for the one thing it cannot help being. Meanwhile, in Household Pain and For your memory , toys – remnants of simple childhood logic – take centre-stage while addressing themes of loss and grief; something we might assume would be an inappropriate or childish approach, but yields some deeply impactful results by cutting through a lot of the repression that we have internalised as ‘respectful’ adult behaviour.
The dreamlike There is something I don’t understand immediately builds on this false divide – with a brilliantly constructed image, of what appears to be closed-circuit footage of a dusty, sunbaked road. As cars flash by in the jumpy footage from the cathode-ray screen, the rush of wind from passing traffic can be heard – before Gionti’s narration kicks in.
“There is something I don’t understand.
Why do I need a passport to cross the street?”
One kneejerk reaction to this, is to immediately imagine excuses as to why. Perhaps the road is on an international border. Perhaps there is a law that you must carry identification when you leave the house – let alone cross the street. But ultimately, the truth is that Gionti’s assertion is dripping in absurdity. Of course, she does not literally need a passport to cross the street.
And the longer we gaze at the street, the more apparent it becomes that the cars apparently passing by are a procession of Matchbox cars. However weighty their diecast shells are, they are not real. The road does not exist – and neither does the border control Gionti fears. But then again, why should that construct exist outside this dreamworld either?
The buzzing video footage also harks back to a bygone cultural space, with an interesting inversion. Usually, I feel 90s nostalgia is a warning sign for something horrific to come in a political or personal sense – but here the old-timey imagery seems to instead prompt us to return to a happier state of being, rather than a specific (ideologically rose-tinted) era. A time where someone would tell us about the construct of nationhood, and we might well laugh at the silly idea we couldn’t walk from one arbitrary plot of land to another, because of an invisible line.
As Gionti’s narration continues, the description of more impossible scenarios follows – always with risks or imagined barriers standing between her and her figurative destination. Different adult assumptions do little to help. Having gaged that the number of toys she had in childhood would have some impact on her worth, she has obtained many more in later life, chasing some Calvinist ideal of accruing wealth to ascend to some higher state of being.
Her gatekept, distant destination remains elusive all the same. All the while, as her journey continues, each moment and memory creates new bends and dead ends – reversals and intersections before disappearing into the horizon.
Exactly what the destination could symbolise will be personal to whoever happens to be watching. It could still literally be crossing a street or a border – obtaining the right to free movement, and to live in peace somewhere new – which threatens the ridiculous fiction of national boundaries designed to coral a working population, and undercut their ability to demand better. It could be the transition between gender identities – to break free of the arbitrary and cruel standards which governments around the world are increasingly raising to prevent people from living as themselves – which threatens a backward binary that people of wealth and power use to prop up an entire system of exploitation.
Whatever it is, the goalposts inevitably move, because the requirements aren’t for something which is either rational or real – they are constructed constraints, designed to keep you in the place you began.
Gionti doesn’t necessarily have a comforting resolution to that. But she does have a resolute determination to keep going, regardless of how weary adult life makes her. A refusal to accept the ‘sensible’ aspects of adult life which bind and break her. Instead, while she “might never cross the road”, she pledges to maintain her playful exploration of life where she is.
“And I will not stop.”
Gionti’s brand is very much ‘short and sweet’ – and that never hurts with experimental cinema. But I would love to see something longer from her one day, to allow for more intricate takes from her unique philosophical style. With that said, this is my favourite work from her so far – blending that trademark sense of humour with a unique format, and a powerful message.
