phylum
between kingdom and class
There is something I recognize
when I let the soil and the limbs
of the sensuous world
hold me i drop the weight of my head,
the back of it supported by my father’s hand
the reeds by the river talk about me
but i cannot hear them over the hisses
and the clangs of my scion
don’t they know that they are but feed for it?
i do not mean for my fingertips to dig
into the skin of the earth or my
limbs to pull on the wooden veins of the sky
but i cannot help it i cannot help it
i have dreamt of a child all my life
but in my dream,
my baby was warm and did not rust
and it cared for me too.
in my wake i tend to it
even when i want to run because
i promised some days the whirrs
sound like my father,
before they rendered him bloodless
and that is when i notice
the thousand severed hands
supporting the back of my baby’s head
Phylum is a 16mm experimental short film and an accompanying poem of the same title. Phylum was shot on Kodak Tri-X B/W and Vision3 500T with a Bolex camera, with intercut footage from the now public domain 1936 film Master Hands. Master Hands was a sponsored film depicting the inner workings of the Chevrolet factory in Flint, Michigan. It depicted the manual labor of the hands of the workers as well as grand and heroic shots of the colossal industrial machinery to an orchestral score. This film was shot right before the workers, starting at this factory and spreading to others, staged a powerful strike, sitting down on the job and occupying the factories, which achieved them union recognition, rights for the United Auto Workers and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and a stimulation in labor solidarity across the country.
Inspired by Marx’s vivid imagery and symbolic language in Capital, such as the “demon power” of the “mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories,” and the “vampire-like” nature of capital “sucking living labour,” Phylum aims to provoke thoughts about the process of labor, metabolism between man and nature itself, the tools and implements used in processes of labor, and the machinery (constant capital) it evolves into using the surplus value and dead labor from the worker. I aim to visually and sonically explore the way in which the machinery and labor process under capitalism creates a generational dissonance between the self and the natural world we live in.
— Anjali Bakhru, 2026