This week, Film Notes publishes Qingyuan Deng’s essay that brings Lacan’s account of retroactive meaning into relation with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s distinction between paranoid and reparative reading, asking how recent artists’ films and moving-image installations hold the time between an event and its belated political comprehension.
A hole is not nothing. It is the shape left by what was taken, and it has duration. Pope. L called holes “occasions—opportunities which can take many forms, materials, and durations.” Imagine a hole that has only duration. This is what censorship produces: a reorganization of listening, an archive structured around what has been removed. The hole does not wait to be filled. It generates.
For Lacan, time is not the medium in which events occur. It is what events produce retroactively, through the cut. In his late work, meaning operates in the future anterior: what happens now will have been significant, but only later, only after a subsequent moment restructures everything that preceded it. For instance: a song is banned. For decades it circulated underground, degraded, contraband. Then one day it resurfaces, in a warehouse, on a screen, in gold leaf on aluminum, and everything that happened to it in the interval—the suppression, the cassette dubbing, the diasporic cabarets—will have been the process by which it became what it now is: neither the original nor its ruin, but something the state could not have anticipated. The meaning was not there when the ban was imposed. It arrived après-coup, in the gap between the event and its retroactive comprehension. And the cut—what Lacan called the scansion, the interruption that forces the subject to produce meaning from the rupture, the variable end of a session—is not only an analytic technique but also a cinematic one, manifested as splices and perforations, the burned hole in the celluloid where the image should be through which light passes.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick described two orientations toward damaged knowledge: paranoid reading, which forecloses surprise by already having anticipated the worst, and reparative reading, which tolerates not knowing and seeks sustenance rather than exposure. She insisted they are not opposites but positions on a continuum. What several recent moving-image works suggest is that the most urgent formal problem for political cinema is how to build structures capable of holding both: the arrow that never lands and the arrow that finds its target in the dark.
In Perforation, Ellipse, installed earlier this year at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture, 16mm projections showed the artist Alison Nguyen shooting an arrow across the dark downtown skyline. The arrow crossed the width of the triangular gallery but never landed, forever remaining in transit. The offscreen sound of an impact punctuated the cuts across the installation’s multiple video channels.
Within the gallery space, freestanding sculptures consisting of large vertical monitors with smaller screens above them were mounted on the floor, taking formal cues from industrial A-frame signboards with casters. They looked like warehouse equipment because the speculative fiction film that runs across them, Nguyen’s Aisle 9 (2026), is set in one. The screens cycled asynchronously. On one monitor, footage from the film—workers in a hosiery warehouse, faces lit amber—ran. On another, a circle was scorched through celluloid, the emulsion blistered where it melted, lower Manhattan visible as the void’s frame. Elsewhere, a 16mm frame declared “SCENE MISSING” in white block letters, sprocket holes flanking the announcement. Another: handwritten Vietnamese text, lyrics of banned bolero songs. The installation elegantly and seductively moved between narrative fiction, material destruction, the archival, and institutional language.
Bolero (or nhạc vàng, or yellow music) is the exhibition’s political center. Following the American War, the Vietnamese communist government banned the genre for its bourgeois sentimentality and romantic lyricism. It survived underground despite and because of its suppression, circulating through makeshift cassettes and Parisian television. Periodically, text reading “WE ONLY HAVE ONE SUMMER” or “THE CURRENT SWIRLS AROUND HER LIFE OF HOPES UNMET” surged across all channels simultaneously, flushing the screens with warm orange. A fleeting homeland is built through affect in motion rather than territory. The channels briefly shared one frequency before drifting apart again.
The cinematic cut of Aisle 9 unfolds the speculative world more fully. The workers are, first and foremost, conspirators. Silvia Federici’s 1985 poem “In Praise of Conspiracy Theory” (which is cited in and interlaced into the film) opens with an etymological explanation that the linguistic history of conspiring originates in breathing together. Federici reclaims conspiring from the neoliberal discourse that dismisses structural analysis as paranoid fantasy and treats economic violence as impersonal. Federici insists: “for as long as there are men who sit and plan deeds that cause any of us to die, no conceptual flight or verbal trick will stop me from concluding they are conspiring against us.” The refusal to accept that coordinated violence is accidental is a form of political intelligence native to the powerless and the dispossessed. To conspire is to breathe together; the conspiracy theory is the knowledge of those who share the same poisoned air. In Aisle 9, the workers breathe together.
Outside the warehouse, the world is bleak and dangerous. A violent revolution has overthrown the old regime. Music and photography are banned. Inside, a family-like hosiery company lurches toward foreclosure, but the factory floor has taken on the character of a socialist experiment, a communal life improvised after hours, a collectivity forged from shared precarity. The workers practice archery in the aisles, play cards, trade conspiracy theories without claiming to know what they mean in full. Their speech is wary, lateral. They distrust the promises of the new order as they distrusted the old. At night, in secrecy, they open the mysterious boxes sent by an unknown global corporation, whose rented storage space has become one of the few things keeping the factory afloat. Inside they find censored yellow music from Vietnam, sung by contemporary Vietnamese people.
What follows is not a scene of decoding or political awakening. Factory life transforms into mass collective viewing. The workers watch together, in the dark, as the banned video art plays. The viewing does not explain their condition or resolve their suspicion. It works on the body without the workers noticing. One of them develops the ability to hit the archery target with his eyes closed. The reparative encounter with censored art produces not knowledge but a new somatic capacity, a physical skill specifically about closing the eyes, about not seeing. If paranoid reading is the drive to see everything in advance, to anticipate the worst before it arrives, then this is its inversion, granted precisely by the willingness to not look, to trust what the body has absorbed without converting it into sight. The viewing deposits something in the flesh that operates below the threshold of conscious understanding, which is what Sedgwick means when she insists that reparative reading does not depend on mastery but on the willingness to be surprised by what the object yields. Meaning arrives belatedly. The arrow will have been aimed at what the worker could not yet see.
Installed at New York’s Swiss Institute earlier this year, Saodat Ismailova’s Swan Lake (2025) projects black-and-white images across two screens, composed as a montage of material drawn from Central Asian films made between 1980 and 2000, many of which Ismailova encountered as a child in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where communal film watching was part of daily life.
On one screen, a bearded man in a tall cap sits against bare rock, eyes nearly closed, an ascetic figure from devotional cinema, inward, still. On the other, a woman’s face fills the frame in extreme close-up, an earring catching light. The montage shifts: feet reaching into straw, overexposed, the film grain merging with the texture of what it records; a figure in a striped chapan standing alone in a doorway, half-shadowed and backlit, looking at viewers; a conveyor belt dumping raw cotton onto a vast industrial pile, a single body dwarfed beside it, visualizing the Soviet extraction economy; a woman inverting herself, suspended upside down in tattered clothing, hair dragging toward the earth; a man holding a sharp knife against his abdomen, tracing his muscle movement or contemplating self-harm. The two screens are rarely fully aligned or synchronized, but sometimes the same gestures appear on one and then, after a short delay, on the other.
The title names a historical instance of state broadcasting. Soviet Central Television played a recorded performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake after the deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, and again during the 1991 coup attempt—nearly twenty-four continuous hours of ballet while the country dissolved offscreen. Citizens learned to read the loop: when the ballet appeared, something catastrophic was happening that could not be shown. The broadcast replaced the event with aestheticized repetition.
The Swan Lake broadcast is paranoid reading performed by the state and imposed on its citizens. It trains the viewer to anticipate catastrophe from the absence of information, to already know that the loop conceals the worst. Sedgwick describes paranoid reading as a “strong theory” designed to confirm suspicions, marking every new event as proof of its own conspiratorial evidence. If Nguyen’s Perforation, Ellipse stages the paranoid orientation as a discursive position (the warehouse workers speaking their distrust of advanced capitalism’s promises of prosperity, narrating the foreclosed future under neoliberalism), Swan Lake locates it, before language, in the body of a population trained by decades of state broadcasting to know without being told, to read crisis in the texture of what replaces it. But Ismailova’s montage is not itself paranoid. Its form neither confirms nor forecloses a world that was ending while feeling the upcoming collapse. Instead, it holds the somatic residue of crises without positing explanations, conspiratorial or otherwise, for faltering economic experiments or failed revolutions. This is the reparative turn. Where the state’s loop offered repetition as concealment, Ismailova’s montage offers recurrence as care: the same footage returning and reappearing across the two screens in shifted color or texture configurations not to expose what happened, but to further attune to shared senses of precarity in times of upheaval. Such insistence on the deferral of conclusion is itself reparative; it refuses the paranoid reduction that would make all of it evidence of one thing.
Breaking through the monochrome archive is Anatoly Kashpirovsky, the Soviet hypnotist whose televised healings aired in 1989. A purple and yellow aura emanates from him. His broadcasted mass hypnosis sessions attempted to soothe audiences during the Soviet Union’s final years, aiming to restore the populace’s faith in communism and the regime. What can you know about your own subjection to power when the mechanism operates by making self-accounting impossible? The hypnotized are represented in the montage as groups of people who gather outdoors in states of collective seizure—bodies swaying, faces slackened, eyes rolled back or fixed on nothing; crowds surrendered to forces for which no political vocabulary is adequate; mass suggestibility that is both manipulated and genuine, imposed and sought. The hypnotized masses and the warehouse workers in Aisle 9 inhabit the same condition, where opacity is the only viable register of subject-formation under systems one cannot fully reconstruct.
The paranoid-reparative continuum operates differently when the paranoid reading is simply correct. In Carolyn Lazard’s Fiction Contract (2025), included in “Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form” at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an all-Black obstetrics team at a hospital rehearses a childbirth scenario with a mannequin named Jada. The “fiction contract” (a term from simulation pedagogy) names the mutual agreement among participants to treat what is staged as if it were real while knowing it is not. During the exercise, Jada’s sister grows increasingly distressed, paranoid about the complications of the birth. Her fear is visceral, persuasive, real as affect. Then a close-up of Jada’s plastic face, the surveillance system recording, and the two-way mirror remind us that everything is fictive and contained.
Afterward, the actors gather to debrief, stepping out of their roles to assess the exercise’s efficacy and leaving the helpless Jada alone on the bed with all her suffering, left to possibly spill out and be reacted to by many Black patients to come. The paranoia was performed. But the fiction contract exists because the danger is not fictional: Black maternal mortality is the empirical ground the simulation was built to address. The distress is an accurate reaction to structural violence, and the care the medical team rehearses is dependent on an institution that may not sustain it. The reparative does not arrive after the paranoid has been overcome. It is practiced inside it.
In the same exhibition, The Judgement of the White Cube (2023), a film by Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) in which Congolese plantation workers stage a trial against the White Cube (a stand-in for liberal Western institutions founded upon histories of colonialism), poses a question the paranoid-reparative frame cannot easily adjudicate: do we demand total restitution—the return of land, art, and sovereignty, even at the risk of further violence—or do we work within the liberal framework of reconciliation? The defense attorney for the White Cube argues against destroying it, suggesting that it “brings unity,” “boosts the economy,” and “holds the secret for us all to develop.”
The word secret is telling, suggesting hidden knowledge and concealed power, but the attorney deploys it in defense of the institution. The White Cube claims to hold secrets that benefit everyone, which is the liberal museum’s self-justification: stewardship reframed as universal good, the withholding of looted objects recast as custodianship. Against this ideology, the prosecution demands reparation. When the community strikes the White Cube with branches, it bleeds palm oil, the commodity extracted from their labor, which financed the institutions housing their stolen objects. Eventually, after suffering this violence, the White Cube capitulates. It promises to be the Indigenous people’s brother, their friend. But the kinship is coerced. Is a brotherhood extracted through violence reparative or is it just another fiction contract, an agreement whose sincerity cannot be verified, only inhabited? The promise of institutional kinship under duress mirrors Lazard’s simulation: the White Cube says it will be a brother, just as the hospital says it will protect Black patients, just as the museum says it will decolonize. What the film stages is only the communal gathering itself: witnesses testifying against extractivism rooted in the coffee and rubber trades while the judge presides angrily. The trial is the reparative form, regardless of the verdict’s sincerity. The act of gathering to judge the institution that judged your culture is already a reversal.
Both films share with Nguyen and Ismailova an insistence that the reparative is not what comes after paranoia, but what operates within it: care rehearsed in a system that may betray it, a brotherhood promised under duress that may or may not be kept, a bolero surging across screens that may go silent again.
In Lacan’s future anterior, the subject does not know what has happened to them until later, until a cut restructures the temporal field and what was lived through will have been the thing it becomes. This is the temporality these works inhabit. Nguyen’s arrow opens an archive whose contents the workers absorb, even with their eyes closed, but the archive remains archival rather than a political instrument. Ismailova’s films from a collapsed empire loop endlessly, not yet legible as history, as the pains of the failed socialist project continue to reverberate. Lazard’s medical team rehearses tenderness for a mannequin whose sister weeps real tears, inside a system whose betrayal has not yet occurred but is guaranteed. CATPC gathers on a former plantation to meet face-to-face with their former oppressor, unsure if its promise of kinship will be delivered.
The Real, in Lacan’s late teaching, is what ruptures the symbolic order: the non-symbolizable, the thing that cannot be metabolized into narrative but keeps returning. Across these moving-image works, irruption—the pressure point where what cannot be contained manifests as loops, splits, desynchronization, cuts, and wounds—is the medium adequate to this condition: not because it represents political time but because it is political time, duration structured by what has been removed, motion composed of infinite stillness, meaning that arrives only through deferral, in the gap between the event and its future comprehension. The arrow is still in the air.
