Berkeley Art Museum

The first artistic piece that I stumbled upon was the one that I was most taken with. It was a film called Bachelor Machines, by Rosalind Nashashibi. It was a film that followed the lives of the men working on a cargo ship.

The room was dark and deceptively casual. I started to walk by but was captivated by the screen, just barely visible behind draping curtains. I felt my way through the fabric that separated the film from the rest of the museum. I expected to find a large audience, seated in rows, watching the film quietly. Instead, I squinted into the darkness and noticed six empty beanbag chairs. I laughed to myself, as I lowered my body to the ground and took a seat in the squishy brown bag.

The film was very slow. There was no narration, and each scene consisted of the simple life these sea men lived. I watched as one man opened the residence door. The sun outside was hardly up, but it framed his silhouette as he peered out at the morning. Another scene consisted of the side of the ship, rising and falling with the pull of the waves. There was a scene of a crewmember, dressed in blue. He walked slowly in front of the camera, unconsciously switching which hand he stuffed into his pocket. At last the telephone rang and he answered it in a language I didn’t understand.

While watching this film I kept getting strange feelings. They were like flashes of empathy. These cargo ship crewmembers had a different kind of life. It was slowed down. Their life was mundane, but at the same time contained. It wasn’t as if these men were pining for home. They just seemed to be living separate from normal life. It was as if what they used to know was forgotten, and this life had taken its place.

There was a night scene that exaggerated this feeling. The control room at the front of the ship had no lights in it. There was only a faint, bluish glow coming off the ocean, showing through the windows. The truly bright part about this scene were the lighted TV screens, emitting an endless, flickering light. The faces of these mesmerizing information screens were obstructed once in a while by the passing shadow of a man.

This whole socially simple, and technically complicated control room was this crew’s whole life. It was simply a life of men. A life full of sailors. Their jobs had become second nature, and each shadow moved with the same gentle purpose. I couldn’t tell one shadow from another.

The ship was it’s own world. The film made it seem as if it could be the only world. I was drawn into the film, and I could feel myself believing this. The only thing that reminded me that this world was really contained in another world was the slight movement of the kitchen utensils. The soup spoons were suspended on a wall, and they trembled, ever so slightly. This was the only thing that seemed to remind me that this ship was gliding across a body of water. It was this mild movement that reminded me that this ship was almost, but not perfectly in unison with the ocean. Some day that ship would reach its destination, and the crew would step out onto real earth again. But would it actually become clear which world was real?