Across the Abyss of Language
New films by Jenny Brady, Sophie Sabet, and Basma Al-Sharif
Beny Wagner
The Glass Booth
Director JENNY BRADY
Year
2025
Country IRELAND
Return of the Bright Night
Director SOPHIE SABET
Year
2025
Country
CANADA
Morgenkreis
Director
BASMA AL-SHARIF
Year
2025
Country UAE, CANADA
Watching the films in this thoughtful program, I was reminded of a story in David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), about Hernán Cortés’ conquest of Mexico between 1519-1521. Many historians have puzzled over how Cortés, leading only a few hundred men, was able to conquer Montezuma’s kingdom of several hundred thousand in only a couple of years. Abrams cites Tzvetan Todorov, who suggests that Montezuma’s fall did not come about primarily by physical force, but was precipitated by a crisis of meaning that arose from differences between indigenous and colonial language. The Aztecs’ written language was ideogrammatic; it was composed of a pictorial system that conveyed meanings derived from their immediate relational environment. The Spaniards’ language, on the other hand, was the product of the alphabetic revolution; in this system, the written phonetic alphabet is understood to be detached from the sensuous environment, delivered by a God who sits outside the world. In the Aztec ideogrammatic system, language could not be used duplicitously, as this would go against the order of the nature from which it spoke. The Spaniards’ language was dissociated, both from its own European context and from the Aztecs’ system of meaning. One recorded conversation between the Aztecs expressed disbelief that the Spaniards were capable of lying ‘even in the presence of the sun.’ The Aztecs’ system for interpreting the world quickly collapsed when confronted with such a language.
That language is at once terrifyingly powerful and shockingly frail is evident in every fold of our contemporary condition. Trump’s grip on power, and the atrocity of Israel’s ongoing genocide, both stem from their respective abilities to upend the Western system of sense-making in the post-World War II global order. No matter how much we try to evoke historical moments of rupture to orient ourselves, words that once seemed stable–fascism, genocide–fall short in navigating the present.
In Basma al-Sharif’s Morgenkreis, we see the semiotics of this rapidly receding world system drifting past us through the window of a car. Driving through Berlin’s cold winter streets, we pass Potsdamer Platz, the Axel Springer building, the Jewish Museum—all monuments to Germany’s efforts to author and stabilise the meaning of its own historical atrocities. These landmarks memorialise a collective effort to muffle the spectres that still haunt Germany; they codify a sanctioned story of what happened, as if the past could be quarantined in a single system of meaning. From these monuments in Berlin’s centre, we move towards the city’s periphery, where the coercive work to police that meaning begins to fray; passing Hermannplatz we see GAZA graffitied on a wall, followed by views of Sonnenallee, the epicentre of the last two and a half years of state mandated police brutality against pro-Palestinian protestors.
We are snapped into alertness by a disembodied voice speaking German: Why did you come to Germany? Would you like to go back Mr. Abrahamyan? The recipient of this interrogation, the father we will follow for the rest of the film, is reduced to a silhouette as we feel the distance from which state power strives to capture life as it is lived. No understanding is possible here. It is not only that the two voices speak different languages, but that their respective structures of meaning exist within different spheres. Once father and son arrive at day care, the interviewer’s questions return in the form of harsh cuts to black that break the lively scenes of children playing together. Like Cortés’s language, these statements violate the living sensuous world we feel in the free flow of children playing with the endlessly shifting possibilities of meaning. The German words emanate from alien grammars used to remake the world into one whose meaning is pre-sanctioned by state officials. Yet we know that this system of meaning has lost its stake in the real. The German state and much of its culture lives in a suspended hallucination, unable to address the world as it slips further from its grasp. This language is used to demarcate who belongs in this place, and yet it speaks to and for no one.
In Sophie Sabet’s Return of the Bright Night I read an attempt to occupy the space between language and memory, between the always fraught effort to communicate and the act of wilful forgetting. As we bend together with the distorted images of the past and feel their inability to offer concrete orientation, we experience an intergenerational reluctance to face the truth of what happened, a force field still rippling through the present. The filmmaker’s own presence is just short of embodiment; a series of rhythms and bumps, a sequence of obstacles towards finding comprehension. When the filmmaker’s mother speaks of her brother’s imprisonment by the Iranian regime, she speaks from inside this incomprehension: “I didn’t care what he knew or didn’t know. I just wanted him out of danger.” I sense some kind of meaning emanating from beyond language’s erasure, a form of communication that persists within or despite of language’s violence.
In Jenny Brady’s The Glass Booth, the structures of language are quite literally brought to the outer limits of comprehension. We enter the film through an historic meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, which Brady turns into a swirling cacophony of senselessness. Images of interpreters whispering translations to statesmen are digitally enlarged almost to the point of abstraction. Brady skilfully dissects image and sound to amplify the fragility that underlies this kind of political theatre. The words and the speaking bodies are alienated from one another, placed within a kind of dissociative stupor.
Later, the city of Dublin appears in slow motion, where the present has slipped outside the flow of time. Observing an ostensible interview about a Syrian woman’s asylum claim, Brady uses the gaps between English and Arabic, and spoken and textual language, to push comprehension past its limits. Instead of translating the spoken Arabic to English subtitles, it appears in Arabic text. This doubling of speech with text communicates the absurdity of expecting meaning to emerge from this situation. The state’s language is incapable of meeting the asylum seeker’s needs, even if it is the only language available. Then, suddenly, we learn the whole situation is theatre. The interpreter, who we realize is undergoing training, failed to acknowledge that she doesn’t speak the woman’s dialect, and has misinterpreted much of what was said. The structure of legibility itself stands trial.
The films in this programme tell us that comprehension is impossible. Yet despite this technological, political, and metaphysical impossibility, the effort to communicate across barriers is felt as essential. Brady offers us a moving expression of this effort in the faces of the children who volunteer as buddy interpreters for asylum seekers. Their work shows us that the Sisyphean task of communication, despite certain failure to achieve comprehension, is, at the same time, precisely where humanity is found. Such a task points to the existential urgency of producing art, even as the world around us collapses.
Beny Wagner is an artist, filmmaker and writer. His recent films A Demonstration (2020), Constant (2022), My Want of You Partakes of Me (2024) have been shown globally in festivals and museums such as: Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Tate Modern, CPH:DOX, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Museum of Moving Image New York. His writing has been published in e-flux, Spector Books, Diaphanes, Fireflies, and Sonic Acts Press, among others. He is a lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths University of London.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme The Glass Booth + Return of the Bright Night + Morgenkreis at Close-Up Cinema, 16 April 2026.
That language is at once terrifyingly powerful and shockingly frail is evident in every fold of our contemporary condition. Trump’s grip on power, and the atrocity of Israel’s ongoing genocide, both stem from their respective abilities to upend the Western system of sense-making in the post-World War II global order. No matter how much we try to evoke historical moments of rupture to orient ourselves, words that once seemed stable–fascism, genocide–fall short in navigating the present.
In Basma al-Sharif’s Morgenkreis, we see the semiotics of this rapidly receding world system drifting past us through the window of a car. Driving through Berlin’s cold winter streets, we pass Potsdamer Platz, the Axel Springer building, the Jewish Museum—all monuments to Germany’s efforts to author and stabilise the meaning of its own historical atrocities. These landmarks memorialise a collective effort to muffle the spectres that still haunt Germany; they codify a sanctioned story of what happened, as if the past could be quarantined in a single system of meaning. From these monuments in Berlin’s centre, we move towards the city’s periphery, where the coercive work to police that meaning begins to fray; passing Hermannplatz we see GAZA graffitied on a wall, followed by views of Sonnenallee, the epicentre of the last two and a half years of state mandated police brutality against pro-Palestinian protestors.
We are snapped into alertness by a disembodied voice speaking German: Why did you come to Germany? Would you like to go back Mr. Abrahamyan? The recipient of this interrogation, the father we will follow for the rest of the film, is reduced to a silhouette as we feel the distance from which state power strives to capture life as it is lived. No understanding is possible here. It is not only that the two voices speak different languages, but that their respective structures of meaning exist within different spheres. Once father and son arrive at day care, the interviewer’s questions return in the form of harsh cuts to black that break the lively scenes of children playing together. Like Cortés’s language, these statements violate the living sensuous world we feel in the free flow of children playing with the endlessly shifting possibilities of meaning. The German words emanate from alien grammars used to remake the world into one whose meaning is pre-sanctioned by state officials. Yet we know that this system of meaning has lost its stake in the real. The German state and much of its culture lives in a suspended hallucination, unable to address the world as it slips further from its grasp. This language is used to demarcate who belongs in this place, and yet it speaks to and for no one.
In Sophie Sabet’s Return of the Bright Night I read an attempt to occupy the space between language and memory, between the always fraught effort to communicate and the act of wilful forgetting. As we bend together with the distorted images of the past and feel their inability to offer concrete orientation, we experience an intergenerational reluctance to face the truth of what happened, a force field still rippling through the present. The filmmaker’s own presence is just short of embodiment; a series of rhythms and bumps, a sequence of obstacles towards finding comprehension. When the filmmaker’s mother speaks of her brother’s imprisonment by the Iranian regime, she speaks from inside this incomprehension: “I didn’t care what he knew or didn’t know. I just wanted him out of danger.” I sense some kind of meaning emanating from beyond language’s erasure, a form of communication that persists within or despite of language’s violence.
In Jenny Brady’s The Glass Booth, the structures of language are quite literally brought to the outer limits of comprehension. We enter the film through an historic meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, which Brady turns into a swirling cacophony of senselessness. Images of interpreters whispering translations to statesmen are digitally enlarged almost to the point of abstraction. Brady skilfully dissects image and sound to amplify the fragility that underlies this kind of political theatre. The words and the speaking bodies are alienated from one another, placed within a kind of dissociative stupor.
Later, the city of Dublin appears in slow motion, where the present has slipped outside the flow of time. Observing an ostensible interview about a Syrian woman’s asylum claim, Brady uses the gaps between English and Arabic, and spoken and textual language, to push comprehension past its limits. Instead of translating the spoken Arabic to English subtitles, it appears in Arabic text. This doubling of speech with text communicates the absurdity of expecting meaning to emerge from this situation. The state’s language is incapable of meeting the asylum seeker’s needs, even if it is the only language available. Then, suddenly, we learn the whole situation is theatre. The interpreter, who we realize is undergoing training, failed to acknowledge that she doesn’t speak the woman’s dialect, and has misinterpreted much of what was said. The structure of legibility itself stands trial.
The films in this programme tell us that comprehension is impossible. Yet despite this technological, political, and metaphysical impossibility, the effort to communicate across barriers is felt as essential. Brady offers us a moving expression of this effort in the faces of the children who volunteer as buddy interpreters for asylum seekers. Their work shows us that the Sisyphean task of communication, despite certain failure to achieve comprehension, is, at the same time, precisely where humanity is found. Such a task points to the existential urgency of producing art, even as the world around us collapses.
Beny Wagner is an artist, filmmaker and writer. His recent films A Demonstration (2020), Constant (2022), My Want of You Partakes of Me (2024) have been shown globally in festivals and museums such as: Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Tate Modern, CPH:DOX, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Museum of Moving Image New York. His writing has been published in e-flux, Spector Books, Diaphanes, Fireflies, and Sonic Acts Press, among others. He is a lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths University of London.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme The Glass Booth + Return of the Bright Night + Morgenkreis at Close-Up Cinema, 16 April 2026.