Coinciding with this month’s Movie Club screening of 3 Films by Audrey Lam, which are available to stream via our Patreon through October 25th, we present a dialog between two filmmaker-librarians on the filmmaker’s debut feature film.
by Blanca García and James Devine,
with special thanks to Alex Fields for additional edits.
Most art operating on the margins must find its form around the pre-existing necessities and conditions of everyday life. This means the work of our passions, whether artistic or romantic, cannot always be easily distinguished from the capitalist work which constrains it; the worker is forced to claw back what time and energy they can within the structures of a job. Shift work can provide an escape of constant supervision and a library at night can conceal as much as it reveals. In Audrey Lam’s 16mm feature Us and the Night (2024), the strange linguistic courtship of library workers Umi (Umi Ishihara) and Xiao (Xiao Deng) takes place under cover of the sharp overhead lighting of a university library.
It will soon be ten years since I turned to library work, precisely because I thought it could be a profession where the work of my passions did not have to be fully alienated, relaxed enough that I could keep some inches of self present while in paid work time. This view was, of course, naive, but in a library, the way one’s life, interests, emotions, creep into the daily stolen time of labour happens in ways more unexpected than most other workplaces. Us and The Night starts with one of those library tasks where serendipity is more common: the weeding of unused stock, often unveiling random subject matters, slips of paper, dates long past stamped in the due date frontispiece, which inevitably unleash memories. A note found by Xiao behind some books unravels the memory that is the film; the remembrance of a different library, its subtropical rain soundtrack, and Umi, whose name meant the ocean, but also spells their complicity—”u am I, I am u, Umi, do you hear it?”
In this library, glimpses of others are rare, effaced by the intimacy and secrecy of the workplace at night. Each characters’ presence seems at times only a trace remembered by the other: Umi, often distracted from cleaning, curiously investigates books from the shelves, dances, sleeps, or lounges, while Xiao shelves. Xiao teaches Umi English, though this is not a one way transmission: each relates puns and stories received from the other. This process of simultaneous learning and deconstruction has an incantatory effect on the structures around them.
A joint play where two people choose to embody the premise that a university library can be the whole universe, as all that is concealed in its shelves and shapes can only exist through its users, its readers, its workers. Like in Dickinson’s poem, in a library we are all vacant nobodies, ready to encounter each other. To become filled with “letters as letters, letters as numbers, letters as stories” and, in turn, make meaning.
These discursive explorations refer both to their own lives and the content of the books around them. The girls’ adventures are invoked by the library’s stillness and alienation from all that is outside it: its texts fill the gap to constitute the world. Nouns here are always common and never proper: the mountains, summers, forests are generalised, abstracted, elemental. The fixity of the world is released, and as the signified is lost, these aisles have to become equal to all isles. Language takes primacy here, leading the camera on its travels and inviting the viewer to participate and make their own discoveries below the surface level of the image.
Years ago, in my own evening library job, I made up a game where I would collect combinations of the three-letter segments at the end of a decimal classification number, and make up words, phrases, messages to keep me from falling asleep. Later on, in a different library and while falling in love, I would constantly seek advice from titles and phrases glimpsed while sorting volumes alphabetically. These days, even in the busiest library I have ever worked in, I cannot stop myself from seeking fragments underlined by other readers in certain books, and imagining conversations where we debate each other’s understanding. The logic of the library, structures of knowledge that impose biased interpretations of reality, of our lives, of each other, can be defied internally, challenged by the playful recomposition of its signifiers, even if doing so grows from an acceptance of its pervasive confinement.
Like Umi and Xiao, the camera is confined between the shelves during these night hours and the library appears as a relentlessly structured place, albeit one which both necessitates and enables the girls’ escape. We are always returning to the repeating stacks and corners, and through the metaphorical imprint we can perceive, in these same singular images, the spell-like nature of Umi and Xiao’s discursions appears. We see light fall on the foaming white pages of a row of books, arcing across the screen as they are straightened by an unseen hand. Soon we will see the navy spines of books as a rippling surface, or an inversion of the space as the blue carpet becomes a waterway between islands of mangroves. In passages like these the images are never completely disconnected from the filmmaker’s intent, yet the approach is one which seeks not to dissolve the signifier completely, but revel in the infinite possibilities of signs open to the viewer.
Perhaps this being the most poignant aspect of the film’s vision: for Audrey Lam, a former library worker, the possible worlds hidden within the stacks never eclipse the shelves themselves, the material surfaces where the dream takes place. A library can be the universe, but it is also a mundane space of repetitive gestures: cleaning, sorting, tidying, carrying, wheeling, reaching, straightening, stamping, mending; while most ideals of what a librarian does seem to only contemplate the researching, reading, and supervising of knowledge. A library, like a domestic space, can only function thanks to the invisibility of reproductive labour. The statistics show that more than 80% of library workers in non-managerial positions are women, many of them immigrants like myself. And in this weird mixture between workplace and place of care, upkeep, and rest, my favorite glimpses of the film happen. Umi resting, yawning while swiveling in an ever familiar desk chair; Xiao pausing in between tidying tables, lost in the reflection of a crossroads of LED lamps; the secret of the library, Umi’s present, not an incantation but the effort of every hand that processed a book into the collection. With Umi recounting the story of how, despite his abandonment, Frankenstein’s monster teaches himself to read, we are reminded of this indisputable power the subject has to shape reality, and the agency of the worker over their conditions.
This rediscovery of the world from the matter of the workplace around it suggests not only an essential reclaiming of time and values, but the vulnerability of intellectual structures to the prodding of those marginalised by origin or language. The library as a physical and intellectual construction is constantly being rebuilt by the labour of readers and library workers. To look curiously is to reveal the opportunity immanent in each constitutive action: what is to stop a repetitive task performed by a precariously employed library worker from becoming a veiled dedication from one lover to another?
Blanca García is a Spanish writer, filmmaker, researcher, and library worker based in London (UK).
James Devine is an occasional writer and filmmaker based in London (UK).
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