Krishna

Krishna is the 24fps’s sound technician and one of its quiet organizers, a figure whose practical craft gives shape to the collective’s unruly politics. She helps members negotiate their differences, fits music to footage, and records the sound of a killing that the camera fails to capture. Later, as the collective scatters, Krishna herself disappears from view: she follows a voice into darkness, and the narrative gives no account of what happens to her afterward.

Place in the 24fps

Krishna belongs to the working center of the 24fps, a film collective whose members differ over both political tactics and what their images should do. Frenesi Gates and Sledge Poteet form part of its realist faction, set against dreamers such as Mirage and Howie. The Pisk sisters, Ditzah Pisk and Zipi Pisk, occupy the group’s center, while Krishna takes on the recurrent work of keeping people settled and able to continue. She is not formally presiding over meetings; her influence comes through practical intervention rather than command.

That role becomes visible in small, charged exchanges. When a discussion about whether to shoot people turns on the worth of insect life, Krishna insists that every form of life, including cockroaches, is sacred. Her position cuts across the group’s readiness to make violence its organizing principle. The exchange does not resolve the argument, but it shows that Krishna’s idea of political work includes limits on whom the collective may treat as disposable.

Sound, editing, and mediation

Krishna’s technical contribution is also a form of interpretation. Frenesi can bring in reels of young California women dancing at a rally, but the Pisk sisters object that the dancers are out of rhythm. Krishna finds music that suits the images and manipulates the film’s playback speed to make the two fit. She appears to understand what the Pisk sisters want before they have fully expressed it, and this knack earns her a reputation within the group for extrasensory perception. The reputation grows from attentive work: listening to what others ask for, anticipating their preferences, and making mismatched material cohere.

Her mediation extends beyond editing. When conversations become too ambiguous or practical matters are left unattended, Krishna accompanies a member to the bathroom and stays as a confidante for as long as needed. Ditzah regards her as essential to the group’s ability to hold together. Krishna’s stabilizing labor is not separate from the filmmaking: it helps maintain the conditions in which the collective can keep working despite its quarrels, competing sensibilities, and uneven attention to everyday needs.

The camera and the sound of violence

Krishna’s sound work acquires a sharper significance in the account of Weed Atman’s death. Years later, the members review footage in Ditzah’s motel room, projected onto a sheet with the windows shut and curtains drawn. The film records Brock Vond in Oregon, and Krishna calmly corrects Zipi Pisk’s reference to him in the present tense: the footage shows a man who was the prosecutor. The past tense makes the projected image feel less like an active political encounter than a record of a vanished moment.

The later playback of the killing exposes the limits of what the camera can preserve. As Rex Snuvvle confronts Frenesi and accuses her of knowing the truth, Ditzah films close-ups and Howie operates another camera. When the action moves outside, Howie is changing reels and misses the fatal instant; Krishna’s audio recording catches the gunshot. The image is incomplete, with possible figures barely distinguishable in the darkness, but the sound remains. Once the light is turned on, Weed lies face down in blood, and Rex poses with his pistol before lowering it beside the body. Krishna’s recording does not restore the missing visual instant, but it supplies a record of the violence that the moving image fails to show.

Departure and the fragile record

The surviving sound and images do not make the 24fps’s work feel powerful enough to its own participants. During a later conversation, Frenesi tells DL that the group had mistaken cameras for cannons, imagining that film gave them a comparable kind of force. She connects that disillusionment to Weed’s killing and to reports of other deaths on campus that the FBI had covered up. Krishna is not identified as the speaker in this exchange, but the collective’s judgment bears directly on the purpose of the work she helped make: recording an event and changing its outcome are not the same thing.

The group’s records are also materially exposed. Ditzah’s anxiety about the safety of the 24fps archive proves well-founded when her home is raided and reels of film and bundles of papers are burned outside. The destruction underscores the precariousness of the collective’s documentary labor, though the account does not specify which individual recordings survive the fire. Krishna’s role in making the films and preserving sound therefore sits within a larger struggle over whether political experience can be kept visible at all.

A later report describes Krishna moving away from the orange-red light of a broken-down Volkswagen and into unexplored darkness, following a voice she believes is calling her name. The account offers no confirmation of who or what called, and no explanation of her destination. Her departure reverses her earlier function in the collective: the person who helped others find a shared rhythm becomes unreachable herself. She remains both a maker of records and an absence within them, her fate unresolved even as the group’s surviving footage continues to carry traces of what it saw and heard.