Project Detail

The Third Part of the Third Measure

Synopsis

'The Third Part of the Third Measure' creates an encounter with the militant minimalism of avant-garde composer, pianist and vocalist Julius Eastman. The two-channel video installation focuses on what The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun) describe as an “experience of watching in the key of listening”, invoking political feelings of defiance and the collective practice of movement building that participates in the global struggles against neoreactionary authoritarianism. Their work invites viewers to attend to exemplary ecstatic aesthetics of black radicalism that Eastman himself once described as “full of honor, integrity and boundless courage”. (Berlinale brochure)
Official Selection Berlinale 2018 - Forum Expanded Exhibition - "A Mechanism Capable of Changing Itself" - Group exhibition at Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg

Details

Year
2018
Type of film
Shorts
Running time
44 mins
Director
The Otolith Group
Producer
The Otolith Group
Editor
Simon Arazi
Director of Photography
Kate McDonough
Sound
Sound Design: Tyler Friedman
Composer
With Music By: Julius Eastman

Production Status

Production Company

UK, United Arab Emirates, US coproduction

Sales Company

Page updates

This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

See also

You may also be interested in other relevant projects in the database.

Infinity minus Infinity Infinity minus Infinity

Director: The Otolith Group

Year: 2020

INFINITY MINUS INFINITY draws on several inspirations: the modernist verse of the Jamaican poet Una Marson, the alluvial invocations of the Martiniquan philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant, the black feminist poetics of the Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and the racial formation of geology theorised by British geographer Kathryn Yusoff to dramatise an audio-visual experiment in choreo-poetics.<br /> INFINITY MINUS INFINITY brings together dance, music, recital and digital animation to compose a transhistorical zone in which the unpayable debts of racial capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing crimes of capitalogenic climate catastrophe. Infinity minus Infinity enacts the durational timelines of past distress, present duress and future dread through the assembly of a chorus of trans-temporal deities whose utterances, expressions, gestures and movements personify the compounded, accumulated, irreparable times and spaces of the hostile environment. <br /> The phrase ‘hostile environment’ invokes the covert policy of targeting migrants enacted by the Conservative government since 2014. It stands for the criminalisation of the Afro-Caribbean women and men that migrated to Britain in the 1950s to help reconstruct its industrial infrastructure. The effort to detain and deport these women and men of the Windrush generation – so called because they followed in the wake of the men that emigrated to Britain from the Caribbean on board the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 – reveals the British state’s commitment to disarticulating the forms of attachment and belonging of Afro-Caribbean settlement that helped decolonize the British empire from within. <br /> Infinity minus Infinity extends the policy of the ongoing hostile environment backward and forward in an inter-scalar movement between times and spaces that dramatises Saidiya V. Hartman’s formulation of the afterlife of slavery within a choreography of what Christina Sharpe calls anti-blackness as total climate. (RCA)<br /> Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum Expanded - International premiere

A French woman kisses her son before he is evacuated on a bus out of war-torn Paris during World War 2. Ghosts

Director: Katia Lom

Year: 2024

A woman at the end of her life wanders lost in the woods where her memories find her. Seamlessly blending historical archive footage with dramatizations, the narrative explores how nature connects us to our past.

Even If We Never Met Even If We Never Met

Director: Dean Milne

Year: 2025

In the stillness of a park, a grieving young man meets a mysterious stranger whose comforting presence rediscovers hope and uncovers a connection that transcends time and loss.