Shirkers and the joy of unfinishing.
“Sophia Siddique Harvey’s experience of the unfinished is the strangest - and most uplifting - that I’ve ever encountered.”
Sometimes when I interview people with unfinished projects, they feel pleased and confident - even empowered - in having made a decision to leave something incomplete. If a project isn’t enjoyable, is causing stress, or just doesn’t feel like the right path to take anymore, then it can be freeing to accept that it’s better left undone and to move on. Equally, it’s regularly the case that my interviewees feel wistful about their unfinished work, but still see it as valuable because it helped them to get somewhere else. The best examples of this are probably writers whose ideas, or phrases, or images, or styles from an unfinished work mulch down to become the fertilizer for a later piece of work.
But occasionally I interview people whose unfinished things are less happily incomplete, including people who’ve had their work curtailed for reasons beyond their control. Those reasons can be dramatic - renowned poet and academic Robert Hampson for example told me about two of his projects that were curtailed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They can also be bewildering, odd, unsettling, and take people in new and unexpected directions.
Sophia Siddique Harvey’s experience of the unfinished is the strangest - and most uplifting - that I’ve ever encountered.
Sophia is the producer of the unfinished feature film Shirkers, the subject of Sandi Tan’s 2018 documentary of the same name. Sophia filmed the original Shirkers - which she now calls Shirkers 1.0 - in the summer of 1992 alongside Sandi and Jasmine Ng. Sophia met Sandi and Jasmine when she joined a film course at Substation Singapore’s first independent arts centre. Shirkers 1.0 was directed by their teacher, a man called Georges Cardona. Once filming was complete, Georges took the tapes, ostensibly to work on editing the film. As it turned out, he had now intention of doing so. Instead, he withheld the tapes from Sophia, Sandi, and Jasmine - refusing them access for reasons that have never become entirely clear. The footage, but not the sound recordings, was eventually recovered when Georges’ ex-wife discovered and returned it after his death. That story is told in Tan’s documentary (Shirkers 2.0) in which Sophia gives her reflections and which features lots of footage from the original film.
I came away from interviewing Sophia with a profound sense of exhilaration. She told me about how participating in Shirkers 2.0 had opened up for her a well of creativity that had long-been dormant. That means doing things like painting a tiny watercolour and writing a short poem everyday (many of which Sophia told me are odes to her magnificent cat, Magnus). It’s also meant finding novel, experimental ways of approaching her academic work as a scholar of film. Sophia read to me a quotation from the poet and artist Giselle Buchanan that encapsulates her new, creative outlook:
“Creative living is not just about what you can produce. It’s about how you tend to your daily living, the lens through which you look, how you adorn your body, how you prepare your food, what you notice as you’re looking, what you hear when you’re listening. It’s about the beauty you extract from the quotidian of this life.”
Not only does this attitude to life reflect Sophia’s joyful (re)discovery of her enormous creativity, but it also captures much of what unfinishing is about. Near-inescapable pressure to produce generally means to produce something that is complete - it’s revealing in fact of the value placed on completion that even the term ‘production’ is near-synonymous with ‘a finished thing’. Being able to break away from a focus on production and instead to embody an imaginative, careful attention to the world and ones own actions in it is revelatory and joyful.
Sophia’s experience of unfinishedness is undoubtedly odd and bewildering - so bewildering in fact that she avoids thinking about the mystery of why Georges took the Shirkers 1.0 tapes, because to do so would be to allow too much mental space for a hurtful subject that it’s not possible to unravel. But the fruitfulness of revisiting Shirkers 1.0 with Tan’s documentary - the footage revitalised and the original credits restored - shows how the unendingness of the incomplete can resurface in surprising, delightful ways. It may be decades after we’d stopped trying to finish our half-done thing, but that doesn’t mean the half-done thing is finished with what it has to give us.