A Short Film About Disappointment by Joshua Mattson

Author:Joshua Mattson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

36.

OKAN

DIR. VICTOR NNAMANI

144 MINUTES

I agreed to curate the Conspicuous International Film Festival. The previous curator, a Bast emeritus, expired of a heart attack during a screening of Haupt’s Omega, specifically the scene when judgment is passed on the idolatrous village. The Bolivian government deported Haupt, so he burned the footage and reshot at Cueva de las Manos in Argentina. The curator was not mourned by the staff. He paid in change, pinched. When I die, I would like to be sat in a theater kept dry enough to desiccate my corpse. Five showings a day. Then I will never feel alone, or at least only until the next showing.

The owner of the Conspicuous held the festival for tax purposes. To hear him speak, the theater was in danger of bankruptcy, despite filling to capacity four nights a week. He owns the block. Theaters will never disappear. The reforms after the Confidence Crisis included the banning of home entertainment systems, along with the widespread curtailing of data usage, which has made it difficult to watch at home. It’s done, if you have the means, like Jonson, but it isn’t common. The owner of the Conspicuous is a cheap, miserable bastard, and I feel comfortable putting that in the Slaw, because I happen to know he’s illiterate.

Lest he offer the curatorship to Jonson, I felt obligated to take on the responsibility.

Who knows what dreck Jonson would choose, how many of his society buddies would pack the theater? He’d have the arrogance to make it a success.

Jonson’s pals are keen to align themselves with serious cinema. They ignore the avant-garde, the cranks, because they catch from them the stink of didacticism, the disdain of money at the kernel of serious process, and they want to get rich.

The festival lasted one Thursday and one Saturday, on the week the Firebats sequel was released. Shoals of costumed children left disappointed. Better they learn now.

On Thursday, we showed Rrepang’s What Was to a smattering of the neighborhood loonies. I invited the director to attend, but he declined.

He said, The Underunited States is a country dedicated to the innovation of inequalities.

For Saturday, I chose Okan. I sent flyers to the Nigerian Business Association. It was mentioned on Bast mailing lists and at the Well of Forever, an evangelical church with a ministry in New Zion. I pinged Jonson an invitation with specific instructions about whom to forward it to. The Voyageur ran a drink special called the Kilimanjaro, which was twenty ounces of draft beer in a tall thin glass, for five dollars, against my wishes.

In the pocket of my blazer on four cornflower index cards was my speech. The speech exhorted the necessity of cultural exchange. It sketched a brief history of West African cinema and what qualities distinguished it from cinema of the East and South. It posited Nnamani had seen the films of John Burr and Grace Green in a Benin City cinema, giving him the indelible picture of American machismo he undermines in Okan.

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