Author: Admin

DISSENT ! Ariella Azoulay

nakba.JPG

15 & 18 December 2014 20:00, Galeries Brussels. In collaboration with KU Leuven / Leuven University Press and Aleppo. Ariella Azoulay in conversation with Stoffel Debuysere, preceded by a screening of ‘Khirbat’ Khize’ (Ram Loevy, 1978, 48’) and ‘Al-Midya’ (Dani Gal, 2014, 26’)

“I was born in the early 1960’s, and for years took for granted the existence of the state of Israel. My political consciousness was formed by the 1967 occupation, the injustices it led to and the urgent need to reflect on them. As a young leftist, I was raised to believe that 1948 was a distant disaster, irreversible and less acute than the endless injustices that resulted from the 1967 occupation. Years of research on citizenship and photography made it clear that the occupation was part of the Israeli political regime, and that reconstructing its schema should start in 1948”.

Is it possible to break the deadlock of the present and imagine a different future through a revisiting of the past? The theoretical and curatorial work of Ariella Azoulay is grounded in an exploration of this possibility: using the events that occurred between 1947 and 1950 as a prism, she proposes a civil perspective on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, one that turns away from the framework imposed by the paradigm of an unavoidable and irreversible national conflict. It is a perspective that encompasses all the inhabitants of the territory, both Jews and Arabs, which allows to reconstruct the collision between them as a product of the war. The violence inflicted on the Palestinians positioned them as the enemy of the very people with whom they had previously shared their lives, which gave way to two distinct narratives – one culminating in the creation of the state of Israel, the other situating the nakba as the constitutive event of Palestinian identity – both of which are oblivious to the origins of this division. In order to reconstruct this past, Azoulay has created an archive of photographs that have been preserved by the same regime that has previously made great efforts to erase its traces, setting limits on what can be seen and what makes sense. But an image is always more and less than itself: it can not be reduced to the intention that has produced it, nor to the meanings that it supposedly reveals or conceals. The work of Azoulay consists of undoing the dominant connection between these images that speak and the discourse that keeps them silent, by making them speak in another way, linking them with eyewitness accounts, diaries, memoirs, minutes and memoranda. In proposing to think in civil terms about a place steeped in hopelessness, she tries to open up a new horizon of civil living for both citizens and those denied citizenship, as inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew.

This Dissent! session takes as starting point a selection of films, chosen by Ariella Azoulay, that deal with the impact of the events of 1948 on Palestinians and Jews. Documenting something that goes beyond the suffering of the victims and the glory of the victors, transcending more conventional expectations to either expose details of the catastrophe or veil it from view, these films enable spectators to witness a variety of forms of Jewish-Palestinian co-existence to which the event of 1948 put an end. These films will be shown on 15 December and 18 December. Ariella Azoulay will attend only on the 18th.

15 December 19:00, Galeries Brussels.

Kassem Hawal, Return to Haifa (1982, Palestine, Arabic spoken with English subtitles, 84’)
Return to Haifa is based on Kanafani’s novel the plot of which takes place in 1967, when Palestinian refugees living in the newly occupied territories had an opportunity to visit the places from which they had been expelled in 1948. Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple expelled from Haifa in 1948, visit the home that had been their own. Miriam, a Holocaust survivor and now a Jewish Israeli citizen who lives in their house, lets them in. She moved there with her husband shortly after the Palestinian couple had been uprooted. The Palestinian couple returns to Haifa hoping to discover something about their baby, Khaldun, whom they had left at home that April morning in 1948, not realizing that neither of them would be able to return. The abandoned baby had been adopted by Miriam and her husband who gave him a Hebrew name – Dov, now a soldier in the Israeli army. This tragic encounter depicted by the movie emblematizes the Nakba’s being not only the tragedy of the Palestinian people but also of the Israeli Jews who cannot escape confronting this past and becoming accountable for it.

Michel Khleifi, Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction (1984, Israel/Palestine, Arabic spoken with English subtitles, 30’)
Ma’aloul, located 6 kilometers from Nazareth was destroyed in 1948 and its residents were not allowed to return but rather declared by the State “present absentees,” not allowed to have their property back, just as were Palestinians expelled out of the country. This movie makes even more explicit the assumption that the history of Israel cannot be narrated without acknowledging the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians and their dispossession. The movie these internally displaced Palestinians’ testimonies about the destruction of their village Ma’aloul and their dispossession and the curricula taught in a history lesson in Arab schools, compelled by the state to teach the Zionist version of the events.

18 December 2014 20:00, Galeries Brussels. In the presence of Ariella Azoulay.

Ram Loevy, Khirbat’ Khize (1978, Israel, Hebrew spoken with English subtitles, 48’)
Khirbat Khize is a TV drama directed by Ram Loevy in 1978 based on a novel (bearing the same title) by S. Yizhar, published in 1949. The novel is a step-by-step depiction of the expulsion of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. One of the soldiers repeatedly questions their deeds. The moral voice recurds and so its rejection by the others, in ritual-like form. This ceremonial repetition, which the movie makes more explicit, can be read a a rite of passage through which Jews in Palestine became the masters of the land. Since the 1960s, the novel was included in high school curricula. In 1978, when the film was to be broadcast, the Minister of Education and Culture banned it and the workers of the Israeli TV turned spectators’ screens dark for 50 minutes, the duration of the movie.

Dani Gal, al-Midya (2014, Israel, Arabic/Hebrew spoken with English subtitles, 26’)
al-Midya was chosen as the location for shooting the film Khirbat Khize in the mid-1970s. The villagers did not see the movie until Dani Gal, the director of this film, went to the village and screened it. The film documents the encounter of al-Midya’s residents with the movie, but no less so, the way they experienced in the late 70s the arrival of a troop of actors dressed as soldiers to shoot a movie that revives the expulsion of 1948. In the absence of subtitles in Arabic (in Khirbat Khize) one of the local residents serves as a simultaneous interpreter. The Israeli soldiers’ words dehumanizing the Palestinians, repeated in Arabic by a Palestinian, produce remarkable moments of estrangement.

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.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
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.

DISSENT ! Eric Baudelaire

letters_to_max.jpg

5 December 2014 20:00, Bozar Cinema Brussels.
Eric Baudelaire in conversation with Stoffel Debuysere, preceded by a screening of ‘Letters to Max’ (2014, 103’)

“My work is definitely more on the side of asking questions than affirming possibilities of solutions, but then you can probably push that a little further and say that the act of asking questions can be the premisse of some form of possible decision on a course forward, and that is definitely the place I would consider myself in.”

When Eric Baudelaire sent his first letter to Maxim Gvinjia, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Abkhazia, he was sure it would come straight back with a notice saying “destination unknown”. Because Abkhazia does not exist, at least not according to the United Nations and the majority of the world’s governments: it seceded from Georgia during a civil war in 1992-93, but its status remains in limbo, caught in a web of geopolitical interests, ethnic tensions and political unrest. However, the letter did actually arrive, marking the beginning of a long exchange which eventually shaped the fabric of Letters to Max: 74 letters sent over as many days, to which Max responded by recording his comments onto tape. The film became the chronicle of a close friendship, intertwined with the particular history of a stateless state, a place that is both real and imagined. Just like in his previous film works, notably The Anabasis… (2011) and The Ugly One (2013), both made in collaboration with Masao Adachi, filmmaker and former member of the Japanese Red Army movement, Baudelaire’s new film is grounded in a process of interchange and discovery, a process that ineluctably leads to unknown destinations, picking up traces of contested histories and unresolved questions on the way. But in any given space of contestation and invention there is no discovery without a sense of confusion and no interchange without a degree of disagreement. So what forms of cinematic perception and interpretation can be constructed as result of this uncertain hovering between different perspectives and sensibilities? How to find a position between refusal and fraternity? How to define the “point of view” of who or what is inbetween? And what does this enigmatic notion of “point of view” still mean after all, after having done its duty both in the service of Bazinian humanism and of Brechtian verfremdung, after having referred to both the gaze of the filmmaker and the blind spot of ideology, both to the position of the author and what it conceals. What can it possibly mean in today’s cinematic landscape, now that it finds itself permeated with a tendency to either hide behind an adherence to “facts… nothing but the facts” or dwell in a borderless sphere of indefinite ambiguity?

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.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
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.

DISSENT ! Eyal Weizman

weizman.jpg

8 December 2014 20:00, Aleppo (bâtiment Vanderborght, rue de l’Ecuyer 50), Brussels. Eyal Weizman in conversation with Stoffel Debuysere. In collaboration with erg (école supérieure des arts).

“Consider the term “shooting back” that connects the visual field and the field of combat, the camera and the gun. One might say that all these kinds of techniques of extended testimony and mapping should be abandoned because these are techniques born to serve power; but I think we should rather extract them from the mouth of the beast and radicalize them.”

“Give a voice to the voiceless” is one of the responsibilities that is traditionally associated with political and humanitarian activism: to provide testimony of the concerns and struggles of those who all too often remain silent and invisible, those who are regarded within the global socio-political order as “outside” or “surplus”. Yet the status of testimony has undergone some remarkable shifts in the past decades. First of all, the field of humanitarianism and human rights that served as an independent form of engagement with the pains and sufferings of this world in the 1960’s and the 1970’s, has been gradually pervaded by other kinds of forces and strategies: political-military in the 1990’s, legalistic in the 2000’s. In this context, the role of testimony, whether oral, literal, visual or audiovisual, has been superseded by the use of medical and forensical data, which provide another kind of testimony, one without witness. These entanglements and shifts are all part and parcel of what Eyal Weizman has called our “humanitarian present”, a present characterized by a growing ethical indistinction between fact and law, where all judgement is subsumed to an economy of violence and a systemic logic of “lesser evil”, and all division is replaced by a rationale of negotiation and calculation. In this Dissent ! session Eyal Weizman will talk about this contemporary condition in which technologies of humanitarianism and human rights collude with military and political power, with a focus on the role of audiovisual technologies in relation to the paradigm of victimization and the politics of lesser evil, and the status of forensic aesthetics as site of interpretation and contestation.

Professor of Spatial & Visual Cultures and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London; Princeton Global Scholar Eyal Weizman is an architect, professor of spatial and visual cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2011 he set up Forensic Architecture, a research agency that provides architectural evidence in human rights cases and war crimes trial. His books include FORENSIS with FA (2014), Architecture after Revolution with DAAR (2014), Mengele’s Skull with Thomas Keenan (2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (2011), and Hollow Land (2007).

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.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
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.

Mattered Images: The films of Elke Marhöfer

pansori-project.jpg

11 December 2014, 19:00, Cinematek Brussel
In collaboration with Courtisane & erg (école supérieure des arts). In the presence of Elke Marhöfer.

Ani, Nan DooKKeobiga Anigo Geobuk-ee Yo! (No, I am not a toad, I am a turtle!) (16mm to DV, color, sound, 50’32”, 2012).

prendas – ngangas – enquisos – machines (each part welcomes the other without saying) (16mm to DV, color, sound, 27’30”, 2014).

One film shot in South Korea, another in Cuba. They are not anthropological films, nor narrative documentaries or film essays, but they are certainly concerned with foreignness and difference. prendas – ngangas – enquisos – machines was mostly filmed in the hilly communes of Yateras, searching for long disappeared clandestine settlements, so-called palenque, where African slaves, Taínos and Chinese forced laborers freed themselves from colonial violence. No, I am not a toad, I am a turtle! is the result of a research on the Korean song form of ‘pansori’ music and documents a journey through hinterland villages and wooded mountains, along shipping lanes and trade routes between China and South Korea. Both films ask whether it is possible to communicate something of the soul of a place, steeped in histories of violence and dissidence, without relying on didacticism or storytelling, without taking recourse on hierarchical distinctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the macro and the micro, the animate and the inanimate. Is it possible to escape from the systems of signification that constitute foreignness, as well as the heritage left behind by colonial anthropology, without getting detached from the palpable realities of the world? What if there was a way to approach the foreign by relying on the affects of the world that pass through us, giving way to sentimental cartographies, mapping out nameless intensities and collective sensitivities, leaving space for the non-human, including vegetables and animals that had to colonize the new land together with their humans? In these film, these places do not appear as an “outside” to our inside, but as a sensible texture without anchor or vanishing point, where humans are a part of the composition rather than the principal element.

Do you remember future?

bianconi.jpg

By Bojan Vasić

Written in Belgrade, August 2014, after a screening of ‘Do you remember revolution?’ by Loredana Bianconi. Translation from Serbo-Croat to English by Jovana Savic. Loredana will be our guest for a DISSENT! session on 16 October.

This is not one of the films I am used to. This one has no subject but rather an experience talked about by four collocutors. What we have in front of us are, simply, the answers: four women activists and one more, although invisible – the one behind the camera, asking questions. The difference between this and the other films I’ve seen becomes visible especially when we compare this art piece to other motion picture films which deal with the same topic. Most of the films with the word ’revolution’ in their titles are reducing a complex, extended and specific, not easily understood experience, to yet another sensation that should ’make us think’, ’excite’ or simply entertain. A revolution rarely goes further than filming someone’s phantasm about a revolution, filming a prejudice our time has towards the possibility of it’s own end. A revolution is, thus, unimaginable – more un-thought of than unthinkable – and all those revolutions that dared to really happen, are bound to, judging by our sound reasoning, fail because they do not match with our phantasm about a revolutionary change. When we talk about revolution, we most often talk about precisely a phantasm. Saying the big ’R’ word very often, being too quick to thematize it, put it on posters and billboards even, it becomes clear that we are not talking about a change in our experience but about the present spreading at the very notion of revolution, contaminating it and drowning at the end, absorbing it into it’s own self and judging according to it’s own criteria.

This particular film I wouldn’t call neither a motion picture nor a documentary. Perhaps the very experience of a motion picture is such that is seems like mostly staying outside when it comes to the experience of revolution. Even those, undoubtedly successful films, as are Godard and Žilnik’s films, constantly oscillate, among all, between three external points (in relation to revolutionary spirit): the author’s comment on the struggle and it’s participants, achieving a filmic believability of the plot and an effective film image (the scene). And precisely because of that aesthetic success of these films we don’t expect a replay of a revolutionary experience, but what we always expect from any good work of art – an aestheticized subjective author’s point of view towards the topic of their work.

However, this is not a classic documentary either. It barely has any documentary material interpolated into the conversation. A few shots from the trials are shown only in the introductory scene, but they are soundless, so they are put into the film crippled, edited, incomplete. The entire introductory scene is missing any sound. Even the rest of the film is done without any musical background to follow the interviews. This radical minimalist idea in fact comes between the viewer and the viewed. Giving up the usage of archive footages, the barrier of ’specific historical situation’, which could set the shown experience in time and space of its happening, is breaking. By turning off the sound, reducing the shown to an enclosed space where there are only bodies and voices of the protagonists, the assumption of our subjective viewer’s detachment, our position expressed by emotions contained within the background music and by the distance implied in a double, parallel image and sound which doesn’t belong with it, is being erased.

Deducting some of the basic components of the film we get a story that is historically defined, but not objectively separated from us as something belonging to the past. Excluding the original photographs and footages connected with the Red Brigades’ or Prima Linea’ actions is preventing the monotony of narrated experience and its musealization. Nothing of the narrated has anything documentary in itself, because a live statement doesn’t have to have anything compatible with the logic of the document. Similarly, these statements are specific because they lack the closure of what we could call a subjective view and which emerges by evoking – only, the subject evoking and the one being evoked would radically differ from each other. These stories definitely are individual, but not personal in a way life stories we could identify ourselves with are, those which awake the empathy because they are told viewed from a ’normal’ position, close to us. What separates us from that is a complete focus on the ’topic’ , but also that the interviewed women subjectively haven’t given up. The viewer is not being offered just the expression of the live individual relation to the same, but former life experience which, by itself, overrides the subjective, but precisely the continuation of it unfolding. In a word, we hear and see four persons dived into a militant experience of illegal underground struggle, marked by it, marked, in fact, still, by their own choice. There is no distance, because the loyalty to the choice is what endures, what exists still, even when the time of struggle and incarceration, a result of that choice, ends.

And that is what the minimalist, carefully thought of, aesthetics of the film Do you remember revolution? achieves. Its time is a time of decisions, the eternal presence of the inner space of the subject confronted with the possibility of ethical and political choice. The minimalism of the means creates a space for existential between the historical and the personal. And that is a space we all potentially share. In that space a viewer meets four voices, like hypothesis of the achievement of one’s own freedom. Somebody made a choice which we didn’t make ourselves, somebody risked joining their own life and freedom with their beliefs. And that space of subject’s potential entering into the field of open struggle is a space of our inner truth and not of the Italy in the 70s.

’’What would I do?’’ was my first reaction to the subjective presentation of those situations opened by decision. The speech of the protagonists is not representing four personal stories about the fight but four individual aspects of reliving the same decision. And the editing contributes to this impression most directly. The expressions are interwoven following the chronological clock of being loyal to the chosen way of struggle. Each of the four voices makes the given picture complex and enriches it, showing that countless voices could emerge after them and that line naturally ends with the question ’’What should I do?’’, here and now.

The aesthetics of this film, carefully used for ethical purposes, could be carelessly interpreted as the absence of an aesthetic. Which is not a coincidence. The filming process is well aware of itself and its role to be successfully put aside, turning into a perfect medium for the interviewed women’s messages. However, the form is not natural and it doesn’t retreat, simply, in front of the authenticity of the content. It enables it to be heard and with great effort in reducing the tension between the elementary formal requests of such a medium and the statements which are the contents of the film. And one of the voices equally heard is, by all means, that of the author, the voice of the fifth collocutor. The minimalism enables the silence every sound so that we hear Barbara, Susanna, Adriana, Nadia and Loredana dived into the experience of Red Brigades’ actions, that their every sentence and movement sound strong and clear, as an object – whether we agree with them or not – and remind us of the loneliness and strength in which they existed in their time while simultaneously asking that we take responsibility in our own.