Other constants exist, such as Mosse\u2019s collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost; his subversion of surveillance technology; and his tackling of large-scale conceptual problems. However, this film surpasses all of Mosse\u2019s previous works in the palpable display of his discomfort with the power dynamic between photographer and subject and his acknowledgment of the former\u2019s contribution to the colonial paradigm at the foundation of the Western landscape tradition, in which perspective and aesthetics have inscribed the signature of empire both pictorially and physically. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"richard](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/web_juillet_Valcourt_RIM21.002-Senador-Porfirio-B.jpg\")
Broken Spectre<\/em>, installation view, Jack Shainman Gallery,
New York, 2024.
Photo: Dan Bradica, courtesy of the artist & Jack Shainman Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/web_juillet_Valcourt_JSGTribeca-RIM-2024-v24.jpg\")
Broken Spectre<\/em>, installation view, Jack Shainman Gallery,
New York, 2024.
Photo: Dan Bradica, courtesy of the artist & Jack Shainman Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Here I am made to think of the scholar Ariella A\u00efsha Azoulay\u2019s photographic triumvirate distinction: \u201cIn a split second, the camera\u2019s shutter draws three dividing lines: in time (between before and after), in space (between who\/what is in front of the camera and who\/what is behind it), and in the body politic (between those who possess and operate such devices and appropriate and accumulate their product and those whose countenance, resources, and labours are extracted)\u201d (Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism,<\/em> 5\u20136). This fraught relationship between photographer and subject\u2014and the accounting of Azoulay\u2019s other points\u2014is epitomized in a narrative segment of the film in which a young Indigenous woman of the Aldeia Pallmi-\u00fb, Adneia Yanomami, despite her evident unease at being in front of the camera, forcefully condemns former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro for allowing goldminers into their territory to commit violence to their land and people. At the same time, she confronts Mosse\u2019s crew, and by extension his future audience, for their complicity in the story by bearing witness to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a ruptured format involving a multiplicity of scales and perspectives, Mosse challenges conventional modes of reportage in an attempt to tell the most epic story of our moment\u2014which, paradoxically, is no longer front-page news. Rather than sequencing logical advances in narrative, Mosse uses breakage as a narrative device, while what the director Harun Farocki called the \u201coperational image\u201d and what the photographer Allan Sekula called the \u201cinstrumental image\u201d provide the pictorial syntax. Such images are meant to be read with narrow intent (as Sekula said of Second World War aerial photography, interpretations needed to discern only if a feature in a photograph was \u201ca machine gun or a stump\u201d), and they are designed to activate a response rather than be interpreted for rhetorical meaning. I believe that it is Mosse\u2019s intent to motivate action with such images and viewers\u2019 need to unconsciously navigate between dissonant indexical and the narratival ways of seeing that make Broken Spectre<\/em> so emotionally and cognitively exacting. In one broken sequence, aerial imagery captured by a custom-designed multispectral camera shows bright-red clustered formations that we understand as trees; this video flanks an atmospheric scene of a plume of black smoke rising into a hazy grey sky, filmed with 35 mm black-and-white infrared film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We know that these things are connected, but we have to work through divergences in perspective, angle, colour, and film speed to understand why. Impressive spatial expansions occur when the four screens holding disparate scenes open into a black-and-white panoramic landscape of grasses being set alight by men (this is their job, after all), the flames expressed in exquisite snaps and pops. This again causes a strange rising of the sublime: environmental destruction should not also sound so alike a cozy campfire. Other panoramic shots feature flooded wetlands whose calm surfaces reflect the sunlight into a silver coating that mirrors the clouds in glinting tension, seducing us into a misguided pastoral interpretation; meanwhile, ultraviolet microscopy showing minuscule life forms on the forest floor at large scale accompanied by ultrasonic audio of insects make us work to move past the delight of the entangled geometry and the feeling that we are falling into a fantasy of shapes to understand this as a fragment of a biome. How can so much beauty exist below the threshold of visibility, while the ugliness above seems to be the mandate of so-called development? Broken Spectre <\/em>prompts us to consider the colossal issues of climate change through localized instances of environmental violence, while simultaneously urging us to question who gets to make things in the world visible, to what ends, and who or what gets made visible despite a lack of wanting to.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/web_juillet_Valcourt_RIM21.014.jpg\")
Broken Spectre,<\/em> video stills, 2024.
Photos: courtesy of the artist & Jack Shainman Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/web_juillet_Valcourt_RIM21.015.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/web_juillet_Valcourt_JSGTribeca-RIM-2024-v42.jpg\")
Broken Spectre<\/em>, installation view, Jack Shainman Gallery,
New York, 2024.
Photo: Dan Bradica, courtesy of the artist & Jack Shainman Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n