Transforming Worlds

On Hetain Patel’s Don’t Look at the Finger (2017)

By Hammad Nasar

Hammad Nasar analyzes Hetain Patel’s film Don’t Look at the Finger (2017) while retracing the cultural tropes which, through the years, have informed the artist’s visual language in proposing approaches to living with difference, from the figure of Spider-Man to the poetics of Bruce Nauman.

Hetain Patel, Don’t Look at the Finger, 2017. Single Channel HD video, stereo sound. Courtesy of the artist, and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

Hetain Patel’s Don’t Look at the Finger (2017) follows a stylized bout of prenuptial combat between a man and a woman. The film is shot inside a London church, but the cinematic wedding ceremony it depicts has little in common with the Christian tradition. What we see is extravagantly cosmopolitan. The film appears to have been costumed in West Africa, choreographed in Hong Kong, and scored somewhere in between. The significance of these three elements—costume, choreography and music—makes them full-fledged characters within the construction of the film, rather than merely supporting features. It is the triangulation between them that furnishes those not versed in British Sign Language with a narrative arc. No words are spoken throughout the film—all communication is physical and nonverbal. Even the wedding vows are signed.

It is not obvious if the members of the cast are portraying deaf characters or are engaged in an unspoken ritual. Patel’s decision not to have subtitles flips the usual advantages afforded the able-bodied; those versed in sign language are privileged over those who are not. Most hearing audiences are instead offered Amy May’s haunting score, which channels the epic grandeur of Hans Zimmer and the mood of Ang Lee’s crossover hit, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). There is no attempt to mediate between these two audiences—the film offers different experiences with no false equivalences.

The hesitant and nervous manner in which the photogenic young couple approach the priestess presiding over the ceremony echoes a thousand arranged marriages in Bollywood films. The supportive arrangement of their respective families is suggestive of another typically South Asian cultural trope—the wedding as a union of two families. The all-Black casting, however, allows no easy anchor to the artist’s cultural heritage. Gender norms are similarly resisted. The couple’s ritual call-and-response combines kung fu and signing, in aesthetically pleasing exchanges that move fluidly between a beautiful and occasionally vulnerable man and a woman who oozes strength from every gesture, eschewing gender expectations. We are invited into a different world.

THE COUPLE’S RITUAL CALL-AND-RESPONSE COMBINES KUNG FU AND SIGNING, IN AESTHETICALLY PLEASING EXCHANGES THAT MOVE FLUIDLY BETWEEN A BEAUTIFUL AND OCCASIONALLY VULNERABLE MAN AND A WOMAN WHO OOZES STRENGTH FROM EVERY GESTURE, ESCHEWING GENDER EXPECTATIONS. WE ARE INVITED INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD.

Hetain Patel, Don’t Look at the Finger, 2017. Single Channel HD video, stereo sound. Courtesy of the artist, and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

The title, Don’t Look at the Finger, is taken from Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973), a touchstone of the martial arts genre, in which Lee warns us not to let the pointing finger distract us from what the finger is pointing toward. Patel’s unvarnished admiration for Lee is not restricted to his sayings (Be Like Water [2012], a performance turned into a TED Talk, is another Patel title borrowed from a Lee maxim) or his symbolic value as an Asian action hero for a brown boy growing up in a predominantly white industrial northern English town. The artist also seems inspired by Lee’s approach to filmmaking, where it is the moving body rather than the script that is the life force of the work. Don’t Look at the Finger is perhaps Patel’s most generous invitation for the audience to enter the dojo and occupy that space between action and expectation that Patel is interested in playing in, and Lee is warning us against.

The scale of the projection and the immersive sound design ensure that we see the figures at human scale and feel the film at a visceral level. We are enveloped in its fictive world. Followers of Patel’s work will recognize the seeds from which Don’t Look at the Finger has blossomed. Eccentric wedding ceremonies, for example, sprinkle his oeuvre. In The Jump (2015), a double-sided video projection, one screen presents us with his extended family arranged in his grandmother’s living room, dressed as if for a wedding and staring at the artist as he leaps from the arm of his grandmother’s sofa in a homemade Spider-Man costume in super-slow motion. The other screen gives us the Hollywood epic version of that same leap against a dark, smoke-filled background—adding a dark yang to the family wedding scene’s quasi-comedic yin. In an earlier work, The First Dance (2012), the recently married Patel restages a scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with his wedding sherwani standing in for kung fu robes opposite his wife—the dance and performance curator and dramaturge Eva Martinez—who is wearing the same Indian wedding dress that the eagle-eyed may recognize from The Jump.

Hetain Patel, The Jump, 2015. Two-channel HD video, stereo sound. Courtesy of the artist, and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

Holly Waddington’s costumes for Don’t Look at the Finger take inspiration from Japanese samurai attire and avant-garde fashion, and visually reference the colonial histories of Dutch wax prints. In their functionality, however, wherein a series of folds and shifts transforms fighting gear into ceremonial dress, their genealogy lies in the Japanese/American Transformers media franchise, which is based on sentient, autonomous robots that can transform themselves into multiple forms including vehicles and animals. Here too, as with wedding ceremonies, Patel has prior form. In Fiesta Transformer (2013), the artist collaborated with his autoworker father and engineer brother to transform a humble 1988 Ford Fiesta—the same model as the artist’s first car—into a squatting, humanlike entity. The transformative potential of the squatting figure is a metaphor shared between Patel’s Spider-Man and the Fiesta Transformer.

Patel came of artistic age in the 1990s and went to art school in Salford and Nottingham in the early 2000s. This was a period when the generation known as the Young British Artists was at its peak in the UK. But while the YBA’s brand of knowing irreverence, willful provocation, and populist “stereotypes of Britishness” was heavily promoted by an emergent London art market and readily co-opted by New Labour’s “Cool Britannia” marketing campaign, it did not present an idea of Britain capacious enough to fire the imagination of a Bolton-born son of Indian migrants.¹ Nor did Patel come across the work of John Akomfrah or the BLK art collective during his time at art school.² Patel was drawn instead to the power of self-representation he saw in the now-iconic videos of Bruce Nauman performing to the camera in his studio.³ Combining this deliberate address to camera with the power of mainstream cinema, Patel developed a practice of self-fashioning through fragments of the popular. This is made manifest in the four-screen video installation The Other Suit (2015), where we follow the artist performing a series of recognizable male archetypes from Hollywood blockbusters (from Men in Black to Spider-Man) in his living room.

Hetain Patel, Don’t Look at the Finger, 2017. Single Channel HD video, stereo sound. Courtesy of the artist, and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

In my reading, Patel’s intent is not, as is often posited for artists’ moving-image work, to “operate in the gap between film and art,” but instead to make film that is art.⁴ Or conversely, art that is film. I am not sure he is interested in exploring questions of primacy, neither in his work’s adherence to a set of rules nor modes of address, but rather to the possibility of drawing in the widest audience.

In Being Singular Plural (2000), French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy proposes that we can only make sense of “being” in the world through “being-with” others.⁵ This articulation of community as something that does not exist on its own but rather has to be made or formed through effort—through being-with—is the thread that runs through Patel’s work, with his most fully realized articulation of this notion to date being Don’t Look at the Finger.

There is a considered intersectional approach at play here—the work of being-with is practiced across a range of different axes. It is made evident in the choice of an all-Black cast clad in Japanese-inspired costumes made with West African textiles, being choreographed with a nod to Hong Kong cinema, in a wedding scene that has the narrative structure of Bollywood and the visual exuberance of Coming to America (1988), the romantic comedy starring Eddie Murphy that is another Hollywood favorite of Patel’s.⁶ But it is through the positioning of signing as an alternative form of communication that the artist is able to most prominently tap into ancestral knowledge embedded in the body.

In a short YouTube video on the role of sign language in the film, Louise Stern—the sign consultant who collaborated on the film—identifies in Patel’s work a desire to connect with other people. What we see in Don’t Look at the Finger is a realization of what more than thirteen years of Patel’s earlier artistic practice—an accumulative and extended exercise in being-with—has made possible.

Marriage of course is one exemplar of connecting with others, of being “singular plural.” It is an optimistic enterprise. Don’t Look at the Finger channels that optimism. It is a profoundly hopeful film about living with difference without being framed by it.