Blind Ambition is a nine-part video shot throughout one day in the streets of Cairo. It features nine social situations that take place in public spaces. Shot with two mobile phones, Blind Ambition gives the impression of using real-time, factual footage material.

The wayward footsteps of scrambling pedestrians, the abrupt shrieking honks of taxis and the generic blare of the city streets are all silent. The sentimental attachment to these presumed sounds has long fueled the romantic cliché of the city, Cairo, as a character—living breathing, smelling, bright, noisy, loud, hot. In Hassan Khan’s Blind Ambition (2012), through a series of predetermined cuts and dubbed dialogue, the camera becomes a character. Khan’s artfully composed black and white long-short or short-feature (running roughly 46 minutes) was shot entirely on his Samsung Galaxy phone. Khan later recorded and dubbed the characters’ scripted dialogue into the audio track of the film effectively removing any of the presumed ambient audio that would otherwise be present. This calculated gesture by Khan dramatically centers the dialogue or “chatter” of the film’s characters within intimate yet intentionally generic vignettes. The rough camera movements, the extended tracking shots, the generic and even quotidian subject matter of the characters and their dialogue might tempt viewers into receiving Blind Ambition as a kind of experimental documentary or at least an attempt to document. It is not. Instead what Khan offers us in this dynamic and subtle work is a brilliant visual soundtrack in which the camera engages the sonic and visual effect of chatter. Whether two girls’ truncated arguments about chocolate and trust, or young children’s invented language of play with a soccer ball, or the subtle class tensions that arise in a business meeting, Khan engages the, at times, subtly unintelligible micro spaces that are marked with culture’s residue. These spaces, which Khan fictionalizes, are not inscrutable, but deceptively familiar in their subtle unfamiliarity—not unlike chatter. Khan is suggesting something about the dynamism of culture by playing with and representing the gestures that partially fall outside “culture’s” set purview. The camera is not so much a device for the capture of these elusive cultural meanings that attract and evade us. The subtle management of natural light and seemingly generic visual subjects is juxtaposed with the overtly synthetic composition of the dubbed soundtrack of speech. The line between automation and something else here is quite blurry. In a scene in which a group of young men argue cyclically about the money they owe one another, Khan inserts slight audio fades within the dubbed dialogue that mirror the camera’s movements towards and away from the subjects. The seemingly automated fades in the dialogue reflect a studio dynamic, which does not try to recreate the fictionalized imbeddedness of the camera that is romanticized in documentary, but indicates the camera’s intimate involvement in manufacturing these moments. Through the masterful soundtrack of this film we come to realize the formal gesture of the camera as characterized not through abstract omniscience, but through silence—its tendentious relationship to sound.

Credits

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

Blind Ambition premiered at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012
SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul, Turkey, 2012