Film Poster

16mm film transferred to digital, color/sound, 30 min. 50 sec., China (Hong Kong), 2015.

Primate Colors was shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015.

The film pursues and accelerates methods and forms elaborated in ethnographic and anthropological filmmaking. The anthropological understanding of following subjects to record their lives is re-oriented. Rather than (critically) explaining the actions, believes or norms of certain subjects, the film concentrates on the affective components of events, objects and actions. (No claims are made about the lives of others.) Here, filming is to follow affects and to produce further affects. To follow affects, does not mean to be affected by an idea or a subject, but to be mesmerized by materiality, by the sounds of the running camera and by following the movement of things that are being filmed.

Especially when recording and reproducing the capitalist reality (of hyper-exploitation of human and non-human recourses) one finds ones own condition not in the relations of production, but in disgraced facts, minor neglected aspects, ridiculed signs. Reality is understood as fundamentally strange and obscure and filming becomes a form of assembling the obscure and the supernatural. Rather then to shadow subjects or objects, this mode follows different grades of speed, light, temperature, rotation, friction, fall-off. Bringing forth a mind-independent knowledge that takes place in relation to a territory, an environment or a color, where images are not understood as representations of human life, but are produced and perceived constantly and everywhere, by human and nonhuman alike.