Nonsynchronism in green: Constellations of resistance

Offering a counterpoint to the stabilized view of the pleasant garden of England are two films, both made in 2022: Arjuna Neuman’s Syncopated Green and Onyeka Igwe’s The Miracle on George Green . In this article, I explore the commissioning, circulation and production of the films to critically assess how the curation and distribution of artists' moving image can corroborate, complicate or disrupt ideas of the English pastoral. Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s account of the ‘nonsynchronous contradiction’, this article suggests that both films offer opportunities of refusal of the flattening effect of linear temporalities and the march of historical progress. By offering accounts of the various ‘nows’ which run counter to the Edenic vision of English rural space, both films foreground the racialised and classed antagonisms of English rural space. The tension of the Ungleichzeitigkeit (‘nonsynchronous’) is revealed in the works, as each grapples with the disciplining counterinsurgency that aims to subdue the ‘miracle’ of concepts of hope, utopia, liberation, fulfilment and transcendence. Each film connects rave culture, ecological direct action and 1990’s anti-capitalism to what Ernst Bloch called the ‘warm stream’ of human history, running as an undercurrent to the ‘cold stream’ of economic reductionism and the flattening and homogenization of time.