Who Shall Remain Nameless1978

Who Shall Remain Nameless (16mm, 16 minutes, black-and-white, 1978)
This film juxtaposes extreme close-up film of the activity of ants in the tunnels of an ant farm
with a narration by a middle-aged, middle-American male discussing the relation between race
riots and the positions of the planets. The narration derives from found tapes I’d discovered in a
thrift store that had been recorded by a man named Archie Olson, speaking to his daughter in
Minnesota. In other scenes, texts from Joan of Arc and Eldridge Cleaver, patterns of feathers and
seeds falling, Harry Partch percussion music, and imagery of multiplying bacteria supply a view
of the American political-cultural landscape that continually shifts from the macrocosmic to
microcosmic and from practical and conversational to the occult and religious.