From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Retro-Causal Record (Documentary, 2022)
This article concerns a 2022 documentary film. For the theological concept of retro-causality in Beach Surgery adaptation, see Antinomicity and the Past as Future's Product.
The Retro-Causal Record is a 2022 documentary film directed by Maya Okafor that investigates whether adaptations of Beach Surgery existed before the novel's 2020 publication—and whether later adaptations can retroactively summon these earlier works into being.
Shot across Newcastle, Warsaw, Jeddah, and Santiago, Okafor follows a fragmentary trail of contested evidence: a 1993 radio manuscript housed in a Warsaw archive; a 1987 performance piece documented only in a single attendee's journal; the disputed Addis Ababa Icon Cycle, allegedly a 1989 fresco sequence that no institution has recovered; and interviews with archivists and curators whose catalogues of "pre-Beach Surgery precursors" were later retracted as "ontologically impossible."[citation needed]
Rather than resolving the question, the film stages the impossibility of verification as its true subject—embodying the glitch at the documentary level. Fragments appear on screen as degraded: a photograph of a manuscript in poor light, a voice on a tape too damaged to transcribe, a curator's testimony contradicted by her own later correspondence. No single artifact is resolved.
The film's wager—following C. W. Smith's Antinomicity—is that the past is "a spontaneous product of the present": that Surgipelago's act of cataloguing pre-2020 apocrypha may constitute them retroactively into ontological reality.[1] The final image is an empty shelf in the Dakar archives, labeled for works not yet found. Premiered at Toronto and Dakar; thereafter adopted as canonical text in meta-fandom scholarship.
See also
- Pre-2020 apocrypha
- Retro-causal apocrypha — "the past is composed by the future"
- Adaptations that resolve the glitch
- Surgipelago and the Glitch Made Archive
References
- ↑ C. W. Smith, "Antinomicity," 2022, Chapter II, p. 47.