3 May 2012 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane event.
introduced by Stoffel Debuysere
“There is a debate on the relevance of the use of cinematic writing methods in the service of political ends. Some filmmakers working in the heat of a struggle claim they have no interest in developing language forms. I rather think you have to attack language itself in order to cancel out the predetermined language.“
– Johan Van der Keuken
De Weg Naar Het Zuiden (The Way South) NL, 1981, 16mm, color, various languages, English subtitles, 145’
According to the late Serge Daney the idea of “Unequal exhange” is what defines the work of Johan Van der Keuken (1938-2001), form as well as content: the ever unequal exhange between filming and being filmed, between one image and another, but also between here and there, between those who belong and those who are left out. The “gliding Dutchman”, as Daney used to call Van der Keuken, always had an eye for the economical and ecological aberrations of the capitalist world order, not in the least regarding the relation between “North” and “South”. In the so-called North-South triptych (Diary, The White Castle and The New Ice-age, 1973-1974) he showed how the current global system of inequality and exploitation holds different worlds, which are still inseparably linked. This idea is also central to The Way South, which is in more than one way his most direct film. It is the account of a journey from North to South, from Amsterdam, his hometown, to Caïro, where he literally and figuratively looses the North; but is also a chronicle of migration, of people who see their own lives reflected in that of others, always elsewhere. Van der Keuken records his impressions and encounters with an eye as a scalpel: sharp and precise, but also fragile and pure, always conscious of the tension between a look and the world, between those filming and those being filmed. It is this consciousness, and rendering it visible, that forms the true political stake of Van der Keuken’s work: every exchange is unequal.
In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)” KASK / School of Arts
Programme 1: 16 February 2012 19:00, KASKcinema, Gent.
Programme 2: Courtisane Festival (21 – 25 March 2012)
introduced by Stoffel Debuysere
“My works don’t tell political stories. They rather document a political alertness, a clairaudience for certain constellations. My films, each for themselves, are generally useless for the purpose of a position or theory.”
– Thomas Harlan
“I am the son of my parents. That is a disaster. It has determined me”, declares writer, playwright and filmmaker Thomas Harlan (1929-2010) in the interview book ‘Hitler war meine Mitgift’. Harlan, who grew up in Nazi-Germany, once shared a table with Adolf Hitler, accompanied by both of his parents, actress Hilde Körber and filmmaker Veit Harlan, the director of the infamous anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß. It is a heritage that he could never get rid of: the appalled son would take upon himself the sins of his repentless father. His whole life Harlan would strive for truth as the only possible justice: he spent years in the Polish archives, looking for proofs of German war crimes; in Rome he joined the radical leftist group “La Lotta Continue” and travelled to wherever the spirit of revolt and revolution emerged. In 1975 Harlan was in Portugal where, in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution, various movements of resistance and initiatives of land occupation were developing. That is where he shot his first film, a documentary about the occupation of the Torre Bela estate, which according to critic Serge Daney represents a condensation of “all the key ideas – materialised, embodied – of political and theoretical leftism from the past decade”. His following film project started as a reaction to the “German Autumn” of 1977. Wundkanal explores the relation between the events in the Stammheim prison, where several members of the RAF died in suspicious circumstances, and the logic of Nazi terror. The shooting of the film, in which war criminal Alfred Filbert played a hardly fictionalized version of himself, appears in Robert Kramer’s documentary Notre Nazi, revealing a staggering portrait of a filmmaker who, in an attempt to come to terms with his past, takes on the methods of the enemy and in doing so becomes his own worst enemy; and thus an old sin is replaced by a new one.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————- PROGRAMME 1 16 February 2012 19:00, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane programme.
Thomas Harlan Wundkanal
1984 – RFA/France –107’
Robert Kramer Notre Nazi
1984 – RFA/France – 116’
“My film is perhaps another fiction: the story of a certain T., son of the greatest Nazi filmmaker, and himself a film director. All his life he has tried to undo his past. Today he is shooting a fiction film, he has given the main role to a Nazi war criminal who is more or less the same age. By this act T. releases a whole torrent of unforeseeable energy which sweeps the set and even more than the set.”
– Robert Kramer
“For the first time in the history of cinema, said Louis Marcolles in le Monde (30 August 1984), two films were shot against each other; the first being fiction, the second unmasking this fiction; the first mystifying its subject (crime), the second outrageously unveiling its methods of manipulation.
Yet, both films were produced by the same producer, both in the outskirts of Paris and with two directors who are complementary to each other: Thomas Harlan, The German and Robert Kramer, the American. Wundkanal by Thomas Harlan is a fiction film about a killer. Notre Nazi by Robert Kramer kills the fiction.
But the Killer is a real-life killer, and never before in the history of cinema did an audience get so intimate with a murderer like doctor Alfred Filbert, did an audience get so close to his face and to his skin.
Indeed, Alfred Filbert – the archetypal gentel German grandpa – belonged to the inner circle of nine men who in Hitler’s terror state planned the Holocaust; so in the film he appears as an actor and as himself, playing his own part in history.
In Wundkanal – a quiet oratorio of long sequence shots – four terrorists interrogate a war (and peace) criminal they kidknapped in Alsatia, trying to drive him to commit suicide.
In Notre Nazi the actor playing a part in a fiction film becomes a real human being again, of flesh and blood. The members of the film crew discover their sorrow and their pity as they live through unimaginable moments of violence and despair.
Two inseperable films – lashing out against each other as ruthlessly as a couple divoring publicly – “the scandal”, as Il Messagero put it, “of the 1984 Venice Film festival.” (Editions Filmmuseum)
Note: There is actually a third film in this series: Dorenavant tout sera comme d’habitude by Roland Allard, a documentary report on the making of Wundkanal and Notre Nazi. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to track down a copy.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————- PROGRAMME 2 Part of the Courtisane Festival (21 – 25 March 2012)
Thomas Harlan Torre Bela
1977 – Portugal – 106’
José Filipe Costa Linha Vermelha
2011 – Portugal – 80′
“Torre Bela is the complete opposite of what a documentary should be. The film is a film that we, in fact, did not conceive as a film, but as reality. The reality was provoked, intentionally created.”
– Thomas Harlan
“In the revolutionary Portugal of 1975, a group of peasants occupied the vast manor and estate of Torre Bela owned by the Duke of Lafões and founded a cooperative there. The events were recorded in the film Torre Bela (1977) by the German director Thomas Harlan, son of the director Veit Harlan.
When I first started filming Red Line I asked a woman in a village near Torre Bela if she had been involved in any way in the 1975 occupation. She immediately replied that she had not and that I should ask that question to another villager who was on the other side of the street. When I asked him, the latter was extremely surprised by his neighbour’s denial: since it was even possible to see her in the film, amongst a crowd shouting slogans! After this episode I became increasingly aware of how an observational documentary had become a controversial historical object: for some it was even proof of a “crime” committed during the revolutionary period of 1975. In one of the most controversial sequences of Harlan’s film it is possible to see the squatters breaking into the palace on the estate, opening drawers and trying on the Duke’s jackets, as they play joyfully with these symbols of power. Red Line questions how the film Torre Bela played a role in how these events are viewed and examines how Thomas Harlan intervened in the flow of the events, himself becoming a squatter. Drawing on testimonies, recently discovered sound rushes and other documents, Red Line explores the complexities and ambiguities of a filmed revolution, in which the camera helps people to play new roles: “Are we actors or occupiers? If we are actors, we’re actors…” says one occupant while waiting for the camera to start filming before the group broke through the door of the palace in 1975.” (José Filipe Costa)
In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)” KASK / School of Arts
Figures of Dissent : Jean Genet 24 November 2011 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane programme.
“Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.”
— Jean Genet
Orphan, prisoner, deserter, vagabond, writer, dramaturge, one-time filmmaker and overall poet : the life and work of Jean Genet (1910-1986) resists easy classifications. But if there is a constant characteristic in his unorthodox trajectory, it is an ever-moving feeling of resistance and rebellion. “Obviously I am drawn to peoples in revolt”, he says in an interview in the early 1980’s, “because I myself have the need to call the whole of society into question.” From his first novel, that would earn him the respect and recognition of the likes of Cocteau, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Breton, he manifests a profound aversion towards all forms of social consensus, as well as a deeply felt affection for those who do not “belong”. And yet, it wasn’t until Les Paravents, the closing chapter of a series of theatre plays that he wrote between 1950 and 1960, that Genet would – be it implicitly – take sides with a political resistance movement: the Algerian independence fighters. A few years later he would write a tribute to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the protagonists of May 1968, and protest against the inhumane living conditions of immigrants in France. In 1970 he travelled clandestinely to the United States where he supported the cause of the Black Panther Party. That same year he visited for the first time Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, where he would remain intermittently until 1972. When he returned ten years later, he was confronted with the terrible consequences of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Genet would be one of first Westerners to witness the aftermath of the blood bath perpetrated at the Shatila camp by the Lebanese Phalangist Militia, with the tacit approval of the Israeli government. His Palestinian experiences are recounted in the essay Quatre heures à Chatila (“Four Hours in Shatila”) and in his posthumous novel Un Captif Amoureux (“Prisoner of Love”). He writes: “All these words to say, this is my Palestinian revolution, told in my chosen order. As well as mine, there is the other, probably many others. Trying to think the revolution is like waking up and trying to see the logic in a dream.” During the past two decades since he passed away, his writings have only gained more force. Two documentaries gauge the resonance of his work in the light of the continuous ghettoisation of Palestine.
Richard Dindo Genet à Chatila (Genet in Chatila)
CH/Palestine, 1999, 16mm on video, colour, stereo, English spoken version, 99’
“Le titre du film de Richard Dindo est trompeur. Optant pour un intitulé de documentaire, Dindo, qui n’a fait que paraphraser l’un des titres de Genet, Quatre heures à Chatila, ferre en quelque sorte son spectateur avant de l’emporter dans un long poème sur le temps, de lui faire découvrir en companie du personnage attachant d’une jeune journaliste algérienne, jeune Arabe parlant difficilement l’arabe et comme habitée d’une peine infinie, que la meilleur façon d’aller dans la durée consiste à avancer dans les lieux. (…) (…) Armé d’une langue magnifique, Genet joue fondamentalement, tout comme il aurait misé au jeu, la fusion des strates temporelles. “Le présent est toujours dur, l’avenir est supposé l’être davantage. Le passé, ou plutôt l’absent, sont adorables et nous vivons au présent.” Pour se dégager de l’emprise de ces durées, plantées en chacun et apparamment inextricables, Genet va donc faire fusionner les strates du temps, ses strates du temps: son récit sera tout à la fois celui d’un premier séjour en 1970, d’un second en 1982, d’un troisième en 1983-84, et celui d’aucun d’entre eux. Et Richard dindo, qui a pour bonne habitude de coller littéralement aux textes de ses auteurs, vient à son tour mêler – et dissoudre – sa strate, celle du temps cinématographique, à celles de Genet. Il demeure ainsi dans l’oeuvre et effectue, en sa compagnie, sa propre sortie de la durée. Là où résidait la grande prouesse de Genet dans son Captif Amoureux, se retrouve le pari, réussi, de Dindo.” (Elias Sanbar)
The Otolith Group Nervus Rerum
GB/Palestine, 2008, video, colour, stereo, English spoken, 32’
“It is perhaps with Nervus Rerum (the title is taken from Cicero and translates as ‘the nerve of things’), the 2008 film shot in the Palestinian Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank, that The Otolith Group’s (Kodwo Eshun & Anjalika Sagar) vision achieves its greatest success. The film begins with the camera moving slowly up a backstreet in Gaza. Children look on silently as an eerie soundtrack deepens their gaze. Abandoned cookers line the sides of the road; graffiti is everywhere, a palimpsest of politics. Two men stand talking next to a pick-up truck filled with empty plastic bottles. ‘We are death,’ declares Sagar. ‘We are dead when we think we are living.’ The words are taken from Fernando Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’ and Jean Genet’s book about Palestine, ‘Prisoner of Love’; they both distance us and draw us closer to the slow, quiet images of the settlement. (…) This is the success of Nervus Rerum and The Otolith Group as a whole: when image and voice fail to coincide; when the ‘big story’ of Palestine becomes a whole series of smaller tales; when representation fails because it has to.” (Nina Power)
In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)” KASK / School of Arts
Figures of Dissent : Masao Adachi 23 November 2011 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane programme.
“Shooting a gun or shooting with a camera, it doesn’t make a difference to me”
— Masao Adachi
“The revolution has been continuously my theme. Main subject” says Masao Adachi (born 1939). “People Said: Revolutionary Cinema. I said: No. It’s Cinema for Revolution.” Of all the filmmakers that would be inspired by the spirit of resistance and utopia of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Adachi is without a doubt the most radically and perseveringly militant. Armed with a camera or with a gun: it made no difference to him. To him, both weapons served as possible intervention tools in the fight against political and social oppression. It is not accidental that his first films were made under the auspices of the Japanese student movements that were born after WWII against what were regarded as antidemocratic and neo-colonial policies (particularly in relation to the USA). With his surrealistically tinted and politically provoking experiments he inscribed himself rapidly as part of the so called “new wave” currents that shook Japanese culture of the time. In that context he collaborated with the likes of Nagisa Oshima and especially Kôji Wakamatsu, with whom he would inject the erotically charged “pink cinema” genre with a lively dose of anarchism. Resulting in controversial works such as Seiyûgi (Sex Game, 1968) and Jogakusei gerira (Female Student Guerillas, 1969), these experiences taught Adachi the basic rules of guerrilla-style filmmaking: fast and cheap. In 1971, after visiting the Cannes Film Festival, Wakamatsu and Adachi travelled to Lebanon, where they would film Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War), a propaganda film in support of the Arab fight against Israeli occupation. In 1974 Adachi returned to Pastine, with the idea of making a second film. He would end up staying 26 years, at the service of the Palestinian cause. In 1997, under the pressure of the Japanese authorities, he was incarcerated in Beirut. He was extradited to his country three years later, where he remained in prison for two more years. Once free, Adachi gave the account of his experiences in a series of autobiographical publications as well as a new film – his first in more than thirty years : Yûheisha – Terorisuto (Prisoner/Terrorist, 2006). Today Adachi’s activist thought resonates with more force than ever, as show the number of screenings and retrospectives that have been organised around the world in recent years. Perhaps the most beautiful homage is the one that French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux pays to his work in a recent cinematographic portrait.
Philippe Grandrieux Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution – Masao Adachi
(It May be that Beauty has Strengthened our Resolve)
FR, 2011, video, color, stereo, Japanese and French spoken with English subtitles, 75′
“A to and fro between politics and cinema, between Trotskym and Surrealism, between armed struggle and screenplays, between Palestine, Lebanon and Japan, between the day-before-yesterday and today, between beauty and resolve, between the art of eating and that of being a father, such is the risky and precise life of Masao Adachi, the monsieur with the white hair glimpsed in his delusions. And this is just how Philippe Grandrieux, faithful to his way of doing things, decided to suggest his portrait, with no a priori, without interrupting speech, filming him and listening to his words without at first understanding them, framing him in a tight close-up that is sometimes underexposed, other times overexposed, to better abandon him later for: cherry trees in blossom, the streets of Tokyo swarming with cars and passersby, familiar objects and lactescent celling light. And from time to time, Grandrieux lets speak a few shots from his earlier films, from where suddenly crops up the phrase, Genet-like, given in the title: a paradoxical program that hesitates to connect one shore to the other”. (Jean-Pierre Rehm) This is the first part of the film series “Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution”, dedicated to filmmakers who in the course of the 20th century devoted their lives and work to resistance and emancipation.
Masao Adachi & Koji Wakamatsu Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War)
JP/ Palestine, 1971, 16mm, color, stereo, Japanese and Arabic spoken with English subtitles, 69’
“In 1971, Adachi and Wakamatsu were invited to Cannes Film Festival. On the way back they went to Beirut, and while they were there shot Sekigun PFLP – Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War) a film that showed the ‘everyday life’ of Arab guerillas, and transformed a ‘news documentary’ into a radical text for a world revolution. Rejecting the existing system of film exhibition and declaring the screening itself as a political act, the ‘Red Bus’ mobile projection unit was formed and they hit the road, showing the film in Palestine and Europe. This film can be seen as the key Japanese film of that era, as it completely epitomised the spirit of the radical filmmaking movement. It was also a personal turning point for one of its makers: Adachi left Japan in 1974, in order to join the Palestinian revolution as a Japanese Red Army soldier. “ (Go Hirasawa)
Figures of Dissent : Pasolini 8 – 9 June 2011, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane programme.
“It has been said that I have three heroes: Christ, Marx and Freud. This is reducing everything to formulae. In truth, my only hero is Reality. If I have chosen to be a filmmaker as well as a writer it is because, rather than expressing reality through those symbols that are words, I have preferred the cinema as a means of expression – to express reality through reality…”
— Pier Paolo Pasolini
The death of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), as Serge Daney once suggested, marked the end of an era: a certain history of cinema seemed to tiredly come to a halt. Cinema understood as a communal place where to come together and disagree, as an open space for exploration and confrontation (mise-en-scène as well as mise-en-crise) is no more â or at least no longer with the scope of former days. However, the critical and polemical tone that once indicated the vitality of the seventh art has always continued to resonate in Pasoliniâs work. Today, in the grooves of the 21st century, his voice appears to resound with the same vigor of old, when he sent cold shivers to the world of the 1960âs and 1970âs. The recent wave of retrospectives, restorations, updates and reprises proves how strongly the countertone of Pasolini – filmmaker, poet, author and true dissenter at heart – is to be missed more than ever before in todayâs consensual times. Pasoliniâs self proclaimed role, in the words of art critic Guy Scarpetta âwas to subvert conceptions of the dominant world, to explore all that is not said by conventional representations, to uncover all that is repressed in the social and cultural consensus.â This programme celebrates his outspokenly rebellious character with the screening of two rarely shown and recently restored documentaries by Pasolini, as well as works by two contemporary artists who each in their own way reinvigorate his legacy: Alfredo Jaar and Ayreen Anastas.
Alfredo Jaar Le Ceneri di Pasolini (The Ashes of Pasolini)
IT/CL, 2009, video, b/w & colour, stereo, Italian with English subtitles, 38â
Copy courtesy of the artist
“The Ashes of Pasolini is a modest film about the death of an extraordinary intellectual. It is mostly based on documentary material discovered after 1975, the year of his death, and before. As you know, it is still unclear who killed him. But for me, it has always been clear why: it was because of fear. Fear of his voice, fear of his life style, fear of his ideas, fear of his opinions, fear of his intellect. Pasolini was the complete intellectual: a filmmaker, a poet, a writer, a journalist, a critic, a polemicist. He was totally involved in the cultural and political life of his time. As an artist he took risks, broke the rules, he created his own rules. Pasolini wrote one of the most beautiful poems of the 20th century titled ‘The Ashes of Gramsci’ (1957), a eulogy to another great Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci. The title of my film is based on this poem by Pasolini but I chose it to write a eulogy to Pasolini himself. In these dark times in which Italy finds itself, Pasoliniâs voice is sorely missed.” (Alfredo Jaar)
“Why a tribute to Pasolini in 2009? … In the middle of the Berlusconi era? The answer is in Pasolini words, in his voice. Itâs such a contemporary voice that we can hardly believe that these words were pronounced almost half-century ago. We are surprised when we realize how his words are directly pertinent, not just to Berlusconiâs Italy but to our current condition. […] My short film The Ashes of Pasolini itâs a montage of excerpts of his films and interviews, as well as RAI news footage. Also, I have included images shot in Casarsa, the small village where he was buried. My main aim was to revive his voice in the XXIst century, where it belongs.” (Alfredo Jaar)
Giuseppe Bertolucci & Pier Paolo Pasolini La Rabbia di Pasolini (The Rage of Pasolini)â¨
IT, 1963/2008, 35mm, b/w and colour, stereo, Italian with English subtitles, 83ââ¨
Print courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna
“In 1962, Pasolini was invited by an Italian newsreel producer to create a feature-length film essay from his companyâs library of footage. Inspired by diverse wealth of imagery, Pasolini set out to make a film as ‘a show of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world.’ Assembling images from the Soviet bloc and various anti-colonial movements as complement and contrast to the newsreel footage, Pasolini crafted a remarkable tour de force of politically trenchant commentary on the modern world, climaxing in a moving meditation on the death of Marilyn Monroe. Fearing controversy and box-office failure, the producer ordered Pasolini to cut the original version to less than an hour and then promptly added a right-wing counterpart by the filmmaker Giovanni Guareschi, packaging the two parts as one film. Disowned by Pasolini, this version was indeed a failure. Although Pasoliniâs original version remains lost, an ambitious reconstruction was recently completed by Giuseppe Bertolucci and the Cineteca di Bologna using the shot list and a dialogue transcript from the first version, as well as Pasoliniâs notes on music for the film.” (Harvard Film Archive)
“A hundred elegiac pages in prose and verses, and a texture of moving images, photographs and painting reproductions: in the laboratory of the film La Rabbia, Pier Paolo Pasolini experimented for the first time with a narrative style different from the traditional and conventional documentaries of the time. His intention was â in his own words â to create a ‘new cinema genre. An ideological and poetical essay through new sequences.’ La Rabbia had to be ‘an act of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world and its consequent historical irresponsibility, to testify to the presence of a world that, unlike that of the bourgeoisie, is deeply rooted in reality. And reality implies a true love for tradition that can only be achieved through revolution.’ (…) The project was born from the proposal of a small producer, Gastone Ferranti, who entrusted Pasolini with the file material of a newsreel called ‘Mondo libero’, which he had directed and produced for a number of years. During an interview with Maurizio Liverani (‘Paese sera’, April 14th, 1963), Pasolini declared: ‘I pulled vision out of that material. It was horrendous, wretched, a depressing portrait of international populism, the triumph of the most trivial reactions. However, in all this terrible squalor, every now and then, beautiful images would grab my attention: the smile of a stranger, two eyes expressing joy and sorrow, and interesting sequences rich with historical significance, visual fascination in black and white’.”(Roberto Chiesi)
Pier Paolo Pasolini Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (Notes for an African Orestes)â¨
IT, 1970, 35mm, colour, stereo, Italian with English subtitles, 63ââ¨
Print courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna
“While shooting Medea, a film about the subjugation of the ancient world to an alienating modernity, Pier Paolo Pasolini developed the idea to make a companion piece about another Greek myth â the story of Orestes. This story would end more happily, with the archaic making way for a different kind of modernity, built not on exploitation but on communalism. Encouraged by emerging socialist governments in post-colonial Africa, Pasolini hoped to shoot his film there, and so he went to Uganda and Tanzania to scout for locations and actors. That footage became the basis for this film, with Pasolini explaining his ideas on the soundtrack. A perfect example of leftist intellectual auto-critique, the film climaxes with Pasolini discussing his plans with a group of African students in Rome. The discussion hovers somewhere between tragedy and farce as one by one, the students calmly and kindly offer numerous reasonable objections to Pasoliniâs idea, all of which he seems to take in stride. The Oresteia project was never made. Little-seen and little-discussed, the film is essential viewing for understanding Pasoliniâs political thinking and his attachment to myth.” (Harvard Film Archive)
“Orestes synthesizes African History over the last hundred years: the sudden and almost divine passing from a ‘savage’ state to a civil and democratic one. The series of kings, who dominated the African lands (and who in their turn were dominated by the dark Erinyes) in the atrocious and century-old stagnation of a tribal and prehistoric culture, have suddenly been swept away. And Reason, almost motu proprio, has established democratic institutions. We must add that now, in the sixties, the years of the ‘Third World’, the years of ‘negritude’, the burning problem and question is the transformation of the Erinyes into Eumenides. Aeschylus’ genius foreshadowed all of this. All advanced people today agree that archaic civilizations – superficially referred to in terms of folklore – must not be forgotten, despised, or betrayed. Rather, they ought to be absorbed within the new civilization, integrating it, making it specific, concrete, historical? The terrifying and fantastic divinities of African prehistory should undergo the same process as the Erinyes, they should become Eumenides.” (Pasolini)
Ayreen Anastas Pasolini Pa* Palestine
US/Palestine, 2005, video, colour, stereo, Arabic with English subtitles, 51â
Copy courtesy of the artist
“Pasolini Pa* Palestine is an attempt to repeat Pasolini’s trip to Palestine in his film, Seeking Locations in Palestine for The Gospel According to Matthew (1963). It adapts his script into a route map superimposed on the current landscape, creating contradictions and breaks between the visual and the audible, the expected and the real. The video explores the question of repetition. For Heidegger Wiederholung ‘repetition, retrieval’ is one of the terms he uses for the appropriate attitude toward the past. “By the repetition of a basic problem we understand the disclosure of its original, so far hidden possibilities.” The project ventures a conversation and a dialogue with Pasolini, especially his ‘Poem for the Third World’. Discutere ‘to smash to pieces’ is the Latin source of dialogue, discussion. The piece does not criticize Pasolini, but reveals unnoticed possibilities in his thought and works back to the ‘experiences’ that inspired it.” (Ayreen Anastas)
“From: Ayreen Anastas
Sent: Dec 2, 2003 4:22 PM
To: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Subject: Sopraluoghi in Palestina per il film “Vangelo Secondo Matteo”
Dear Pier Paolo,
I am writing to ask your permission to repeat your seeking in Palestine film 40 years ago in the film: Sopraluoghi in Palestina per il film ‘Vangelo Secondo Matteo’.*
In this repetition, I would like to find in that landscape what you have not found in your film. Your refusal of the Palestinian landscape makes me sad: a refusal that is a negation and affirmation at the same time: it is a negation because you did not execute ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’ in Palestine, and an affirmation in the sense of the necessity of a repetition of this venture, trip, seeking etc… only in that gap of not finding the location in Palestine in your film 40 years ago, I can start seeking them in the new film today.
So it is not a real sadness if I say: I am sad that you did not decide for this landscape and for locations there. It is rather a symbolic sadness, that will help me find an unnamable (an unknown that actually motivates the project) in that landscape I grew up in. It is a sadness of love, a double love, for you as a director and for this landscape.
(…)
* Seeking Locations in Palestine for ‘The Gospel According to Matthew'”
In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)” KASK / School of Arts
