Captain Elliott's Circle (Jake Barningham, 2023) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Daniel Gorman

If we take the position that essay films are essentially like written essays, only using visual and auditory input as part of their argumentative structure, then essay films ask to be read with a critical eye and this includes rhetorical analysis. Is the film structured in the best possible way to put its point across? Are there elements that detract from the main thesis? Is the work internally coherent? This is the writing teacher in me coming out, and I know it might seem pedantic. But I am really trying to grapple with Jake Barningham's film Captain Elliott's Circle, a work of admirable erudition that is nonetheless given to long periods of unclear experimentation and a few moments that are difficult to watch. Put another way, perhaps the essay requires another draft.

It appears that this is Barningham's first long film, and perhaps his first documentary. It seems that for years he has primarily worked as a video artist, part of the abstract, post-film Chicago posse that includes Kyle Canterbury and Fred Camper. So taken as a foray into a new mode of imagemaking, Captain Elliott's Circle is quite impressive. Barningham knows how to make striking use of the Chinese island landscape of Houtouwan, a now-abandoned fishing village. And he brings history to bear on this location, by articulating its place in the opium trade of the late 19th century, its imbrication with British colonialism, and the mostly forgotten role of Capt. Charles Elliott, a Royal Navy plenipotentiary who defied orders from his superiors and tried to protect the Chinese locals from British aggression.

At just over two and a half hours, Captain Elliott's Circle covers a lot of ground. What is strange and frustrating about Barningham's film is that he seems intent on introducing a given idea and sticking with it for long stretches of time, then moving onto an adjacent or seemingly unrelated idea. For long stretches, we hear a narrator reading the letters sent back and forth between Elliott and his superiors. The reader pauses and starts again when he makes a mistake, adding to the staccato pacing. These letters were interesting, and their 19th century public prose, with its syntactical density, reminded me of the texts used by David Gatten in his Byrd films. But for most of these segments, we only see the sea around Houtouwan, endless shots of lapping waves or occasional glimpses of ships on the horizon.  It is as though Barningham took a problem -- it is difficult to process this complex verbiage orally -- and met it with a doggedly anti-cinematic solution -- reduce the image track to virtually nothing.

The closest thing to a throughline in the film is the story of Iris (Iris Zhang), a young woman who wants to leave the dying village and find work on the mainland. (Shanghai is about two hours away.) In between the segments focusing on Elliott, Barningham shows us extended passages with Iris that don't make much sense. In one, she is sorting plasticware into piles, her taxonomy thwarted by the appearance of a spork. In other, she is arguing with an unseen man about going on vacation, all the while trying to bounce ping pong balls into a paper cup.

At times, Barningham's constellation-like organization reminded me of Yvonne Rainer's films, especially her 1980 film Journeys From Berlin / 1971. But Rainer had the idea of braiding the various idea threads across the runtime of the film, so that the viewer could better comprehend their connections and relationships. Even in the film's final moments, when Barningham shows us 360-degree pans around and across the now abandoned Houtouwan, there's a strange start-stop rhythm to the camerawork, and often the framing is awkward but clearly deliberate. So from start to finish, Captain Elliott's Circle struck me as a collection of concepts and gestures whose meaning and cohesion was always just out of reach. I don't doubt that Barningham made exactly the film he wanted to, but it seemed to repel my every attempt to access it.