Martine Syms on ‘The African Desperate’: A Freudian slip that became the title

Martine Syms’ debut feature film, The African Desperate, is a wild trip through the art world. The protagonist, Palace’s (Diamond Stingily) last 24 hours at art school is a vivid, sensory experience of defending her work to uptight examiners as part of her MFA (Master of Fine Arts), drugs, doing laundry, donning sheet masks and a drug-and-music filled graduation party.

The viva-voce in the opening scene also gives the film its title. “Palace says, the African desperate when she is intending to say the African diaspora,” says Syms, over video call from King’s Cross, London. “I wanted to show that she was nervous as well as trying to sound smart and academic. The professors also do not respond to it, as if they are not really listening, rather they are thinking about what they were about to say. It was also something that Diamond said. I knew what she meant, and it became a joke between us because the slip was the truth of how she felt.”

Two experiences

Stingily, an artist and poet, has worked with Syms before. “She was in a piece called Notes on Gesture, which I shot while I was in graduate school. Last fall, we were talking and she said ‘I don’t know what I would have done if I was in that program, and it sparked this seed in my mind for the film. We’ve had two very different experiences in the art world. I liked imagining a character that was the two of us in the program I went to. My first draft was basically me recreating my last day of school and it grew from there.”

About whether the film is autobiographical, the 34-year-old artist says, “In a way, everything I do is, but in the same way, it is not. I am interested in telling a good story. Some of the things that happened in real life are just not that interesting. Someone asked me during a Q&A about my actual graduate review. I said it’s so boring, it’s not even worth talking about! (laughs uproariously) Nothing special happened, I had a beer afterwards. There are however other elements that were part of my experience. I built the story around Diamond and Ruby McCollister. “

Her co-writer, Rocket Caleshu, went to a graduate program like Syms. “I also taught art at graduate and undergraduate levels so some of my experiences were from the teaching side.”

Serendipitous casting

Starting with Stingily, Syms says the casting included people she wanted to work with. “I’d seen Ruby do this set in New York, which was bombing in a way, but she was so hilarious. I knew I wanted to do something with her and had been waiting for the right project.”

Syms went to graduate school with Cammisa Buerhaus. “She had this performance for her thesis that was Monica Lewinsky as a stand-up comedian. She was talking about sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in an unusual and funny way. I knew I wanted Cammisa to be a part of the film. I worked with Erin Leland at my gallery. I had been talking with her about being in another piece I was writing. I liked her look and her performances.

Some of the other people fell into place as they got closer to the shoot, Syms says. “I met Aaron Bobrow at a party six years ago. We did karaoke and I had taken a photo of him doing karaoke. I was in New York in pre-production and showed the photo to a friend saying ‘I want a guy like this’. My friend said, ‘oh, that’s Aaron’. You want me to give you his phone number?’ There were some funny moments like that and lot of cameos from art world people as well.”

Sound of silence

The film makes innovative use of sound. “Discourse was an idea I was thinking about broadly. The film has a lot of dialogue. I wanted that to be a texture and then in the sound mix, we did a lot of playing with sound and space to put the viewer in Palace’s position, her state of mind, in that time. I wanted there to be a sense of fatigue with talking.”

The critique is central to arts education, says Syms and that is what the film starts with. “I wanted the viewer who has never been to art school to feel like they were being critiqued. The silences are the punctuation, when Palace is in water, in nature and by herself. You can tell how intimate she is with people by how much or how little she talks.”

Picture this

Palace with her height and flaming orange hair makes for a striking picture. “Orange is a colour I like to wear. For a long time I had my hair bright. Sometimes when you are in a small area, you stick out intensely, but simultaneously people do not see you. I liked the idea of a six-foot-two-inch Palace with bright orange hair somehow still being unseen.”

With most of her artwork being film and photos, The African Desperate felt a continuation, says Syms. “I thought about it like I think about most projects I do. I worked with a combination of people who work in film and people who work in art. We all say this phrase that I started. Whenever somebody would question a decision or say, ‘I don’t know if we can do that’, I would just scream New American Cinema and then pretty quickly everyone was saying that to each other and it became our rallying cry.”

Digital constructs

While a lot of Syms’ work is in the construction of identities, the conceptual entrepreneur describes social media as being tedious. “There is nothing new about using social media to construct identities that might not be true. I’m thinking about the Van Der Zee studio in Harlem, where people came from the South to the city. They might have been working at a terrible job and living in bad housing, and yet they took these extremely glamorous, beautiful photos, and sent them back to their family at home.”

Part of people making their identities is storytelling, Syms says. “Identities are not fixed though people are constantly trying to fix it. My problem with social media is that it is less about identity in a personal way and more about identity in terms of advertising. People find themselves fitting into a story that they did not write, a story that is like a sitcom. That is just boring to me.”

The African Desperate streams on MUBI from October 21