A ring of black text on a transparent background, reading 'Monday Short'.

Ishu Patel’s Bead Game (1977)

So maybe it isn’t utopian, but it isn’t nihilistic either, and when you’re looking at the span of human history, that’s its own sort of optimism.

black background, illustrations of buffalo are made out of green sequins on the left and pink sequins on the right

NOTE: This Monday short was originally posted on October 2, 2017. We are posting Peter Hemminger's previous Monday shorts until we exhaust the amazing archive.

It’d be a stretch to call Ishu Patel’s Bead Game an optimistic film. Its depiction of nature is one of constant struggle of life against life, following the arms race of evolution from the earliest life to the dawn of humanity. That dawning isn’t a break, though, so much as an amplification, and war and violence are seen as an inevitable consequence of life’s aggressive nature.

But the last image is a hopeful one, or at least one that holds a hopeful possibility. After showing the culmination of humanity’s military ingenuity in a burst of atomic bombs, the scene is echoed with trees in place of mushroom clouds, with a central character ultimately placing the atom in the middle of a cat’s cradle. It’s a peaceful image, but a fragile one, too, without the inevitability of the earlier apocalypse.

So maybe it isn’t utopian, but it isn’t nihilistic either, and when you’re looking at the span of human history, that’s its own sort of optimism.

syn. Amy Johnson worked as a typist for a firm of solicitors before her record- breaking solo flight from Croydon to Australia in 1930. This film has been created with an Underwood 315 typewriter as a celebration of her journey.

dir. Lizzy Hobbs

1977