Reading Riar Rizaldi

This text is an exercise in making transparent how I enter into a film. It includes revelations of embodied knowledge as well as texts, games, photograhs and other artworks that have helped me to construct my understandings of time. More often than not, we are citing ourselves. This reading list may say more about me than it does about Riar Rizaldi’s films. It allows us to study the projection.

Before film criticism, analysis and prose, let us rest in the vulnerable and intimate state of unknowing. This moment is for wonder, and lack of better words.

1.           Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo. Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey, 1986.

2.           My sister’s Guyanese version of Jollof rice - a recipe that is now passing up through generations.

3.           Lim, Bliss Cua. Translating Time : Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Duke University Press, 2009.

4.           Brewster. Sandra. Blur 18, 2017. Photo-based gel transfer on archival paper, Overall: 101.6 × 88.9 cm

5.           Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness : Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

6.           project Somewhere, In the Pause Between the Ringing. Version 9.0c, Steam, 2019.

7.           Walcott, Rinaldo. The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom. Duke University Press, 2021.

8.           Sun showers in the late afternoon that feel like morning dew.

9.           Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle -L’Ouverture Publications, 1972.

10.        Ndiritu, Grace Becoming Plant. (Denmark, Norway, United Kingdom, 2022), Color / Sound, English subtitles, 49 mins 25.