Diagonal Thoughts

One of the movies that really struck me lately is Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman’s animated account of his search to piece together some lost fragments from his memory, from the time that he was a soldier in Lebanon 25 years ago (leading up to the rememberance of his experience of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre). In fact, seeing this powerful film, considering its queries about the status of documents and film documentary, about the ethics of the image and the relation between media and memory, was one of guiding forces for putting together a new film program, Drawn to Life, which is partly about “animation” as “reanimation”, as a tool for revitalising history, memory and perception.

“How does one avoid overly aestheticizing violence when using animation?” asks Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot. “Despite a radical, unified look, the imagery in Waltz with Bashir ranges from the mundane to the dreamlike, and often those distinctions collapse, expand, and mutate right before our eyes. Folman isn’t gussying up a difficult chapter of history in accessible pop extravagance; rather he’s using a new form to investigate the terrible persistence, not to mention unreliability, of memory and perception, and how personal and political deceptions often go hand in hand.”

Here’s a few fragments from interviews with Folman, in which he talks about his reasons for using animation techniques (actually a specially designed combination of Flash animation, classic animation and 3D, so NO rotoscope animation. Each visual was made up of independently moving pieces) to deal with memory and trauma.

“WALTZ WITH BASHIR was always meant to be an animated documentary. For a few years, I had the basic idea for the film in my mind, but I was not happy at all to do it in real life video. How would that have looked like? A middleaged man being interviewed against a black background, telling stories that happened 25 years ago, without any archival footage to support them. Then I figured out it could be done only in animation with fantastic drawings. War is so surreal, and memory is so tricky that I thought I’d better go all along the memory journey with the help of very fine illustrators.”

“Using animation is like magic. You have freedom to go from one dimension to another pretty quickly, a freedom to move from the subconscious to the conscious, from dreams to memory and hallucinations and testimonies. (…) How do you depict a dream? You can write it down, which would be fairly accurate, but if you want to film it, you would have to have a set and actors,” he said. With animation, however, “you get rid of the ‘middle-man.’ And in some cases, you have a tool that is more truthful.”

“A journey trying to figure out a traumatic memory from the past is a commitment to long term therapy. My therapy lasted as long as the production of WALTZ WITH BASHIR: four years. There was a shift from dark depression as a result of things discovered to being in euphoria over the film finally being in production with complicated animation being done by the team at a pace better than expected. If I was the type of guy who believes in the cult of psychotherapy, I’d swear the film had done miracles to my personality. But due to previous experience, I’d say the filmmaking part was good, but the therapy aspect sucked.”

“I don’t care whether it is documentary or fiction. maybe it is the first animated documentary ever, but does it really matter? (…) The whole idea is that it was basically subjective memories, so there is no real or unreal.”

“I believe that there are thousands of Israeli ex-soldiers who keep their war memories deeply depressed. They might live the rest of their lives like that, without anything ever happening. But it could always burst out one day, causing who-knows-what to happen to them. That’s what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is all about.”

Folman is now working on an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel The Futurological Congress.

The Berlin-based Serbian artist Oliver Laric is part of a growing community of succesful (not in the least in the contemporary visual arts world) young creative producers (alongside people like Michael Bell-Smith, John Michael Boling and Cory Arcangel, to name just a few) who use digital forms to explore contemporary visual culture and how it is mediated through popular technologies. One of his most interesting projects is ’50 50′ (2007), in which he seamlessly strung together fifty YouTube clips of strangers singing three songs by hip hop artist 50 Cent. The video has received praise around the internet and the art world for its remix of both 50’s music and vernacular video culture. He has now made a recomprised version of the piece (’50 50 2008′) by using all new clips. “The mass availability of videos of people singing these three songs speaks both to the popular appeal of the music and of the act of performing for the home movie camera–thus deepening the initial resonance of Laric’s project” (Marisa Olson).For ‘Touch My Body’, Laric took Mariah Carey’s video for her hit single ‘Touch My Body’ and made a template for chroma-keyed remixes by YouTube users by digitally replacing the background images surrounding the starlet’s body with a flat green backdrop. “The music video begins like many classic pornos: Unwitting nerd rings doorbell, half-naked bombshell babe answers the door, contracted labor assignment is soon interrupted by a romantic interlude with a thumping soundtrack…The song is Carey’s foray into reaching out to the the geek set, and includes references to software upgrades, laser tag, and of course…YouTube! The video millions hits on the video-sharing site and, naturally, all of this makes the piece very attractive to an artist like Oliver Laric, who has a keen interest in digital culture and pop remixes. The artist’s newest piece is an edit of Carey’s video, with everything (the “compunerd,” the house, etc) but the singer masked out in green to encourage chroma-keyed remixes by online vi! ewers. Ironically, Carey’s lyrics speak not only to a mainstream paranoia about surveillance and privacy intrusions, but moreover drops hints about sharing footage online. She sings, “If there’s a camera up in here then it’s gonna leave with me when I do. If there’s a camera up in here then I best not catch this flick on YouTube.” Naturally, this is exactly what Laric is hoping will happen–and no doubt Carey herself. Fame is nothing if not a self-production and Laric’s taken this to heart in leaving the title of the video the same and modifying his YouTube video tags to attract more viewers. His real hope is not that the piece will become an artworld cause célèbre but that the larger public of YouTube surfers will adopt the piece and post remixes of their own. The key point made by removing the superfluous imagery from the video’s 3,000 frames is that, with her “come hither” gestures and the invitation “touch my body,” Carey’s certainly asking for it!” (Marisa Olson). You can a set of remixes watch on Laric’s site. Here’s his Green Screen version.

Also check out his other work, like Message The (2007), in which Laric slices up the video of Grandmaster Flash’s classic “The Message” into its individual words, then rearranges the lyrics in alphabetical sequence (a form of détournement that has been done by other artists as well, see Lenka Clayton’s fantastic Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet) or (>’.’)>=O____l_*__O=<(‘.’<) (2008), based on thousands of tiny animated gifs that create an ultra-low-res illusion of cinematic movement, generating a barely discernible compilation of clips from a series of hip-hop music videos.

While doing some research on “animation” for our upcoming film program Drawn To Life (more info later), I stumbled upon some great autobiographical-tinted animation series, which are distributed via the net (where these vignettes are phenomenally popular). One is Tales Of Mere Existence by LEV (or Levni R. Yilmaz Esq), a wonderful series of witty (live) hand-drawn self-observations. Taylor Jessen writes: Tales Of Mere Existence is not necessarily about interesting stories, It is what it’s title indicates, anecdotes about the gloriously mundane. Everyday stories told not by the Devil on your right shoulder or the Angel on your left, but the voice in the middle of your head that doubts himself, questions everything, and sometimes doesn’t let you get out of bed. An unseen narrator tells the stories in a monotone voice, while his doodled illustrations come together on the screen. The stories deal with issues such as Sex, identity, and social confusion and just about anything else you would have written in your journal in High School. “Tales Of Mere Existence” goes for laughs in fearless ways that shock you even as you nod your head in recognition”. Take a look on Lev’s website, where you can suscribe to his films and comics. You can watch most of his animations on his YouTube or MySpace pages.
Here are some of my favorites:

A second series is Simon’s Cat by Simon Tofield. As a cat lover I find these Flash animations not only highly recognisable but also simply irresistible. The delightful vignettes (three so far) “accurately depict and exaggerate the comical aspects of nature’s odd couples, humans and felines, living together — especially the parts about ‘FEED ME!'”. One of the episodes has recently won “Best Comedy” at the British Animation Awards. Check out Simon’s Cat on YouTube and Simon Tofield’s work on the website of Tandem Films.

“For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye”
Paul Virilio

I’m currently reading a fairly interesting book entitled Witness, Memory, Representation and the Media in Question ( ed. Ulrik Ekman and Frederik Tygstrup, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), based on the proceedings of a symposium held at the European Summer School in Cultural Studies, Copenhagen, August 25, 2004. One of the most striking essays is the one written by Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg, ‘Witnessing at War’. In it he comes up with the term ‘the belligerent gaze’ as “an umbrella-expression designating a diversity of perhaps internally heteregoneous modes of looking in and at warfare”. He focusses on two distinct events, World War I and the incidents in the Abu Ghraib prison, in order to explore the changes in modes and conditions of “witnessing”, referring to the writings of Erich Maria Remarque, Ernst Jünger, Primo Levi, and others. All these authors seem to agree on the “peculiarly aporetic nature of witnessing and trauma: be it in the form of blindness and insight, of a non-coincidence between fact and truth, of the detrimenal and coercive contamination of all on the inside as well as the outside, or of the bleak curse and guilt of the inauthentic survivor.” What is rejected is the ’emperical’ notion of the witness as someone who ‘saw it with his of her own eyes’. Zangenberg’s claim is that the condition of witnessing is evaded and destroyed, circumvented or paralysed. In WWI soldiers were ‘derealized’, turned into some form of ghost – or else, appearing as pilots (see Virilio’s War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception), in which case their sight is reduced to an exclusively streategic and destructive gaze – they see victims, but never witnesses their obliteration. 90 years later, in the Abu Ghraib case, the conditions of witnessing are perverted and caricatured by the degrading videos of humiliated prisoners. Or the deceased civilians are not seen at all, they literally become invisible (see Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence).

Zangenberg considers the erosion of these modes and conditions, leading to “the obliteration of witnessing”, in part due to the contemporary role played by media and the proliferation of digital imagery. He refers to the ideas of Virilio, who writes about the dehumanizing, automated appearance of surveillance and seeing in the 20th century warfare and proposes that the emergence of unmanned planes and missiles (“intelligent weapons”) inaugurated the virtual dissapearance of witnessing. In War and Cinema Virilio quotes W.J. Perry, a former US Under-secretary of State for Defense, as saying “once you can see the target, you can expect to destroy it”. Virilio adds: “For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye””. “Obviously”, Zannenberg writes, “this circumstance is intensified when there is only a machinic eye casting a belligerent, neutral and automated glance at an infrared shape representing a human body” (see Manuel de Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines). The new kind of automated images have suggested a new surgical precision of warfare. War is the subject of these images, but it is also a means of creating subjects, visual subjects. In the Gulf War strategy, the agency belongs to the “West” seen from the point of view of the weapons themselves. Pictures were transmitted showing their “view” of their targets right up until the moment of impact (see Nicholas Mirzoeff’ Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture). In these shots – according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Theweleit- bomb and reporter are identical.

For example, these images were taken in 2002, when about 2.000 troops from the US led military coalition were engaged in close in combat with small pockets of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the rugged terrain of northeastern Afghanistan, as part of an operation called Operation Acaconda…. This footage was filmed from US gunship helicopters that were part of this mission. At the same time these pictures show the distance between the pilot and the battlefield. (Found in OVNI’s Babylon Archives. Fragments of these shots were appropriated by Dominic Angerame – in Anaconda Targets – and Christoph Büchel – in AC-130 Gunship Targeting Video (Afghanistan 12/6/2002)).

The images below were recorded during NATO air strikes against former Yugoslavia. There were 4 US AIR Force airplanes flying from a NATO-base in Italy to a destination in Yugoslavia. Mission objective was to bomb several targets in the area around the city of Novi Sad. On the way back, after the mission was completed, one of the planes was shot. This tape was found near the crashed plane in the Fruska Gora mountains in the Srem region. It shows the electronic cockpit with basic graphical interface and voice communication between the pilots. This videotape is a regular flight document used by command structures to analyze its efficiency and success after very mission. It presents the last moments before the plane crashed. The blue image signifies the end for the pilot: no image, no place, no reality. (Found on Kuda.org)

The loss of the ‘genuine picture’ means the eye no longer has a role as historical witness. It has been said that what was brought into play in the Gulf War was not new weaponry but rather a new policy on images. In this way the basis for electronic warfare was created. Today, kilo tonnage and penetration are less important than the so-called C3I cycle, which has come to encircle our world. C3I refers to “Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence” and means global and tactical early warning systems, area surveillance through seismic, acoustic and radar sensors, radio direction sounding, monitoring opponents’ communications, as well as the use of jamming to suppress all these techniques.
Harun Farocki explores these issues in many of his films and installations. In War at a Distance (2003) he focusses on how, since the first Gulf War, it has virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on a computer. The image is no longer used only as testimony, but also as an indispensable link in a process of production and destruction. In Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1989) he researches the interconnection – and at times, disjunction – between cognition and recognition in Images of the World and the Inscription of War. The film is based on an event which took place in 1944, when an Allied aircraft took topographic photographs of Auschwitz during a routine surveillance operation for power plants, munitions factories, chemical plants, and any other industrial complexes that could potentially serve as bombing targets that, in the military’s myopic search for these high collateral targets that would cripple the German war machine, failed to recognize that they had actually taken an aerial survey of the layout of the Auschwitz concentration camp – an explicitly detailed, but mentally unregistered discovery for which the implicit meaning would not be realized until decades later, long after the tragic reality of the Nazi death camps had been exposed. Investigates this conceptual image of a “blind spot” and the binding of the gaze, the film illustrates the conceptual introduction of quantifying images measured from a “safe” distance into discrete elements that can be uniquely identified or accurately reproduced remotely into scale models and detailed simulations. Christa Blümlinger wrote about the film: “one’s thoughts are not free when machines, in league with science and the military, dictate what is to be investigated. This is the essence of media violence, of Paul Virilio’s ‘terrorist aesthetic’ of optic stimulation, which today appears on control panels as well as on television, with its goal of making the observer either an accomplice or a potential victim, as in times of war”.

For Zangenberg this concerns the duress of being the subject of the belligerent gaze. He writes: “I contend that the one who cast the belligerent gaze, the one who is the subject and master of that gaze, is barred from ever becoming a witness; he may well ‘see everything’, but since he is always at a safe distance, and since he is the one who produces death, he cannot properly turn into a witness. Being the object of the belligerent gaze, on the other hand, is a position of passivity, vulnerability, fear, horror, and suffering, if not being exposed to the numbing effect of alienation and derealization. Either way, war is engaged in a constant process of un-witnessing.”

Just got this message from Emily Foreman via Brian Holmes. “This material from Emily Foreman is important to get out. Despite the good news from the polls we are still living under the boot here in the USA. Poor people’s lives get wasted in the war, and when they try to participate in the democracy they were supposed to be fighting for they get their skull crushed by the police. When is this gonna stop?- BH”

Hello All-

I just wanted to draw your attention to this video, particularly these video stills, that i shot during the Iraq Veterans Against the War protest at the final U.S. presidential debates, last Wednesday, in Long Island, NY. The video is extremely disturbing and clearly shows Iraq War Veteran Nick Morgan at the moment when his head was crushed to the sidewalk under a police horse. This story has been completely ignored in the media. He was legally, peacefully and standing on the sidewalk when the event occurred.

The still images speak volumes to this moment in history, please look at them and please get them to people (journalists, activists, veterans) who can use them!

Last Wednesday October 15th 2008, former Army Sergeant Nick Morgan, a 24 year old veteran of the US war in Iraq, was nearly killed by riot police, his face crushed under a police horse, during a peaceful protest outside the final US presidential debates.

Morgan is a native of Annapolis, MD who spent four-years the US Army and one year in Iraq. He was a participant in the Winter Soldier hearings and is an active member of the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), a national organization of ‘Global War On Terror’ veterans who had come to the Presidential debates in Long Island, demanding that veterans’ concerns be heard during these nationally televised dialogues.

The IVAW had previously announced, sending a letter to CBS, that two veterans had prepared one question each for Obama and McCain, to be asked during the televised debate. They had also announced that if they didn’t receive a response by 7pm on the night of the debates, that those veterans would enter the debates anyway, in an attempt to be seen, if not actually have their voices heard.

On Wednesday, as the sun was going down, the veterans waited for a response with a crowd of civilian supporters. When no response came from CBS, Obama, or McCain by 7pm, they led a march peacefully to the gate of the debates. Seven veterans were arrested while attempting to enter the gate of the national debates.

Nassau county police immediately began pushing the crowd of media, veterans and supporters backwards and across the street, charging riot cops and horses into the tightly packed crowd. One officer, Officer Quagliano was seen by many witnesses to be driving his horse backwards, in circles and out of control, repeatedly antagonizing Nick Morgan and a group of Iraq War vets who were peacefully holding the front of the line. The IVAW veterans are committed to non-violence and committed to protecting ‘civilians’ that come out to support them. Video shows him swiping Morgan and veteran Carlos Harris with the head of his horse just a few minutes before trampling them on the ground.

After the crowd was divided in two and fully pushed back onto the sidewalk with nowhere to go, Officer Quagliano continued to run his horse into the crowd and in circles ON the sidewalk. Riot police on foot began pulling people from the tightly packed sidewalk and into the way of Quagliano’s out of control horse. At least three civilians and and three veterans were knocked to the ground and trampled in the undertow.

This video clearly shows the moment of impact as Officer Quagliano’s horse backs up and steps on Nick Morgan’s face. He immediately lost consciousness and his lower orbital was shattered in 3 places. After nearly being killed, suffering a concussion and bleeding profusely from the head, police actually refused to allow other soldiers and friends to give him medical attention and to protect him from Quagliano’s horse, still stomping inches from his body.

A police statement later claimed that quote “a ‘person’ may have been injured when their body came into contact with a horse.” While the event happened quickly and in the pitch black, the momentary flashes in the darkness reveal a different story.

Instead, Nick Morgan was flipped, tugged, and dragged by police, bruising and cutting his abdomen. He was pulled from the crowd, face wiped, and thrown in an arrest van with other arrested veterans.

Morgan, who already suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after his tour of duty in Iraq, was eventually taken to Nassau County hospital where he was handcuffed to a gurney, cat-scanned and given a prescription for antibiotics and Motrin. Ironically, Morgan and other members of Iraq Veterans Against the War had come to the October debates with the intention of asking candidates pointed questions about lack of care for veterans.

A few hours later he was taken to jail, chained to a bench for five hours, and given a November 10th court appearance ticket for a charge of disorderly conduct.

Multiple veterans and civilians were injured by horses. All were given insufficient medical attention at Nassau County hospital. Veteran Carlos Harris had his foot stepped on and was refused an X-ray at Nassau County. IVAW supporter Devra Shore actually heard her foot crack under the hooves a horse, and she too was denied any diagnosis in Nassau County.

Nick Morgan has nerve damage and his vision is still blurry. He underwent facial reconstructive surgery this morning to keep his crushed cheekbone from sinking into his face.

The reality is that American police nearly killed an American vet last week with immunity, and with complete silence from the media, as he peacefully exercised those ‘constitutional freedoms’ he was sworn to protect and was supposedly fighting for across the world. Anti-war Veterans like Nick Morgan have suffered a double betrayal, in Iraq and at home, and their voices deserve to be heard, if not by the presidential candidates, then by the American people themselves.

i witness
Iraq Veterans Against the War
IVAW media contact for Nick Morgan is – matthis(at)ivaw(dot)org
Video and video still requests – Emily Forman – multiplefronts(at)gmail(dot)com