The Music of the Unruly

There is something difficult to shake about The Rivals of Amziah King.

For a while you can’t work out what kind of film you are watching. It seems to keep changing its own rules. A scene begins and, before you have found your place inside it, the film has already moved somewhere else. A face freezes. A moment returns. Something that seemed finished suddenly appears again, slightly altered.

It has the strange logic of a dream.

Not the soft, floating kind. Something earthier. Hotter. The sort of dream in which you can feel the ground beneath your feet and still have no idea where you are.

The landscape seems to press against everything. The people are equally close. Faces, bodies, voices. The accents are sometimes so thick that language becomes almost physical; you hear the meaning without always catching the words.

Then the bluegrass comes in.

It isn’t simply music accompanying the film. It seems to take over the nervous system of it. The fiddle and banjo have an intensity that keeps suggesting Baroque music, that strange sensation of several things happening at once without anything quite resolving. The music can be joyous and mournful almost simultaneously.

And the film moves with it.

Not smoothly. It lurches and doubles back, sometimes with the feeling of a play being performed by people who have forgotten that there is supposed to be a distinction between performance and life. You can almost see the seams.

Yet the seams are part of its beauty.

What stays with you most are the people. Their unruliness. The sense that ordinary social boundaries have loosened somewhere. There is lawlessness, certainly, but it isn’t the lawlessness of people without bonds. Almost the opposite.

They are fiercely attached to one another.

Tenderness sits beside brutality without either explaining the other. Loyalty can become dangerous. Humour arrives in the middle of something disturbing. You can feel affection without being entirely sure whether you should trust what you are seeing.

Nothing settles into a moral position.

Perhaps that is why you become so absorbed in it.

There is no comfortable place outside the film from which to make sense of these people. You are simply inside their world for a while, caught in its heat and its music, its roughness and strange tenderness.

Something of the experience remains afterwards, as it does with certain dreams. Not quite a story. More a residue of place and feeling, the atmosphere somehow clearer than the sequence of events.

A face held in stillness.

A voice you almost understand.

Music rising out of the heat.

And somewhere beneath it, the faint sense that the rules were never quite where you thought they were.

Notitia — Unsettled Places attends to dreams, images, art and encounters that resist resolution, staying with what is felt before it can be explained.