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Across the Margins, Beyond the Pale

Courtisane Festival 2014, 2 – 6 April 2014

“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
– Frantz Fanon

An anthropological mockumentary, a baroque anti-symphony, a surrealist counter-ethnography, a revolutionary musical comedy, a porno-misery parody and a cubist road movie. What do all these films have in common? At first sight hardly anything, except for the fact that they all seem to be rooted in a world that is still classified “third”, a world marked by broken promises and shattered dreams, haunted by the spectres of colonialism and the realities of imperialism. These films are distant echoes from a time when a roaring call for a “third” cinema was resounding, one that could expose cruel realities and chase away unwanted ghosts: a cinema of liberation, not owing anything to the workings of the dominant order; a cinema of opposition, found on the outer edges of the overdeveloped world, always South to someone else’s North. These films are all that, and they are not. They do speak of the incoherence of underdevelopment and the discards of colonialism, and yet they refuse to conform to the imperatives of urgency and pedagogy that are bound up with these motives. They do take position against established powers and manifest a desire to overcome the past, but also resist any prescribed directions and prefer to reimagine unforeseen futures. They struggle hard to look for identity, but they do so through the very dismissal of the identities that are imposed by others. Outrageous, hilarious, vertiginous, delirious: this is a cinema that has nothing to lose, and everything to gain; a cinema that chooses to forsake the trodden pathways, only to find itself in a state of complete sovereignty. In all their dislocated intensity, unfathomable glory and impossible hope, this is the stuff that foolish dreams are made of.

In collaboration with the Royal Belgian Film Archive. In the framework of “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)” (KASK/HoGent).

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Djibril Diop Mambéty
Touki Bouki (The Journey of the Hyena)
SN, 1973, color, Wolof spoken with English subtitles, 35mm (restored), 95’

“That’s the way I dream. To do that, one must have a mad belief that everything is possible – you have to be mad to the point of being irresponsible. Because I know that cinema must be reinvented, reinvented each time, and whoever ventures into cinema also has a share in its reinvention.“
– Djibril Diop-Mambety

Touki Bouki portrays the wanderings of Mory and Anta, who roam all over Dakar in pursuit of their dream of escaping to France. “The story of Touki Bouki goes back centuries: men have always set out for new lands where they believe time never stops… Only few adventurers seem to make it, but that has never stopped anyone… Djibril left his country with the dream of finding success and solace in Europe. He soon discovered, however, the cruelty of life. While his dream fell apart little by little Djibril found he was unable to leave “Europe”, his host country. That was when returning to Africa became the real dream for him. Ending his days in Africa was a dream he would never fulfill. Touki Bouki is a prophetic film. Its portrayal of 1973 Senegalese society is not too different from today’s reality. Hundreds of young Africans die every day at the Strait of Gibraltar trying to reach Europe (Melilla and Ceuta). Who has never heard of that before? All their hardships find their voice in Djibril’s film: the young nomads who think they can cross the desert ocean and find their own lucky star and happiness but are disappointed by the human cruelty they encounter.” (Souleymane Cissé)

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Kidlat Tahimik
Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare)
PH, 1977, color, Tagalog spoken with English subtitles, 16mm, 93’

“Maybe I’m just an accumulator of images and sounds and then I make a tagpi-tagpi [patchwork] and sew them together. I just work with images and I put my sounds on them and then I release a flow of thoughts and start juggling the sequences back and forth. I don’t try to find surrealist images even in the way as it happened in Perfumed Nightmare. I was a madman when I was making that film and I still am.”
– Kidlat Tahimik

For his first film, Kidlat Tahimik (meaning “quiet lightning” in Tagalog) drew on his own experience living “in a cocoon of Americanized dreams” for this tale of a village jitney driver, faithful student of Voice of America and its many lessons, and founder of his local Werner Von Braun fan club. Kidlat hopes to become an astronaut, or at the very least to strike it rich in the promised land. He makes it as far as Europe, where a series of rude and comical awakenings unfolds and Kidlat learns that the modern Western world is far from paradise. Tahimik, who later became a protégé of Werner Herzog in Munich, is a faux naif who uses the genuine naiveté of his hero – like Chaplin’s Little Tramp – to inscribe a powerful portrait of the American colonization of Filipino dreams. But, like the charming, festooned “jeepny” Tahimik constructed from an abandoned U.S. Army vehicle, the film creates something wholly original and imaginative from the discards of colonialism. In the words of Susan Sontag: “ Perfumed Nightmare makes one forget months of dreary moviegoing, for it reminds one that invention, insolence, enchantment – even innocence – are still available on film”

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Arthur Omar
Triste Trópico
BR, 1974, color, Portugese spoken with English subtitles, 16mm to video, 75’

“I am fascinated by sound interference and remixes, ultra-editing, blending, everything that goes beyond the immediateness of the image and the verbal. Words, depositions, speech; for me it’s all raw material to be modulated. I’m not interested in anything that preexists the images, but the production of an experience through the image, in the image, like a chemical reaction in the brain, that can only occur there.”
– Arthur Omar

The biography of an imaginary doctor who left Brazil to study in France where he became friends with André Bresson, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso, and somehow ended up as an indigenous messiah. “A galaxy of discontinuous images. With a new presentation of the conflict between the coast and the sertão, Triste Trópico proposes a criticism, full of irony and hallucination, of the anthropological discourse in the tropics. Its main character, a surprising petit bourgeois doctor, embarks on a journey that will invert the sense of Levi-Strauss demarche, as expressed in his book Triste Tropique. The allegory of Cinema Novo was conceived as an unveiling, whereas the allegory of Triste Trópico is a movement towards opacity, and what poses a problem is the very act of reading. Triste Trópico is meta-cinema and, from this point of view, it is different from the forms of anti-colonialism of the 70s in Brazil”. (Ismail Xavier)

DUE TO THE UNAVAILABILITY OF A COPY OF ‘TRISTE TROPICO’, THE FILM WILL BE REPLACED BY ‘HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMAN’
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Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Como era gostoso o meu frances (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman)
BR, 1971, 35mm, Tupi, French and Portuguese spoken with English subtitles, 84’

“The government broadly financed historical films, but it wanted the history to be within official parameters – the hero, the father of the country, all those things we have been told since elementary school. I made How Tasty Was my Little Frenchman, which does not correspond in any way to the official vision of history, under these circumstances. The film was not even considered to be historical, but rather purely fictional, as if official history were not fiction.”
– Nelson Pereira dos Santos

Jaundiced cultural allegory dressed up as anthropological re-creation, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman slyly links Montaigne’s who-are-the-real-savages query to Brazil’s military dictatorship. Pereira draws from multiple historical sources—especially German explorer Hans Staden’s 1557 memoir—to tell the story of a French soldier’s experience as a captive of the cannibalistic Tupinambá tribe. “Pereira constructs a comic horror film in which sixteenth-century intertexts are read as current events in an analogy of colonialism with global capitalism. This film is Pereira’s response to Brazil’s building of the Trans-Amazon Highway, in the course of which contact with indigenous communities was made that threatened them with near extinction. The current destruction of habitat and native populations recalled to Pereira the traumas of colonization…The ingesting of foreign invaders thus becomes for Pereira a metaphor for indigenous resistance to global capitalism, the most recent form of economic colonization.” (Virginia Higginbotham)

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Carlos Mayolo & Luis Ospina
Agarrando pueblo (The Vampires of Poverty)
CO, 1977, color & b/w, Spanish spoken with English subtitles, 16mm to video, 28’

“In the early 1970’s there appeared a certain type of documentary that superficially appropriated the achievements and methodologies of independent film to the point of deformation. In this way, poverty became a shocking theme and a product easily sold, especially abroad, where it is the counterpart to the opulence of consumption… We made a kind of antidote or Mayakovskian bath to open people’s eyes to the exploitation behind the miserabilist cinema which turns human beings into objects, into instruments of a discourse foreign to their own condition”.
– Carlos Mayolo & Luis Ospina

Filmed in Cali and Bogotá, Agarrando pueblo follows an unscrupulous film director as he and his cameraman wander around the cities looking for unwilling subjects for a documentary commissioned by German television. “Deliberately detached from the accusatory militant left, Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo launch in 1978 what could be called their cinematic-political thesis: Agarrando Pueblo (The Vampires of Poverty), an outrageous protest of national and international documentary models, which at the time – and even today – shamelessly exploited all kinds of third-world suffering (referred to by the directors as “poverty-porn”) and exported it to European television stations and festivals. Counterinformative from beginning to end and in every sense of the word, the film mixes staged and real scenes of a typical film crew commissioned by a Germany television channel to seek out archetypical social horrors, trampling over the basic principles of professional ethics, the meaning of information and – naturally – sociological research.” (Isleni Cruz Carvajal)

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Med Hondo
West Indies (ou les nègres marrons de la liberté / The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty)
MR/DZ, 1979, color, French spoken with English subtitles, 35mm, 113’

“For too long a time, African cinema has been conceived as a poor cinema, a cinema of approximations where techniques did not match ideas … Militant cinema can thus be beautiful and rich … Indeed, West Indies … is no more a West Indian film than an African film. It is a film which summons all the people whose past is made out of oppressions, whose present is made out of aborted promises and whose future is left to be conquered.”
– Med Hondo

A single-set color musical tracing the history of the West Indies through several centuries of French oppression. “Med Hondo’s West Indies is a revolutionary musical in both senses of the word. This witty, scathing production offers an angry view of West Indian history, using imaginative staging and a fluid visual style. The film’s single set is an enormous slave ship [built in an unused Citroen factory in Paris]. Mobile camerawork and frequent narrative shifts take the actors through various vignettes about French colonialists invading the Indies, Carribean natives lured to Paris, the process by which the islands were first settled and a lot more. The material has the potential for overbearing irony but Mr. Hondo has a light touch. With cast members rotating their way through many different roles (the same actors may play slaves, then worried island villagers, then displaced West Indians)… Mr. Hondo leads the film through a long series of well-connected tableaux, culminating in an almost joyous call to arms.” (Janet Maslin)

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Glauber Rocha
A Idade da terra (The Age of the Earth)
BR, 1980, color, Portugese spoken with English subtitles, 35mm, 152’

“The film develops the same ways, principles, lines, desires of justice and humanism in a world getting more and more destroyed by violence. The film is a barbarous mass, not a civilized mass. Because in substance of cinematographic language, montage, structure, everything was remade, subverted, reorganized. It is a baroque, reconstructivistic style, a very new thing that the Brazilians who saw the film adored.”
– Gauber Rocha

Catholic rituals and Afro-Indian gods, rural mysticism and revolutionary politics, Brahms and Villa-Lobos: this last film by Glauber Rocha, angel-demon of the Brazilian “Cinema Novo”, defies every attempt at unequivocal classification or definition. “It’s not to be told, only to be seen”, he said. A torrential, hallucinatory anti-symphony, a terrifying cry of desperation, a destruction in progress. “He hit himself against the impossible, the impossibility of being a great filmmaker of the Third World, a great black filmmaker. The Age of the Earth is the film of the Third World, there is no other. The others are films that join other films. The Age of the Earth is a great impossibility, a passage through world and time, a discovery of America on the opposite lane, a black Battleship Potemkin, or rather, it informs, full of gestures and rhythm, an extreme anti-classic – a spitting of blood in the face of the current cinema, dominated by sweetness.” (Pascal Bonitzer)

Alexandra Cuesta: Films & Influences

17 February 2014 20:30, OFFoff Cinema Gent

At the invitation of art cinema OFFOff, Courtisane is very happy to present a program composed of films made and chosen by artist and filmmaker Alexandra Cuesta (EC/US). Inspired as much by Walker Evans‘s reticent street photography as by Bruce Baillie’s sensuous film poems, her work manages to strike a delicate balance between the mundane and the poetic, the material and the intelligible. Public places and urban landscapes are observed in their splendor and singularity through the abstract and vernacular figures of everyday life, exploring the constructions of space and structures of time that can be found in the order and disorder of people’s daily movements and environments. These filmic portraits in motion, elegantly composed of textures of light and fragments of bodies, are reminiscent of an approach that Flaubert once referred to as an “absolute way of seeing things”, manifesting the sensible intensities of the most ordinary things, on the point of disentangling the connections that make them into functional objects. It is precisely in this point of tension that the sensibility of Alexandra Cuesta’s work is situated, perpetually oscillating between a fleeting play of correspondences and a surface of percepts and affects that is there for us to engage with.

Helen Levitt, James Agee & Ed Howard
In the Street
US, 16mm, b/w, sound, 13’

“In The Street is reportage as art. It reports the facts, but for their useless beauty above all. While it could be argued that the film tells us how working class residents of Spanish Harlem lived in the 30’s and 40’s – how they looked and behaved, the addition of expository narration could have told us so much more. Statistics and other facts could have helped us put what we see into context and multiplied the use-value of the film. The absence of narration or other texts proves the artist’s intent that we are intended to enjoy the film as a collection of beautiful appearances.” (Roy Arden)

Alexandra Cuesta
Recordando El Ayer
16mm, color, sound, 8’

Shot in Queens, NY in 2004. Memory and identity are observed through textures of everyday life in a portrait of Jackson Heights, home to a large Latin American immigrant population. Images of street, people, and daily rituals render passing of time in a neighborhood that becomes a mirror not just of another place, but also of the past. The landscape visually reflects the space as a creation of a new home while revealing displacement within the new condition. The meaning of home is explored and built upon collective recollection.

Robert Fenz
Soledad (Meditations on Revolution, Part III)
US, 16mm, b/w, silent, 14’

Part three of Robert Fenz’ silent black and white series of films that explore the meaning and the resonance of the word “revolution”, shot in Mexico and New York. “The films of Robert Fenz can never be subject to the principles of static analysis: their potential of subversion is always at work. However some traits are common to his entire oeuvre: the critical conscience, the political engagement (which differs from militantism), the desire to know what the shadows withhold, the passion for the other. Fenz reaffirms these prominent traits of his artistic humanist heritage innovating in the construction of a visual sensitivity which opens up elemental questions of idealism from concrete, sensitive and physical observation. Following the path of rhythm, creative improvisation and kinetic description, his cinematographic oeuvre develops a style that is founded on a profound faith on the power of the image – as a source of communication, as a critical tool, as an interior necessity.” (Gabriella Trujillo)

Bruce Baillie
Valentin de las Sierras
US, 16mm, color, sound, 10’

“I just shot simply but used a telephoto lens with an extension tube on the back, which gives you a very limited focal plane, a few inches. No one I know ever uses it with a long lens, especially with a moving subject, but I really liked the way it looked. I had to get into the flesh of that town, with the merciless sun beating into the bricks of the street and all the death-every night there’d be something or somebody killed, lying in the street in the morning. I had met up with this (archetypal) young girl, riding her pony. And I was afraid to meet her father. I’d sent word out trying to see her, and he sent word back to come meet him, and I thought, “Oh, God!”. But he turned out to be a very nice fellow: Manuel Sasa Zamora, of Jalisco. They were very poor and lived behind a big gate and had a horse and a dog named Penquina. That horse didn’t like me and would not let me film. I had to give it up for a while. Later, I named my horse after the film – Valentina.”

Alexandra Cuesta
Piensa en Mi
16mm, color, sound, 15’

Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion; a contemplative meditation on public transport in the city of Los Angeles. Isolation, routine and everyday splendor, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape.

Ernie Gehr
Passage
16mm, color, silent, 14’

Composed of two intercutting shots of the S-Bahn elevated train through former East Berlin taken before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gehr presents a mundane, yet illuminating glimpse of the profound cultural and economic changes in his ancestral homeland as seen through the city’s transformed – and almost unrecognizable – urban architecture.

Alexandra Cuesta
Beirut 2.14.05
16mm, color & b/w, sound, 7’

Shot in Beirut, Lebanon during the filming of Ca Sera Beau, From Beyrouth with Love by Wael Nourredine.

Leandro Katz
Los Angeles Station
US, l6mm, silent, 10’

“Leandro Katz’s simplest, most direct and probably least ambitious film and yet in many ways it is his loveliest. The results of the systematically structured material is unexpectedly stirring. Because of the impersonal method of construction, the freeze frames are not the result of sudden sentimental tugs. The count sometimes falls very conveniently on an image of natural poses, strikingly set against the backdrop; but just as often, the freeze frame is of a bare wall or an alleyway. The mechanical tension between the handheld camera’s panning and the systematic stops creates disarmingly simple, evocative effects. The freeze may halt a pan or simply congeal an already held moment. In the first case, an image often ends up de-centered, highlighting the broadside of the shack-like dwellings with their inhabitants crowded at the edge. Or, alternatively, a smiling boy, full of animate life and sensuousness, suddenly becomes an anthropological document, frozen evidence of a time, a place, and a culture.” (Tony Pipolo)

Alexandra Cuesta
Despedida (Farewell)
16mm, color, sound, 9’30

Shot in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, this neighborhood historically formed by cultural transition resonates with the poetry of local resident Mapkaulu Roger Nduku. Verses about endings, looking and passing through open up the space projected. A string of tableaus gather a portrait of place and compose a goodbye letter to an ephemeral home.

Passion for the Impossible

A well-known art critic and historian recently wrote: “At least for the time being, any redistribution of the sensible through contemporary art is a mirage and, when pitted against the capitalist transformation of things into signs, it is little more than the opiate of the artworld left.” An old sour exposed. At a time when the weakening of the political theatre is forcing art to take the upper stage again, at a time when it is increasingly under pressure to make itself “useful” in light of the local and global struggles that are raging all over the world, we are once again confronted with some of the fundamental challenges surrounding the tensions between art and world, form and life, appearance and reality. The problem has been roaring its ugly head ever since the current paradigm of art has been defined. “In how far is appearance allowed in the moral world?”, asked Friedrich Schiller more than two centuries ago. Disenchanted with the French revolution and its failure to come to terms with social inequality, the German poet proposed another revolution: a revolution of the sensible. For him, the banishment of the hierarchy of classes, founded on the domination of the men of culture over the men of nature, manifested itself in the aesthetic experience. It was through this experience that the partition of the sensible sustaining this domination could be dismantled, giving way to a new kind of “equality” – an equality in the realm of appearances, an equality that could ruin all hierarchies between matter and form, passivity and activity, feeling and thought. The potential of art, he argued, is not based on its alliance with reality – how art affects reality and the other way around – but conversely on its independence from it. Against the critics who, even then, complained that all solidity had disappeared from the world, that all reality had dissolved into appearance, he answered: the power of art can only be fully appreciated as long as it is first and foremost considered as appearance, not because it is held to be something that could supplant or influence reality. We can only experience it as such as long if we stop looking for ends and means, as long as we do not grant imagination a prescription of its own. Indeed, if art can be considered to have a political dimension, it’s perhaps not so much due to the commitment invested, but because of the “indifference” experienced; it’s not due to its ability to transmit messages through a certain suitable form, but because of its promise of “freedom”, which is itself its own end and means.

But this promise of freedom – “to grant freedom by means of freedom” – also involves a strange paradox. On one hand, art is put forward as a sphere of autonomy and self-containment indifferent to any association of cause and effect, an embodiment of freedom unassignable to any single desire or interpretation. On the other hand, it is through the experience of “free play” in front of the “free appearance” of art, this strange appearance out of reach from fixed aspirations and interpretations, that another promise is made: that of another form of life. Indeed, the solitude of art, in all its inexplicability and unavailability, holds the possibility of a another future. Jacques Rancière has argued that this paradox is in fact constitutive of a whole regime of identification of art and its politics: the autonomy of aesthetic or artistic experience is at the same time the principle of the formation of what Schiller described as a new “art of living”. Rancière writes: “the aesthetic education thus is the process which transforms the free appearance into a lived reality and the aesthetic free play into an agency of the living community.” This implies, however, that the separations between art, life, and politics are lifted, which essentially entails the emergence of two opposed types of politics, which are in effect two vanishing points: on one hand the logic of art becoming life at the price of its self-elimination, on the other the logic of art getting involved in politics on the condition of not having anything to do with it. The politics of art actually thrive on the tension between these two logics, on the undecidability between art and non-art. The dominant paradigm of what is called “critical” art for example combines the sensible heterogeneity from the first logic with the political intelligibility from the latter, in view of provoking a break in our perception and mobilize our political energies. It is a formula that it is still very much on our agendas nowadays, although it seems to have lost most of its political force – mainly due to the loss of the emancipatory perspective that sustained the dialectical clash of heterogeneous elements. It has even been overturned: whereas the strategies of critical art were predicated on the effort to reveal the reality beneath appearances, some critics – from Debord to Baudrillard – have advocated that all is appearance, that everything is is equivalent with its image, and every image with its own lie. What these arguments, still very much inherent to our zeitgeist, leave us with is either a deep-felt melancholy or a numbing irony, suggesting that through our own continuous “consumption” of commodities, spectacles and demonstrations, we do nothing else but contributing to the reign of commodity equivalence: as if the world of consumption and the world of struggle have become one and the same.

If the traditional modes of critical art have lost their legitimacy, it’s certainly not because the forms of domination and oppression they opposed have disappeared, but rather because the critical worldview that nourished these modes and the political struggles based on this vision have lost much of their credibility. How to think differently then about the “usefulness” of art, without having to rely on a revolutionary horizon to look forward to? What would it mean to think critically without “a darkened mirror to be made clean by a critical operation which makes it declare all that there is to say”? How to think about the potential of art forms that do not depend on demystification, asking us “to discover the signs of capital behind everyday objects and behaviors,” but in so doing only confirming the “transformation of things into signs”? In practice, the foundering of the critical system into this vicious circle has led many contemporary artists to invest directly in political activism, which has its own value and significance, but at the same time this involves a certain de-neutralization of the idea as art as we know it: art steps in for politics. For his part, Rancière proposes another way of thinking about the relation between politics and art, as alternative for the critique of appearances in the name of an underlying reality and the hermeneutics of suspicion that accompanies this critique. It involves, first of all, the acceptance of the condition of appearance and illusion, as it functions as a condition for the possibility of what Schiller has defined as a kind of “freedom”, which is not abstract but entirely sensible. Rancière: “It is in the moments when the real world wavers and seems to reel into mere appearance, more than in the slow accumulation of day-to-day experiences, that it becomes possible to form a judgement about the world”. It follows that political effects can never be located in the artwork itself, nor in the intention or commitment of the artist. It is exactly by not assigning a specific role or destination to the work and leaving it to their own idleness (as Mallarmé upheld, the works must “prove themselves”), that it may become susceptible to a multiplicity of unforeseen appropriations.

Secondly, there is still something in the dispositive of critical art that has political potential, which is what Rancière calls “dissensus”, meaning a disruption of a given organization of the relation between sensible presentations and forms of meaning, put forward as a challenge to the “reality of the real”. The idea of disturbance has been hailed as a political-artistic strategy for a long time now – think of Eisenstein and Brecht who have both, in different ways, played on the element of “strangeness’, either as “verfremdung” or “eccentrism” – but in this approach the disturbing element leads to no specific form of awareness or mobilization. Art can redraw the borders of the possible and the impossible, oppose the singular outlines of a landscape of the sensible to all the forms of banalization unleashed by the dominant regime of information and explanation, but only on the condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated. That is how art continuously oscillates between autonomous form of life and the promise of political emancipation, between shuddering point of arrest and explanatory instrument of transmission, between the “naive” (in tune with the world) and the “sentimental” (at a distance from everyday life), but these possibilities in themselves can never be integrally fulfilled except at the price of abolishing the singularity of art, that of politics, or both at once. Following Rancière’s reasoning, the issue at hand is thus not whether the work that artists do is political or not, but rather what work we can do with it as political subjects; the question is not whether art can intervene in the social world and construct better relations between existing communities, but how it can shape new communities of sense that can put to work a new sense of community. If it’s important to try to understand and engage with this utterly “foolish” (Rancière’s own word) proposition today, it’s because it is grounded in a much needed intuition of hope and trust, opposing all ideas of necessity and legitimacy with the contingency of social order, opposing all sense of distrust and fatalism with the unrealized potentials borne by the capacities shared by all. It is then up to us to take up this foolishness and exchange our compulsive passion for the real with a wholehearted passion for the impossible. It is time for us to start dreaming, dreaming out loud, dreaming with our eyes wide open.

DISSENT ! Akram Zaatari

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16 February 2014 18:00, Wiels Brussels

“There are works interested in the representation of war, whether fiction or documentary, and others interested in the tectonics of storytelling, writing history, and identifying and producing documents taking the war situation as a case or a base, because war is one of rare situations where notions of common logic collapse, and the notions of evidence in relation to documents and history have to be challenged.”
– Akram Zaatari

How to represent the ongoing struggles in the Middle East, a region in the throes of successive wars, excessive division, and abundant stereotyping? How to displace the dominant vision of never-ending violence, destruction, occupation, resistance, suffering, deeply entangled in what Jean-Luc Godard has referred to as the endless circulation of “brand images”? In his work Akram Zaatari tries to provide some possible responses to this challenge, particularly in regards to the legacy of conflict in his home country, Lebanon. Like many other Beiruti artists who have grown up during the Civil War (1975-1991), Zaatari is concerned with the construction and narrativization of its history and its present day reverberations. A substantial part of his work in film, photography and performance investigates the multiple tensions between memory and history, fiction and document, the public and the private, as a way to intervene in the dominant representation of history. With the use of archival images – partly drawn from the collection of the Arab Image Foundation, which he co-founded – attention is drawn to its constructedness, as well as to its gaps and fissures. In this Dissent! session we will mainly discuss Akram Zaatari’s cinematic work and his use of counter-narrative and docu-fictional strategies, which tend to prompt a fresh perspective on the forms and politics of fiction itself. Perhaps, as Jacques Rancière has suggested, it is above all in situations of radical uncertainty that “the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.”

Akram Zaatari has been invited by Wiels in the context of his forthcoming exhibition (21.02 – 27.04.2014)

DISSENT ! is an initiative of Argos, Auguste Orts and Courtisane, in the framework of the research project “Figures of Dissent” (KASK/Hogent), with support of VG & VGC.

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About DISSENT!

How can the relation between cinema and politics be thought today? Between a cinema of politics and a politics of cinema, between politics as subject and as practice, between form and content? From Vertov’s cinematographic communism to the Dardenne brothers’ social realism, from Straub-Huillet’s Brechtian dialectics to the aesthetic-emancipatory figures of Pedro Costa, from Guy Debord’s radical anti-cinema to the mainstream pamphlets of Oliver Stone, the quest for cinematographic representations of political resistance has taken many different forms and strategies over the course of a century. The multiple choices and pathways that have gradually been adopted, constantly clash with the relationship between theory and practice, representation and action, awareness and mobilization, experience and change. Is cinema today regaining some of its old forces and promises? Are we once again confronted with the questions that Serge Daney asked a few decades ago? As the French film critic wrote: “How can political statements be presented cinematographically? And how can they be made positive?”. These issues are central in a series of conversations in which contemporary perspectives on the relationship between cinema and politics are explored.

Re-mise en scène

By Serge Daney

Originally published as ‘La remise en scène’ in Cahiers du cinéma 268 (July 1976).

Deceitful intent and despicable procedure

It’s under this title that the Renmin Ribao (“The People’s Daily”) trashed Antonioni’s Chung Kuo. The argumentation was rather strange. Judge by yourselves (it’s about the Tiananmen Square).“The film doesn’t provide any general view of this place and removes all majesty from the Tiananmen gate, which the Chinese people hold so dearly. Conversely the author doesn’t save any pellicule to film small groups of people on the square, sometimes from a distance, at other times up close; sometimes up front, other times from the back; here a swarm of faces, there an mesh of feet. He deliberately turns the Tiananmen square into a messy fair. Doesn’t he have the intent to insult our great homeland?” (To this false question, the answer is evidently: yes)

Two reproaches then: 1. By way of an exaggerated multiplication of shots and angles, Antonioni cuts as he pleases (without respect, denigrating, insulting). 2. He doesn’t reproduce the official image, which is supposed to be emblematic of the place “which the Chinese people hold so dearly”, its “brand image”. He does the same when he films the Nankin bridge: “While filming the great Nankin bridge on the Yangtsé, this magnificent modern bridge, he has deliberately chosen very bad angles, giving the impression that it’s crooked and unstable.” In other words: every image that deviates from the brand image is supposedly slanderous. Or: not filmed= denied, denied= contended.

There are cut up images that are supposed to be whole, and there are images that are supposed to be there but are missing. Third reproach: “In regards to the choices he made while filming and editing, he has hardly filmed the good, new and progressist images, and if he has filmed them it was rather for show and to cut them out afterwards.” In other words: the “good, new and progressist images” are not to be constructed but are already there, already given and only to be reproduced. Isn’t the Renmin Ribao contributor assigning a mission to cinema: re-mettre en scène?

Typage and natural, natural and typage

So far for the Renmin Ribao’s argumentation (definitely strange). Let’s get back to Europe. For those interested in Chinese politics (and not only in China as dream or utopia, model or challenge), Chung Kuo wasn’t a very satisfactory film. We couldn’t get rid of the impression that we were assisting in the mute tribulations of Chinese extras in China, under the eye of a great skeptical but nevertheless attentive esthetician who concludes from all this, a bit brisk, the impossibility of understanding anything at all of the mysteries that were shown to him. He refused to affix his signature to the already constituted images (the “good images”) that were expected to be reproduced (Chinese naivety? Pro-Chinese naivety?). Worse: he got even more attached to the images that were advised against or forbidden: an official building, a military boat, a free market in open country. The Chinese didn’t seem to be aware that the only image that marks or “brands” here in the West, is that which is won out on something.

For us (at Cahiers), there was something else at stake in the criticism on Chung Kuo. It provided us with a particularly convenient occasion to restate our mistrust of naturalism. To all those who were bewildered by this slice of life, it sufficed to say: in cinema, there is not only encounter, naturalness, “as if”. There is no image that slyly (naturalism) or explicitly (publicity) wants to become a brand image, that is to say of the congealed, blocked, repressed. And we added: the sly typage welling up from Chun Kuo is not without ulterior motives or malicious intent. We don’t have great merit in being right: Antonioni himself doesn’t hide that he avoids what he does not understand or consider: Chinese politics.

But confronted with the arguments made by the author (anonymous of course) of “Deceitful intent and despicable procedure”, we were also divested. How can one reproach Antonioni of not having filmed the Tiananmen square from an official angle? And why infer that these shots would insult the Chinese people, while in France it’s exactly those shots that do not hold any denigration or slander? It’s almost the opposite: for a progressist audience (those to whom the film is aimed, evidently not the Franco-Chinese friends), a human, close, non majestic image, not resembling a postcard of Tiananmen, was something positive. Where do paradoxes like this one come from (from the Renmin Ribao): “But Antonioni shows the Chinese people as an ignorant and stupid crowd, cut off from the world, with sad and worried faces, without energy or hygiene, loving to drink and eat, in short a grotesque horde. “ And in Libération we could read, written by Philippe Sollers, at text on the calmness, the nonchalance, the lack of hysteria of the Chinese crowd.

We also wanted to tell the Chinese exactly the contrary of what was being said to the readers of Libération and Cahiers: there is not only typage, the exemplary, a film is not only an encoding, a shot is not completely determined by the cause it serves, the image resists. The little of the real it encloses doesn’t let itself be reduced like that. There is always something that remains.

Funny debate which was already about the here and the elsewhere. Here (Paris, end of 1973): release of an Antonioni film on China. Question: what does an image hide? What is its out-of-frame? Elsewhere (China, beginning of ’74): violent debate on western art and “musique sans titre”. Question: what does an image show? What is there in the frame? Here: repression of the “prise de vues”, of the political dimension of the shooting, in favor of of the fetichism of the image taken, won (of the scoop), according to the double criterium of rarity (China) and truth (the eye of the master: Antonioni). Elsewhere: repression of the image in favor of a normalization of the “good image” which is nothing but a “re-prise” of the déja-vu. Here: tracking down the mise-en-scene under the natural. Elsewhere: tracking down the natural under the re-mise-en-scène. Cross-over or short-circuit?

Ambivalence or Amphibology

There’s a scene which the Renmin Ribao contributor didn’t mention: the opening scene showing a childbirth (Caesarian, under acupuncture). Suppose that Antonioni wasn’t the anti-Chinese monster in lack of defamatory images. In that case a question comes up: which images to take back from China that can satisfy the Chinese authorities (those who invited him) and can show the western audience (the only ones who will see the film) something of China, something impressive, something that they don’t know or don’t know well. The cesarian is one response.

In fact, it plays out on two levels. For the Chinese, it illustrates the success of popular medicine: success of acupuncture, success of the ideology “in service of the people” in medicine. Of this image (a birth “with eyes open”), the Chinese have reason to be proud. It’s evidence in their favor.

For us as well this image plays out favorably, yet for different reasons: it shows – better than all discourse – that the relationship the Chinese have with the body is at the very least very different than the one that exists in a society such as ours. The fear of disembowelment, of in- and outside, of shame and fault, is missing here. It’s about something else. About what? We don’t know, but it’s enough that the question is asked. This image, for us, is revelatory. It touches upon our truth.

So here’s a series of shots that is twofold positive, but in two different areas. For them and for us. It satisfies two audiences who will never meet, except by virtue of this film. It forbids the western spectators to put themselves where they are not (in pro-China for example), it does not permit the Chinese to put themselves where they are not (in the throes of the Christian body). It keeps its distance and in doing that, it makes visible.

We see that a militant discourse would object to this double scene. What is important, it would say, is not that these shots play out positively in two areas that don’t know about each other, it’s the fact that because of this mediation these two areas, the Chinese and the French one, have started communicating with one another.

We should know by now that it’s not people who communicate but rather objects (statements, images) that communicate by themselves. In putting too much trust in communication, we risk being disappointed, like we were three years after Chung Kuo when noticing that Joris Ivens, despite his talent, only provoked smiles with Yukong. At least Antonioni is a smuggler, not “here”, not “elsewhere”, but between brackets, protected by them, without anchor, exposed. Exposed to the utopia, to the non-place. Moreover, that’s what worries and delights him since forever: cinema as affirmation of distance, however small. In this scene in The Passenger in which the old African chieftain grabs the camera and films Jack Nicholson, one can see quite clearly what is at issue: the sudden possibility of a reversibility, of the camera passing without a word from hand to hand to the great confusion of the scene and the actors. This, in China, was simply impossible.

The pose (keep smiling)

Someone is being filmed? There are several approaches:
1. The filming happens within the framework of the industry of cinema. It is then symbolically covered by the type of contract (wage, one-off fee, benefits participation, unpaid) agreed between the production and the actors. In the name of this contract, the filmmaker will be able to demand a certain acting or performance.
2. The filming happens within the loose framework of a documentary, of a socio or ethno-logical essay, or of an investigation. Most often, actors do not have the capacity, total or relative, of controlling, technically or intellectually, the operations to which they lend their bodies and voices. We then enter the domain of morals and risk: to film those for whom there exists no reversibility, no chance of becoming themselves “filmeurs”, no possibility of anticipating the image which will be made of them, no hold on the image. Mad people, children, primitives, the excluded, filmed without hope (for them) of a reply, filmed “for their own good” or for the sake of science or scandal: exoticism, philanthropy, horror.
3. There is a third type of situation (the one that interests us here): when the filming is done by a filmmaker or a crew who have decided to put their camera and their know-how at the service of. Of a people, of a cause, of a fight. In these conditions, the non-reversibility has other causes (under-development, lack of equipment, need for foreign help) , but generates new kinds of problems.

We know that a people in struggle is led to make an image of this struggle, a “good” image. Every extended struggle makes itself a brand image, a flag, a symbol regarding its identity, so regarding itself (because it always starts with the negation of this identity). Every image is always proof, a constatation, a piece of evidence. And to obtain this image one has to pose, and make pose. The Renmin Ribao reproached Antonioni to have cut, not having filmed a “general shot”, to have destroyed the pose. We are in the heart of the problem: how to respect this pose? And also: how not to respect it?

It’s an old question. Just like Joris Ivens’ response: “In every place we had to struggle to conquer our liberty. The natural tendency of people is to show only the positive aspect of things, to beautify reality. Is is a problem, I think, that I’ve encountered everywhere in the world. When receiving a guest, we clean the table and do the dishes. All the more so when the guest arrives with a camera.”

The common part

The same question is asked to the collective that has made L’Olivier. Danièle Dubroux: “In the children’s camps, what interested us was to show the relations between them, how they handled themselves, autonomously, their life, while doing the dishes, taking care of the plantations and the sheep… But they didn’t understand at all why we were interested in all that and the leader made them put everything in order especially for us.” It’s what Serge Le Peron formulated under the guise of a question-program “What is the common part of two systems of questions?” The film is taken up in a real four corners game. On one hand the one being filmed and their personal issues. On the other the ones filming and their personal dealings. But, behind the ones filming, there is also the question of knowing what effect these images will have on their audience and behind the ones being filmed, of what they imagine and what they hope from this effect that they don’t know. Example: “the Fedayeen were completely dumbstruck when we told them that this image they were showing of themselves, that of people taking up arms, is an image that, here, shows them like madmen, like people who only think about death and suicide, crazy, insane people.. While there, they were completely disarmed, if we could say so, in front of this possible becoming of their images, of these images of them in arms.”

Because, supposing that there are images that actually gratify this four corners game, it doesn’t mean that they would be the most clarifying or even the most useful. It is doubtful that the search for average images, formation-images of compromise defined by the sole fact that they don’t upset anyone, produces anything other than in-decidability, all obscurity and softness. An image can exist in various areas but it can only bear one point of view.

And yet, Ivens and Loridan: “These images, it’s a mixture of our presence and their reality. There is a dialectics between the two.” Strange dialectics according to which the terms of contradiction cannot be assigned. Mixture muddles while dialectics unites contradictorily, unites to divide, combines to disconnect.

“Our presence and their reality”. Making cinema directly based on a coded reality, is what characterizes ethnological cinema. In the case of China, the code has a name: politics. As its name indicates, socialism aims for socialization of relations between people. It makes them enter (mostly by force) the apparatus where individuals think and live the exercise of power collectively and “unconsciously”. By them and on them. Who doesn’t notice that we are already talking about cinema? The “cinema” that makes up a society, the postures that it takes in order to save face?

A camera and a microphone that are naively connected to the Chinese reality necessarily encounter this social pre-mise en scène. Either it renews it (to make it look spontaneous) or it makes it forget it for a while (but then, one has to cut it up). Naturalism is a technique that renews something that pre-exists it: the society as it is is already a mise-en-scène. To work on this given, break this pre-mise en scène, make it visible as it is, is always an courageous, difficult and unpopular undertaking. Realism is always to be won.

The duettists in question

In How Yukong Moved the Mountains, the most interesting episode, according to me, is the one taking place in the generator factory in Shanghai. Why? Because at the moment when Ivens and Loridan are in this factory, something happens that obliges them to leave their first idea behind and adopt another. The film becomes a report on an event that shakes up the factory: dissatisfaction of the workers, campaign of dazibaos, leaders being criticized, meetings etc. Suddenly there is a necessity for the filmmakers to stick to this fiction, to not cheat with it, to respect time and space. Necessity to do what they don’t do anywhere else in their film-flow: to make the masters of discourse come back to the screen at a time when these discourses have touched the fire of the real. In cinema, as in life, we can only take seriously what happens at least twice: for example the two criticized leaders (the duettists) of the generator factory.

What strikes us is that, from the beginning to the end of the film (before and after being criticized), they hold on to the same discourse, which all of the sudden sounds more and more hollow. Discourse without surprise: it is said that one shouldn’t go against the masses, accept their criticism, that it enriches, makes one better etc. If nothing had happened in this factory, this discourse would have played a accompanying role to an “open door” operation. But because we have had the time to witness them sound hollow, it makes us to see what other films seem to want to hide: that in China, more than elsewhere, discourse is above all not to be taken for what it says but for what it constitutes as a political practice that is more diffuse, more crafty, more complex, through which, in low as as in high places, power plays out.

The problem is not so much to know if the people are sincere or not than to encircle the articulation between this or that individual (a body and a singular voice, even if the discourse is stereotypical) and the collective discourse, the rhetorics for all purposes. What does it mean? What does he want when he talks? Or when he shuts up? Where is the accent of truth in what he says? Or, as they say in china, in “waving the red flag to attack the red flag”?

Roland Barthes, in a short text (‘Alors, La Chine?’) has seen this fundamental aspect of the relation between the Chinese and their discourse: circulation of power in the fact of power circulating speech and thus getting rid of it: “In fact, every discourse seems to progress by means of commonplaces (“topoi” and clichés), analogous to the sub-programs known in cybernetics as “bricks”. What, no liberty? Yes, under the theoretical crust, the text fuses (desire, intelligence, work, struggle, all that divides, bursts, exceeds). First of all, these clichés, everyone combines them differently, not only according to an esthetical project of originality, but under the more or less vivacious pressure of his political conscience (using the same code, what difference is there between the solidified discourse of this responsable of a popular commune and the vivacious, precise, topical analysis, of this shipyard worker in Shanghai).”

The important phrase here is “using the same code.” We know (it’s enough to read Pékin-Information) that the most bitter, violent ideological and political struggles speak the same language, they speak from the inside of a limited body of statements that function like so many cards (statement-trumps, statement-masters) in games that are always renewed. Hence the difficulty in recognizing the adversary. That is why Ivens can naively say “no-one says openly: I am a reactionary”.

Hence also the completely particular use that the Chinese make of brackets. Inside a discourse, the brackets never attest to the presence of another (system of quotes). Brackets in China are essentially defamatory. They constitute a double operation
1. To translate. Translate plainly (in the common code) what the other has never said but is supposed to have thought. Example: someone is supposed to have defended the thesis (evidently unsayable) that “the bourgeoise does some good.”
2. To put on the side. Brackets mark an isolation of bad discourse, designating it as defamation.

It’s because Ivens and Loridan have been the first to base their film on the words of the Chinese, that we are entitled to make remarks and reservations about their film. They relate to a decisive point that we can approach in different ways: discourse/power, statement/enunciation.

How to understand something of power, Chinese or otherwise?

How to film brackets?

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translations).

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts