Glossary of Nonhuman Love (Ashish Avikunthak, 2021) (Patreon)

The Ann Arbor Film Festival used to (and maybe still does, I don't pay attention anymore) have a panel discussion on the last day of screenings. It was called "What the Hell Was That?" and it provided a second look at a handful of films that were particularly befuddling to audiences, based on informal discussion around the festival. I was on the panel in 2012, and we addressed such hard nuts as Laida Lertxundi's A Lax Riddle Unit and Mary Helena Clark's By foot-candle light. But the important point here is, a forum was convened for the express purpose of collectively grappling with films that viewers obviously appreciated but felt the need to chew over. 

More fests should do this. And I could sure as hell use a colloquium to help me deal with Glossary of Nonhuman Love, the new feature by Ashish Avikunthak. I should probably be better equipped than most to make sense of it, since the director came to Houston in 2014 and I took part on a panel with him and a couple of other critics, to discuss his experimental short films as well as his previous feature, Ravi Chakravyuh. (So many panels. So much personal interaction. A fella gets nostalgic.) Even with some knowledge about this filmmaker under my belt, Glossary indeed left me wondering what the devil I'd just experienced.

An opening title explains Avikunthak's premise, which to my mind is both silly and utterly unnecessary. In the future, we are told, humans have been replaced by AI, and they have far exceeded us meat puppets when it comes to every conceivable task. Alas, they don't understand love! Accordingly, what we are watching is a group of AI-infused fleshbots trying to analyze human emotion, generating a pictorial compendium of these as-yet-undefined traits. 

What this means is that Glossary is composed as a series of semi-autonomous modules, each designated by a dictionary heading: Waiting, Jealousy, Affection, Disaffection, Refuge, etc. Sixty in all. As you might expect, the connections between the terms and their illustration is often highly abstract. "Disaffection" consists of a woman (mother?) watching in a courtyard while two kids play a game of paddleball. "Endurance" features a nude woman, then a nude man, furiously pedaling a stationary bike in an angular modernist home. Several of the sequences are speech-laden, with the performers discussing their fleeting sensations and fluctuating desires as they describe various romantic and sexual encounters. Although Glossary is extremely open-ended and poetically elusive, one impression does emerge across the entire film, which is that women's sexual desire is more generous than men's, which is debilitated by covetousness and ego.

This is an incredibly strange film. At times, Avikunthak's meticulous blocking and camera set-ups reminded me of certain passages in Tsai Ming-liang and even Roy Andersson, if either of those filmmakers had ever thought to include cameos by Rama or Shiva. But Glossary's extremely precise editing and spatial organization seems most evidently influenced by, of all people, Heinz Emigholz. Like his recent films, Glossary often cuts conversations, or even individual phrases, into distinct shots, creating an atmospheric Cubism that is at odds with the ostensible continuity of a scene. Likewise, Avikunthak distributes his lines between different sets of actors in different locations, using montage to instantaneously "replace" one diegetic situation with another, even though the same (abstract) conversation is continued.

To be honest, I am not sure whether or not Glossary adds up to a greater whole. I'd need a second viewing to attain a more holistic view of the film. But individual segments are magical, and none of them ever feels especially awkward or philosophically overdetermined. (This was not the case with the previous film Rati, which often confused muddy language with profundity.) And I am not entirely certain why Glossary is so chock-full of nudity. I don't mean that in a prudish sense, of course; I'm just not sure what creative purpose it serves. For these reasons, I am not 100% prepared to go to bat for Glossary as a major work, but that's okay. This is a case where I'm happy to be nonplussed, because I feel as though I've seen something utterly unexpected.