Secret Archives: Sex and Spies in Onyeka Igwe and Huw Lemmey’s Ungentle (2022)

Ungentle, a 37 minute long film collaboration, in which Onyeka Igwe’s visuals accompany Huw Lemmey’s monologue narrative, stands apart from much of Igwe’s oeuvre through its subject matter and length. The narrative of a homosexual Cold War spy reminiscing about his political and sexual awakenings draws on an aesthetic evocative of summer haze, pastoral idylls, beachside residences and idealised cityscapes, yet beneath such ideals our anti-hero relates treacherous acts and subversive intent. The use of 16mm film draws us nostalgically into the Cold War past, but our contemporary world caught by Igwe’s camera keeps us at a temporal distance, evoking a ghostly encounter with an ‘other’ world. This essay draws on the narrative as testimonial act to an implied listener, imploring us to explore and ask what it means to know, to see and to be seen in a world of covert espionage and sexual desires. Never in front of the camera, only heard through Ben Whishaw’s voiceover, our narrator’s physicality is only ever approximated linguistically or inhabited by the camera’s subjectivity momentarily. Taking my cue from Will Jennings’s observation that “Ungentle is a queer nature documentary”, I argue that the ecology evoked by Igwe’s visuals straddles rural and urban, productive and decaying, bedroom and the corridors of power; these porous thresholds are signalled though double coded spaces, thresholds such as windows, and the camera’s back and forth between the narrator’s subjectivity and an observational stance on the ‘normal’ world. Particular attention will be paid to the cruising sequence, uncharacteristic in the film for its use of realist sound and a pivotal moment of visual coding that interweaves the queer and the spy. Although no image, or word, in Ungentle derives directly from an archive, the surfacing of traces of a spectral past – redolent in much of Igwe’s work – is vital for how Ungentle draws its viewers into the spy game and the archival space anew.