IF THERE'S ANOTHER UTTER I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT
During a recent conversation with my predecessor Sarah Minor, now the video essay editor at Brink, Minor inspired me to think about language in video essays as a texture or a character. Our conversation reminded me of when I studied video essays at the University of Iowa with Corey Creekmur, and I saw first kogonada’s beautiful collage of various shots of hands in the films of Robert Bresson. kogonada’s film, devoid of voiceover or text on screen, prodded me to ask, How can a video essay convey an idea without saying anything? What can montage do in place of language? These questions were at the forefront of my mind when curating the 2025 summer issue for TriQuarterly. Each of these three films are preoccupied with language to varying degrees, though not every film coheres around the communicability of language. Rather, language is both legible and indecipherable, a grain and a feeling, something that narrates and something that obscures. I’m thrilled to continue to think through this multimodality genre that can break apart or sculpt language anew through the lens of Katherine Franco, Rana San, and Auden Lincoln-Vogel’s work.
In a world made increasingly strange, uncanny, and unrecognizable due to the proliferation of AI, Katherine Franco’s IF THERE’S ANOTHER UTTER I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT is a ludic exploration of infrastructure, landscapes, and digital voice generators. Layers of robotic voices scramble IF THERE’S soundscape into an indecipherable cacophony, eventually devolving into beeps and pure noise. These sounds overlay footage of construction and infrastructure along with clips of a human figure whose presence reminds us that embodied existence still exists in real time and space. Ludic, cryptic, and biting, Franco’s cinepoem is a frenetic exploration of post-modernity, teetering just on the brink of illegibility.
