Writers and artists throughout history have often romanticized the seafaring journey. Rosalind Nashashibi’s Bachelor Machines Part I seems, however, to express something outside of this depiction of history and adventure. Despite being set in contemporary times, the crew could well exist at any point in the last fifty years or so.

Following an all-male crew on a cargo ship travelling from southern Italy to Sweden, the film is both a conglomeration of visceral and mechanical, as well as Nashashibi’s continued exploration of the relationships found in the mundane. The anticipated aspects of seafaring are in fact simple and routine, until occasionally being taken over by some force of nature.

Nashashibi’s thirty-minute work is shot through a wind-up Bolex 16mm camera, each part of the film separately recorded in segments of twenty-eight seconds. This process creates the sense of both repetition and time passing throughout the piece, suggesting the slow, grinding rigour of life inside the vessel. We witness life passing for each of the sailors through static and moving images, tiny vignettes of their enclosed days.

Nashashibi also creates an aesthetic vocabulary that implicates the human lives as cogs within the system, while somehow retaining their warmth. The intensity of focus placed on certain shots – the form of a ladle, a lock, and the embellishment on a uniform.

The ship is a microcosmic world, a self-imposed closed system in which each sailor has chosen to live; there is camaraderie, hierarchy, and misunderstanding within. The vessel contains its own nation, governed by the captain.

Just as in the large glass of Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (Duchamp coined the first use of the term ‘Bachelor Machine,’ in reference to this work starting in 1913), the viewer is forever ignorant to actual life within the organism. The viewers are not part of the machine, hence unable to understand the life it contains.

The generally unintelligible dialogue deepens the rift between viewer and crew. There is an overlying tension in being partially privy to this life, a separate space with a number of outcomes. Nashashibi’s concentrated views through portholes suggest the familiar to the viewer, that which each sailor has turned away from.

One moment the lighting creates the silhouette of a man almost joined to the machine he works at, the next we see someone alone in his cabin. Though unable to understand their moving life, the audience will conjecture something towards the relationships taking place amongst the crew, but also what will happen to them beyond their arrival at a port.

This work is a credit to Nashashibi’s ability to create a challenging interaction from what might otherwise lie overlooked in the background of another composition. Despite the lack of an explicit climax, the outcome of Bachelor Machines I is virtuous and provokes thought outside of what can be shown through sequence, as it is different for the vessel, the sea and its captives.