Moby Dick; or, The Whale is the latest gesammtkunstwerk by artist collective Moved By The Motion, Schauspielhaus Zürig and Wu Tsang. Her adaptation of the great American classic as layered as the book. Where Herman Melville uses reports, scholarly sources and monologues, Tsang deploys film and music.
In a collage of theatrical performance, dance, found footage, animation and documentation nature footage, we see the hunt for the white whale. All of film history passes by with the use of background projections and intertitles. Even within the image, Tsang experiments with the medium: the documentary footage and found footage are in 4:3 format, the old silent film format, the rest is in widescreen.
The accompanying score by Caroline Shaw and Andrew Yee is played live by orchestra Bryggen. Beneath that is another layer of sound and music by DJ Asma Maroof, whose ringing sounds sometimes drown out the orchestra. Where the orchestra plays a lyrical, European-inspired composition, Amoof's score provides the dark undertones, the menacing sounds of an impending doom.
Which perspective do you choose?
Whoever has the last word has the right to historiography. In Tsang's version, not only whaler and adventurer Ishmael is a survivor, but also the under-achiever, played by black poet and philosopher Fred Moton. He is Black, queer and radical, and author of such works as The Undercommons, a series of essays on power and control from Black's perspective. A good and subversive choice to give him the only spoken role.
The rest of the film is silent, another subversive choice. The perspective is no longer Melville's Ishmael, Tsang's Moby Dick is postcolonial and genderqueer. The assistant librarian wears blue glitter eye shadow and wears a wide robe and beaded necklaces in his underwater library. Melville's question marks about power become exclamation marks here. The latent homoeroticism is magnified. The dominant white male narrative is broken, and what better way to do that than to literally leave out the voice? Now we do have to think about whose narrative we are seeing.
On power and nature
The power structures aboard the whaleship are in question. Captain Ahab is no longer "a grand, ungodly, god-like man" as he is in Melville's version, but a megalomaniacal, revenge-seeking madman. He wants revenge at all costs on the white whale that bit off his leg. He does not care that he drags the lives of his entire crew into his downfall. The white man as destroyer of both the lives of his crew and nature. The parallels with the destruction of nature now are numerous. Apt is the close-up of a whale's eye turning into a blood-red vortex.
One of the main characters is the Queequeg, the first harpooner. A wonderful portrayal by Tosh Basco, Wu Tsang's friend and regular collaborator. With Melville, he is an islander, has a made-up ethnicity and is cannibal; while Melville was concerned with the position of workers, they had to be white. In this postcolonial adaptation, Queequeg is a mysterious gender-ambiguous harpooner with agency. Thus, there are more subtle and less subtle adjustments to the original text.
A late-capitalist narrative?
In the floating factory that is such a ship, we see the collectivity of processing whales. Sailors process the blubber, blue and sparkling for the occasion, and nearly lose their lives in the process. All for profit is yet another critical reference to our late-capitalist society. As is the scene where they work the whale house, a kind of rubbery fabric on a wooden frame, with knives. I was reminded of a sail: how can you sail if you destroy your sail? How hard are we digging our own grave?
Wu Tsang started reading Moby Dick only after a post-colonial reading about the book. Initially, she thought such a tough man's book could have nothing to do with her life. And although she finds racism abject, there are enough useful elements in the book to base a film and a video installation ( on show at the Whitney biennial) on it. But one with a new and political interpretation of Sophia Al-Maria and the whole collective she works with. One in which they break the dominant narrative and provide space for marginalised voices.
That pluralism, reflected in the multitude of forms and styles, is pleasing to the eye and feels logical and organic. You sense that there is a whole collective behind this adaptation. It does justice to the layering of Melville's novel without following it closely. You may note that it wants too much and shoots in too many directions.
But I marvelled at the visual power, imagination and guts of this group of performers.
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