What the Owl Knows is a co-production between Cooper Gallery and the Turner Prize nominated artist collective The Otolith Group and had its UK premiere as part of the Group’s The Ignorant Art School Sit-In in 2023. This review of the film is by Khadea Santi a student on MFA Curatorial Practice at DJCAD with an interest in diasporic cosmologies from the Global South who wrote it as part of her module.
What The Owl Knows was filmed during the summer of 2022. There was an urgency of attentiveness towards the political stage, in a way that seemed absurd at the best of times and damaging at the worst. Meanwhile, the film seems to indicate that it was even more necessary to determine what is known, and how it is known. Determined and attentive: both are true in my continual revisiting of the film What the Owl Knows at Cooper Gallery. There is a drive and refusal to give into cinematic platitudes and western modernity; this is the essence of what reverberates through the painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s study of her painting.
Centred on virtuosic brushstrokes applied to areas of large-scale canvases, the film is a documentary subverting the desired immediacy for literal, visible and explicit biographical or narrative arcs: these elements typically expected of documentary film are defiantly omitted. Filmed within a brightly lit studio in London, Yiadom-Boakye carefully brings black figures to light. Her thoughtful dips into paint mirror fantastical elements unlocked from her imagination. Confronting the viewer’s desire for the camera to bear it all, this film revels in its obscuring and frustrating manner and forming knowledge through lens media to the medium of paint in a study of cross-media parallels.
The juxtaposed staging of the metropolis shows dusk setting in with mottled pink and purple skies, while fables are read aloud. The words “Not Yours” are repeated throughout the film’s 50-minute run time. Capitalizing certain words, as in the line “The inaugural Speech of the Raven King”, brings to life imagined allegories. “The Fable of Pigeon and Owl” is read aloud while night dwellings and the rest of the usual nocturnal crowd are seen.
Words hold on as they move through the twilight zone. The sensibilities of Yiadom-Boakye’s writing are enhanced by her painted portraits, each drawing out fictional suggestions. These are only hinting at a dystopian quality, due to the backdrop of the city it is captured in, understood as the heart of empire.
The relationship between the camera – operated by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, otherwise known as The Otolith Group – in a study of a painter who is studying her painting, is one of intimacy through prolonged attention to detail and formation. It feels as if it is recorded at eye-level, inherently placing the viewer in the action of seeing. Neither an object nor a person, the camera feels operated in a way that displaces traditional cinematic devices. In the same sense, Yiadom-Boakye writes about fables, as heard across the film, in which crows observe and engage with anthropological “characters”. Instead of a holding gaze it takes you to “narrative mystery”. I am familiar with Sagar and Eshun’s previous film which inspired this one, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another, where the first part of Etel Adnan’s poem Sea is read aloud in the confines of her apartment while facing away from the camera. It motions towards Adnan’s hands as she holds the realm of language intimately. In both films the artists are faced towards worlds they are building, with their backs to the camera. It is something that Eshun cites when talking about this point of view in which a person’s back says a lot. I notice that their often-tender approach to drawing attention and significance to well- crafted worlds, whether poetry or paint, helps to create their own world away from post-colonial and neo- colonial descriptions.
The film’s second half has the absurdity of Yiadom-Boakye’s fable of the “Deeply Skeptical Pigeon” who is antagonizing the owl. The divisive part they each play in this dramatization, amongst the bustling menagerie of creatures in the dead of night, eventually ends in Pigeon’s own demise, seemingly brought about through their own wrongdoing. It is an interesting contrast to the methodical solitude of being in the studio earlier in the film. It suggests the theatre of the political has a zoo-like unfolding. The Otolith Group are adept at “getting under the skin” by utilizing science fiction to speak to the global effects of political structures in Western society. Towards the end of the credits, a sense of time begins to settle in despite the sequence’s recursive use of dusk and dawn. As the film ends, the weight of time reaches an outcry, as the catastrophic environmental changes on the centre stage of the empire begin to feel cyclical.
The undercurrent notes of the film appear in a cacophony of melodic and chaotic metallic thrashing while concealed in news recordings. After watching through the film again, its end credits roll in with sense of acceleration as recorded news clippings play out: Boris Johnson, the then prime minster, announcing his resignation, cost of living crisis, Liz Truss winning conservative leadership, £130 billon energy bailout, windfall tax, the queen’s death, coronation of Charles III, queen’s funeral, Kwasi Kwarteng lifting cap on bankers’ bonuses and cutting benefits and Mick Lynch on Right-wing politics. The recordings reveal the egregious disparities widening through the influence of orchestrated government and state officials.