America is descending into violence. The president blames the radical left. Soldiers are sent in to curb supposedly violent protests. The death toll mounts.
This is May 1970 and a single month of war, civil war and music has been anatomised by Naeem Mohaiemen in his three-channel film Through a Mirror, Darkly. Mohaiemen had no way of knowing it would open as the US entered a frightening new phase of the second Trump presidency, with the shot that struck down rightwing activist Charlie Kirk echoing through sinister attempts to suppress dissent. Where will it end?
Where did it end? You could make the case that this documentary artwork has an optimistic message about America today. Fifty-five years ago, in May 1970, six college students were shot dead – four by the National Guard at Kent State, Ohio, two by local police in Jackson, Mississippi. Then, as now, this seemed a country so divided and angry the result could only be civil war or dictatorship. But that did not happen. US democracy did not collapse, there was no civil war and a free press helped ensure that Nixon’s presidency ended in disgrace.
Now that era is bathed in a kind of nostalgia – after all, the music was great. Bob Dylan’s Forever Young and Jimmy Cliff’s Vietnam are on Mohaiemen’s soundtrack while a student choir performs the Neil Young classic Ohio about the Kent State shooting. (“This summer I hear the drumming / Four dead in Ohio”). It was also a virulently cinematic moment. The students were protesting a war not only seen on TV screens every night, but one that would soon become the subject of iconic movies.
A discussion across three channels … Through a Mirror, Darkly. Photograph: PR IMAGE
In a section on Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, a Vietnamese-American film critic explains that early viewers from the Vietnamese community complained it was inaccurate: American vets were not really lured into backstreet games of Russian roulette in Saigon. But Cimino’s film is of course “metaphorical” rather than literal, she says in its defence, creating poetic images of war’s madness and despair. It is fascinating to watch this discussion across three channels with a talking head interview juxtaposed with clips of Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken playing blue-collar Americans sucked into a meaningless conflict that destroys them all in different ways.
This is typical of the work’s openness and complexity. Mohaiemen forgoes a narrator or dogmatic agenda for multiple colliding images that leave you always feeling you are missing something, sowing doubt and ambiguity. One thread concerns the nature of public memory. Who gets memorialised and why? What makes one victim of violence a “martyr” while others are forgotten?
He wonders why the white students killed at Kent State were mourned more widely and are remembered more vividly than a Black student and school pupil killed by police at Jackson College in the same bloody month. And why are the 58,220 US soldiers who died in Vietnam remembered with a monument in Washington DC while up to three million Vietnamese deaths are treated as less significant? Such inequalities of grief give this film a restless edge you don’t get in a standard TV documentary.
The artist’s passion for archival research and respect for his interviewees leads him, however, to beautifully undermine and complicate his own argument. The very details of what happened at Jackson remain opaque. The police claimed they were fired on by a sniper, but no evidence of this was ever found. One reason, by contrast, that Kent State is so “iconic” is that the National Guard opened fire in broad daylight, surrounded by cameras, with hundreds of witnesses.
Openness and complexity … Naeem Mohaiemen
In spite of his scepticism about white martyrs, Mohaiemen ends up showing with great power why Kent State haunts modern memory – in a more intimate way than Ken Burns did in his Vietnam documentary. We see it up close here, in enlarged photographs, as eyewitnesses tell the story one more time. After ordering protesters to disperse, National Guard officers huddle to discuss strategy. They then order their men to walk away from the students and, as they seem to retreat, a body of soldiers all turn at the same time, take aim and let loose hundreds of bullets. Students lie dead and dying on the grass. We no longer see it through a glass darkly. We see it face to face.
Mohaiemen’s film blows away nostalgia for the era of protest and classic rock. The setting helps. Artangel has taken over Albany House, a bleak office block that was once home to London Transport Police and has since housed various government agencies. Its sterile aesthetic reminds me of US government building from All the President’s Men.
There is no reassurance here about the present. On screen, Tricky Dicky worms his way out of responsibility for the killings by pointing out that the National Guard is under state, not federal, control. But Nixon was just a crook. Trump by contrast uses the National Guard for his own ends. Worse things are just a shot away.
At Albany House, London, from 21 September until 9 November