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What is cinema for us?

by Med Hondo (Abid Mohamed Medoun Hondo)

Originally published in ‘Framework’, Autumn 1979, as found on Jump Cut. Translation by Greg Kahn. Med Hondo’s ‘West Indies’ (1979) was shown as part of the ‘Across the Margins, Beyond the Pale’ program.

Throughout the world when people use the term cinema, they all refer more or less consciously to a single cinema, which for more than half a century has been created, produced, industrialized, programmed and then shown on the world’s screens: Euro-American cinema.

This cinema has gradually imposed itself on a set of dominated peoples. With no means of protecting their own cultures, these peoples have been systematically invaded by diverse, cleverly articulated, cinematographic products. The ideologies of these products never “represent” their personality, their collective or private way of life, their cultural codes, and never reflect even minimally on their specific “art,” way of thinking, or communicating — in a word, their own history and civilization. The images this cinema offers systematically exclude the African and the Arab.

It would be dangerous (and impossible) for us to reject this cinema simply as alien — the damage is done. We must get to know it, the better to analyze it. We’ll see that this cinema has never really concerned African and Arab peoples. This seems paradoxical, since it fills all the theaters and dominates the screens of all African and Arab cities and towns.

But do the masses have any other choice? “Consuming” at least a reflection of one’s own people’s life and history — past, present and future? LAWRENCE OF-ARABIA disseminates an image of Lawrence, not the Arabs. GENTLEMAN OF COCODY has a European as the gentleman hero, and not an Ivory Coast African. Do we have a single image of the experiences of our forefathers and the heroes of African and Arab history? Do we see a single film showing the new reality of cooperation, communication, support, and solidarity among Africans and Arabs?

This may seem exaggerated. Some critics will say that at least one African country, Egypt, produces some relatively important films each year and that since independence a number of cineastes have made a future for themselves in African countries. Yet, in the whole continent of Africa, Egypt is only one country, one cultural source, one sector of the market. Few African countries buy Egyptian films and they themselves produce too few films. Furthermore, the market within Egypt itself is still dominated by foreign films.

African and Arab filmmakers have decided to produce their own films. But despite the films’ undoubted quality, they have no chance of being distributed normally, at home or in the dominant countries, except in marginalized circuits — the dead-end art cinemas.

Even a few dozen more filmmakers would only achieve a ratio of one to ten thousand films. An everyday creative dynamic is necessary. We need to make a radical change in the relation between the dominant Euro-American production and distribution networks and African and Arab production and distribution, which we must control. Only in a spirit of creative and stimulating competition among African and Arab filmmakers, can we make artistic progress and become “competitive” on the world market. We must first control our own markets, satisfy our own people’s desires to liberate their screens, and then establish respectful relations with other peoples, and balanced exchange.

WE MUST CHANGE THE HUMILIATING RELATION BETWEEN DOMINATING AND DOMINATED, BETWEEN MASTERS AND SLAVES.

Some critics flee this catastrophic state of affairs, thinking cinema is restricted for Western, Christian and capitalist elites or they throw a cloak of fraternal paternalism over our filmmakers, ignoring and discrediting our works, blaming us, in the short term forcing us to a formal and ethical “mimesis” — to imitate precisely those cinemas we denounce — in order to become known and be admitted into international cinema; in the end, forcing us into submission, renouncing our own lives, creativity and militancy.

Since our independence many of our filmmakers have proved their abilities as auteurs. They encounter increasing difficulties in surviving and continuing to work, because their films are seldom distributed and no aid is available. Due to the total lack of a global cultural policy, African and Arab cinema becomes relegated to an exotic and episodic sub-product, limited to aesthetic reviews at festivals, which, although not negligible, are insufficient.

Multinational film companies earn 50% of their profits from Third World screens. Each year millions of dollars are “harvested” from our continents, taken back to the original countries, and then used to produce new films which again come to our screens.

Thus, each of our countries unknowingly contributes a lot of money to the production of films in Paris, New York, London, Rome or Hong Kong. We have no control over them and reap no financial or moral benefit, being involved in neither production nor distribution. In reality, however, we are coerced into being “co-producers” while our resources are plundered. The United States allows less than 13% foreign films to enter its market — and most of these are produced by European subsidiaries controlled by the U.S. majors, which exercise an absolute protectionism.

Film plays a major role in building peoples’ consciousness. Cinema is the mechanism par excellence for penetrating the minds of our peoples, influencing their everyday social behavior, directing them, and diverting them from their historic national responsibilities. It imposes alien and insidious models and references, and without apparent constraint encourages our people to adopt modes of behavior and communication based on the dominant ideologies. This damages our own cultural development and blocks true communication between Africans and Arabs, brothers and friends who have been historically united for thousands of years.

This alienation disseminated through the image becomes all the more dangerous for being insidious, uncontroversial, “accepted,” and seemingly inoffensive and neutral. It needs no armed forces and no permanent educational program from those who seek to maintain the division between African and Arab peoples — our weakness, submission, servitude, and ignorance of each other and of our own history. We forget our positive heritage, united through our foremothers with all humanity. Above all we have no say in the progress of world history.

Dominant imperialism seeks to prevent portraying African and Arab values to other nations. Were they to appreciate our values and behavior they might respond positively to us. They believe themselves “superior” to us, to our peoples’ roles in world history. We are not proposing isolation, closing our frontiers to all Western film, nor any protectionism separating us from the rest of the world. We wish to survive, develop, and participate as sovereign peoples in our own specific cultural fields and to fulfill our responsibilities in a world from which we are now excluded.

The night of colonialism caused many quarrels among us. We have yet to assess the full consequences. It poisoned our potential communications with other peoples since we have been forced into relations of colonial domination. We often have preconceived and false ideas of each other imprinted by racism. Having been colonized and then subjected to even more pernicious imperialist domination, we are not entirely responsible for this state of affairs. Yet some intellectuals, writers, filmmakers, thinkers, and our cultural leaders and policy-makers are also responsible for perpetuating this insatiable domination. It has never been enough simply to denounce our domination, for the imperialists dictate the rules of the game to their own advantage.

Some African and Arab filmmakers realize that the cinema alone cannot change our disadvantaged position, but they know that it is the best means of education and information and thus of solidarity. We must organize our forces, reassert our different creative potentialities, and fill the void in our national, regional and continental cinemas. We must establish cultural relations of communication and cooperation between our peoples in a spirit of equality, dignity and justice. We have the will, means and talent to undertake this great enterprise.

Without organizing our resources, we cannot flourish at home. Dozens of African and Arab intellectuals, filmmakers, technicians, writers, journalists and leaders have had to leave our own countries, often despite ourselves and end up contributing to the development and overdevelopment of countries that don’t need us, and that use their excesses to dominate us.

This will continue until we grasp the crucial importance of cultural and economic strategy and create our own networks of film production and distribution, liberating ourselves from all foreign monopolies.

Those who come after

What does it mean to “come after”? Does it mean we are destined to live with the sad remnants of futures past? That is, after all, what they have been stating for so long now, those who endlessly mourn the passing of a time when events still had a place in the great order of things, those who retrospectively prophecize the beginning of the end, as fated destiny of a history in ruins that has perpetually been piling up wreckage upon wreckage. Does it mean we are living through the end of times, bound to wait for an improbable insurrection to come? After all, that is what we have learned from those who present us with the enigma of a new interminable future, as the horizon that will violently awaken us from the slumbering sleep that has prevented us from fulfilling the promises of the past. Is that where we find ourselves now, roaming in the twilight times between regret and expectation, between the time of an end on hold and the time of a new dawn in infinite suspension? Forever haunted by the ghosts of what should have been, hiding in the shadows of what will be?

With all these comings and goings between past and future, are we not at risk of loosing sight of our present? Is it not possible to rather think of “coming after” as a continuous exploration of the present moment, on the rhythm of our own steps, in the confidence of our own gaze? Without a beginning to contemplate or an end to anticipate, without point of departure or point of closure, where would we go? Are we going somewhere at all? We all know what they say, those prophets of disaster and redemption: that there is no use in trying to deviate from the path of historical necessity without map or guide, that there is no point in questioning the naturalness of the structure of our lives without perspective on a time to come. But where we are now, where we choose to be, time doesn’t commence, and it doesn’t culminate, it continues, it continues to happen. Make no mistake, it is also up to us to make it happen, to take it in, to try to take a hold of its course, without ever knowing for sure where the journey will be taking us. We will fail, and we will have to learn to fail. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better”?

Perhaps it’s too easy. Too easy to say we don’t know. Too easy to rejoice in the absence of strategic reason. Too easy to dwell on our micro-revolutions, to change lifestyles, to live differently, consume consciously, behave conscientiously. Too easy to withdraw from the spectacle of consumption in order to escape the empire of necessity. “Coming after” does not only involve changing our way of living in this world, it also means committing ourselves to the wager of composing another one. It means that, in putting our confidence in what we see and do in the present moment, we must also try to invest in its prolongation, in the believe that there are presents that actually do create possible futures. We all know that failures and disillusions will continue to come our way, but isn’t it precisely this vulnerability that is our strength, that what allows us to reshape the world through the eyes of many? Isn’t it this sense of disorientation that makes it possible to orient ourselves, to persist in the curiosity of our gaze, to invent new ways of seeing, and act upon them? “Apart, we are together”, a poet once wrote. Perhaps, amid our division, in our coming after, we are bound by the fragility of what we are bearing together: in the face of the present intolerable and the as yet unimaginable, we are all afraid. Perhaps we should let each other know that that’s ok.

(Some thoughts after reading Sarah Jaffe’s ‘Post-Occupied‘)

Between the fire and the voice

Talk with John Akomfrah. November 20 2013, Brussels. In the context of the DISSENT ! series. Moderated by Stoffel Debuysere.

In November 2013, John Akomfrah was in Brussels to present Handsworth Songs (1986). This was the first film he made as a member of the Black Audio Film Collective, a group of artists, critics and filmmakers who set out to intervene in the cultural debates around black identity and representation that were raging all over Britain in the 1980’s. Handsworth Songs, in many ways the key work of the collective, was made in response to the riots that broke out in September 1985, when roughly three hundred residents of Birmingham’s multi-ethnic suburb of Handsworth came into violent contact with the local police force. The violence was presented by the government as a solely criminal event with racial overtones, as yet another manifestation of the disintegration of norms regarding “law and order‟. Confronted with the rhetorics surrounding these events, the challenge for Akomfrah and the collective was then to find a form that could address and problematize the dominant representation of the riots in particular and the figuration of race and ethnicity in general. The events in Handsworth resonated with other uprisings that swept through England’s inner cities throughout the late 1970’s and the first half of the 1980’s. From the Notting Hill Carnival in 1976 and the ‘riots’ which ignited nationwide in 1981, to the uprisings sparked in response to the shooting of Cherry Groce in Brixton and the death of Cynthia Jarrett in Tottenham in 1985: these were the events that painfully exposed the gap between the dominant discourses on “Britishness” and what was intimately experienced by the “children of the Windrush generation”, those whose parents formed the first mass wave of migration from the Caribbean, the Indian Sub Continent and Africa during the 1950s; those “bastard children of 1968” who came of age in a Britain that still carried with it so many unresolved ghosts from its colonial past. These were the events that crystallised what was felt by many: a sense of discrimination, marginalisation and downpression, cultivated by a state power deciding who belongs and who does not, who is the same and who is other, who has the right to speak and to be heard, and who merely emits senseless noise. At the heart of liberal realism, supposedly freed of archaic impulses and immature passions, a consensual order in which the rationalization of social roles went hand in hand with a propagation of a certain multiculturalism, a new racism roared its ugly head: one propelled and maintained by the state itself. Who could not forget the words of the infamous speech given by Thatcher in the run-up to the 1979 election, stating that the once so proud empire “might be rather swamped by people of a different culture”, upsetting the hearts and minds of its hardworking people? Who could not forget the sight of Sir Ronald Bell on the set of BBC’s Panorama studio, disdainfully gesturing at the screen behind him showing footage of the “civil disorders” of 1981, and saying: “If you look at their faces… I think they don’t know who they are or what they are. And really, what you’re asking me is how the hell one gives them the kind of sense of belonging young Englishmen have?” These are the words that marked a whole generation, a generation who felt trapped in history, and was anxious to reclaim an affective counter-memory that could intervene in the official versions of historical continuity and national identity. For many of those who were coming of age in the England of the 1980’s, who were painfully confronted with the complacency of a dominant order that contended to have “history on its side” and the contempt of an imagined community in which they did not seem to have any part, the forage into counter-memory was not only a way of undoing the complicity of past, present and future, but moreover of the distribution of allocated places and roles that defined Thatcher’s “Englishness”. The organisation of representations and reasoning that shaped this reality had to be challenged and displaced by way of forms and narratives that could somehow express the uncertainties and anxieties that affectively contradicted and disrupted the state of consensus; forms and narratives that could establish new relations with the past: a past that had produced oppression, inequality, exploitation and discrimination, but had also grown inward, a haunting, unbinding past that had inflicted agonizing wounds and bruises to the sense of identity and collectivity.

“There’s a moment of apocrypha that for me underwrites personally the coming of Handsworth Songs. It was in 1981. Now, you’ve got to remember that the 1981 disturbances in the streets of London and across the country were being reenacted by people of my age and that’s not too surprising because we were almost certainly the first post-migrant generation. Think about the demographic shifts that took place in England between 1949 and ’59: about 1.5 million people came across from Africa, the Caribbean, the West Indies, … It takes about four or five years to find your feet, so if you start to have kids in the beginning of the 1960’s, they turn 18 in 1981, give or take a few years. That demographic block which comes of age between 1976 and ’85, those who are the offspring of the original migrant settlers, are historically unusual because for the first time a culture has to find a way of processing them. But they are also historically unusual because in a very real sense they spell the coming of the “hyphen”. In other words these are people who will be uniquely hybrid, but not in the way that is nowadays fashionably spoken about. They are black British, yes, but their identities will be formed in that space between the two. Because both categories exist prior to them.

This is the first group that was coming into being in that gap between the two, and it was a complicated becoming: part of the complexity had to do with how much of the Faustian bargain pact my generation would make with its history, with its past. The past said: “your parents came here to clean, sweep up the floors, and ‘say yes sir, no sir’”. How much of that will you embrace? If you decide to embrace that, you’re a migrant. But this is an impossible demand to make of that generation because the amnesia that characterized that becoming is not deliberate. Many of these people don’t know an elsewhere. They can’t rely on the ressources of an elsewhere to make this bargain, so they necessarily have to be subversive, because subversion just meant “no, I won’t be that”.

Before Handsworth Songs, we did a piece called Signs of Empire, and one of the speeches we used came from 1981 when a conservative minister said over and over again: “these people don’t know who they are or what they are. And really what you’re asking me” – and I’m quoting verbatim – “is how one gives them a sense of belonging”. Now he was speaking from the right of the political spectrum but I believe that in that particular instance he was voicing a common sentiment, which is: “who the fuck are these young people? We really don’t know who they are”. But crucially they don’t know who they are either. And there’s an element of truth in that. So when Handsworth happened, when it became clear that you had both a birth and death agony at the same time, we had to do something about it.

As for my moment of apocrypha: I remember standing in Brixton, London – then an area of large black settlements – during the riots of 1981. I have a camera and while I’m photographing stuff I see a group of policemen – young, in their twenties, very scared – who’ve got these shields and they are banging on them and screaming “kill, kill, kill!”, because they were trying to find some energy and courage. I was surrounded by all these journalists who were doing the exact same thing as I was. Now the next days’ newspapers all had that story of these policemen. But something interesting had happened – there was this “kill kill kill !” as the headline but rather than coming from the police these were now the words being uttered by the rioters. And that for me was a major lesson. Because I suddenly realized that there is something called a “regime of representation” in which people play particular roles, narrative roles. In that regime at the time it was impossible to imagine that a group of police officers would be saying those words, ergo it had to be the young black people. So I became aware very early on that there was something called a “slippery signifier” and that it was really all about naming. This was about undermining or confirming certain narrative expectations. And we – because many of the people who went on to form the collective were also around at that time – we became aware of this discrepancy between the fact and the naming of the fact. Part of the way in which you came into being as a subject was to chose the ability, to chose the terrain on which you name who you are. You had to involve yourself in that process.”

As part of the act of “naming things anew”, the collective had to look for narratives and forms that could undo and rearticulate the trajectories that framed the existing landscape of reality, and redraw the topography of places, roles and competences inscribed in it. A critical response to cultural and sociopolitical commonplaces could no longer be found in the language of binary oppositions and substitutions, as it was cultivated by Screen theory and its discussions on ideological stereotyping, nor could it be found in the paradigms of “cultural ethnography”, with its vocations to represent the inner workings of a community’s experiential reality. The problem did not lie in opposing the rhetorical messages that are disseminated through mass media or in, as Salman Rushdie suggested in his vexing critique on the film, “giving voice to the voiceless” by making heard their authentic colorful tales, but in questioning the way words and forms are interwoven in a common sense.

“There are several interviews we did for the film. The first two guys they tell you why they do this. The Asian people tell you “we knew there was something wrong, the problem was …” the point is that people might tell you what led to it but that doesn’t explain the acts themselves. And that is the problem that most of the discourse runs into. In other words, as long as you keep insisting that the reasons why people make certain social acts are purposive, rational and programmatic, you’re gonna miss the point, which is that we’re not entirely rational in our actions. Psychoanalysts understand this now and we all understand. There are certain obsessive compulsive acts, there are certain acts of hysteria or anger, … not everybody who’s on the streets is saying to themselves “we’re doing this to bring down racism in British society”, they’re just responding to it. I tried – like everybody else I was looking and asking around – but when we put it together, we realised it just wasn’t enough. It didn’t seem to explain the cataclysm. So you needed other ways of trying to do that and we did. We were editing this for a year trying to take seriously the folkloric and the ethnographic and it just wasn’t there. There was always a gap between the fire and the voice.

When we almost finished the film there was a key British post structuralist called Colin Maccabe, who was very close to Salman Rushdie. He said, “I love this film, I’ll show it to Salman and he will love it too”. Salman did this article in the Guardian and it appeared that he hated the film. The key accusation that he made was that instead of telling stories we had rehashed bits and pieces from archives and this was the worst way of going about things. The argument was that we needed a certain ethnographic veracity and it was difficult then to persuade people that it’s the very language of veracity that had to be challenged.

By the time we came to this film, we knew the cinema of Michael Powell, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Tarkovsky… We had seen everything because we had been to the same fucking schools as everyone else. But nobody believed that. We went to the arts council to get money to make “avant-garde” films and they were like: “you can’t because black people don’t make avant-garde films.” This was the environment. This was the primal scene of our becoming. Salman just couldn’t believe any more than most people who ran the film funds that you might do this deliberately. The assumption is that if something exists like this it is because you don’t know any other way of doing it.

What we wanted to do, and this is gonna sound very pompous but I don’t mean it that way, is to write a kind of feelroom about the coming of hybrid identities, to suggest that this is a kind of neural pathway. I’m not surprised that the work has some kind of resonance here in Brussels, because the condition of diaspora is the same everywhere and always. In terms of impact on the community, it’s always the same: people love it, some hate it. But it forced us to talk to each other about what the film is trying to say, which is really where are we and what do we want to say to each other about this country. Are we Ghanian, black, black British, how do want to name ourselves? And I’m glad we made it because it helped that discussion.

We just wanted to say: “look, there are no stories in the riots, they’re just ghosts of other stories”. These are just infinite rehearsals for this moment, and in order to just understand this moment you need to sift through all of this. You’ve got to understand that nobody leaves their country saving up money for five years, getting up a boat to travel 10.000 miles to come anywhere to cause trouble. Nobody does this. So if someone with their family made this journey to come here and their kids are on the streets rioting, it means that something has happened in the nature of the pact made between them and you. Something has gone wrong. So in order to understand what has gone wrong you’ve got to go back, to look at the moments of affirmation and when this affirmation goes wrong. That is the only premisse for the film, there is no other reason to make the film, because anybody else had done the other stuff before. You can still watch it every day on television: there will be a socialist MP and a conservative MP and a newscaster inbetween – and he will say, “Mister socialist, why are these young black people doing this?”, and he will answer “Oh well, because there is unemployment and policing etc.” And then the newscaster will turn to mister conservative who will say “Ah , but these problems you are talking about: white people in poor areas also face the same problem, so that can’t be the reason why they are rioting, the reason why is because they’re black, they don’t belong”. There’s no amount of great storytelling that will get you around this problem. The problem is race. Everybody knows it, but everybody is trying to wish it away. So we had to confront it: yes, it is about race, yes, all the kids on the street rioting are black. But why is it about race? That’s the question.”

There has always been a certain undecidability at the heart of the image, a tension between the composition of a distinctly visual sensibility, and a sensory fabric of indistinct intensities, circulating independent of any predetermined relationship of address. In other words, there is always a play with the variable significance of images, which are isolated to convey the tonality of the whole entity, or combined into an opaque object or dynamic form. It is this versatility of signs that has been dismissed by structuralist thought, which restored them to their signifying materiality. Within film culture, this tendency ultimately collapsed in endless discussions on “positive” and “negative” images, which more than often filled the pages of magazines such as Screen. The work of the Black Audio Film Collective can be considered as a break with the idea that there was a sort of wholesomeness to the image and that the response to dominant imagery had to be found in its antagonistic double. Their work was an attempt to render sensible the gaps and silences of Britain’s colonial history on the strength of the signs of those who had written it, addressing the uncertainties of the colonial archive and their effects on the diasporic condition by creating a space of poetic reflection in which the irreconcilable gaps and fissures between history and myth, the imagined and the experienced – there where diasporic histories lie in wait – can be excavated.

“We were talking earlier about this distrust of ambivalence and agnosticism in regards to the truth of the image. Yes, all these kids are out on the streets, but the reasons why they’re there is not implicit in the image. This is the standard ethnographic myth: that if you see people breaking stones, somehow it gives you some insight in their being, in their nature. Bullshit, it doesn’t, it’s just them breaking stones. If you see people throwing Molotov cocktails, that’s what they are doing. What it means, that’s a different proposition. It seems to me that when you reach these conceptual ruptures in the tissue of the social you have to go somewhere else in order to effect a kind of repair. You have to find ressources from other spaces, other than what is immediately in front of you, to make sense of that. So the fact that we were skeptical about documentary realism had to do with that. With the fact that you just had to question the value of the immediate, of what is immediately in front of you. Because sometimes it is telling you as much of the truth as it was lying.

The diasporic relationship to the archive is a very special one. In the case of the African diaspora in Europe in particular – between 1949 and ‘69 maybe 2 million people passed through – there is no epitaph, no monument anywhere that tells you that these people ever passed through. Most of them are dead now. The only tangible record of them ever having existed is the archive. But the archive is also paradoxical is the sense that these are also official memories of moments written in the language, or allegedly in the language of the official narratives. So from the beginning you have to have an ambivalent relation to the archive: everything that is in there – you see people coming off ships or boats, there is a voice-over saying “here are the immigrants, they’re going to be causing trouble” or “we have to be kind” – it’s the voice of the outsider of the interior of the archive. Most of these people have no idea that they’re already being constructed as a social problem before they’d even landed. So part of the ethical task in using this material is unraveling the polyvalent, to take apart the multiple meanings which are always present at the same time and make a choice about which of the possible meanings you are going to commandeer and use for certain aesthetic, cultural or political ends. And this starts with the realisation that things are always in multiple places at the same time. ”

Handsworth Songs does not assume a posture of urgency and emergency, as is typical of the so-called “militant” films which attempt to take up the torch for those considered as “surplus”; it does not aim for the awakening of a political consciousness, as was the case for some films of Horace Ove, Menelik Shabazz, or Franco Rosso, who each in their own way attempted to express the sense of dread and disquiet that gripped 1970’s Britain. It rather proposes a rearrangement of words, images and sounds in another fabric of sensibility, one of intimacy and vulnerability. It takes on the tonality of an allegory, choosing the fragmentary and the incomplete over the symbolic and the whole, choosing doleful monody over dramatic discursiveness, the expression of sorrow over the rhetorics of agon. What perspires is a sense of loss, of place and time, a loss that cannot be recovered but that leaves behind its traces, in images of departure and words of reminiscence. But there is also something else that remains vacated, another absence that haunts and taunts the lives of those portrayed : that which Orlando Patterson and Derek Walcott have called the “absence of ruins”, the lack of tangible documents or monuments, memorials or libraries, that legitimize the existence of those anonymous lives, of those who perish in the cracks of history, perish by never being allowed to go behind the definitions that others made of them, by not being allowed to spell their proper name or recount their own memories. What is felt, especially through the use of poetic texts, is a melancholic agency who cannot know its history as the past, cannot capture its history through chronology, and does not know who it is except as the persistence of a certain unavailability and unavowability that keeps haunting the present.

“When I first came across the phrase “the absence of ruins” it helped me so much. It is a phrase by the Jamaican sociologist/novelist Orlando Patterson. He was using it to describe the new world, the Caribbean, and how it, as a place of the diasporic subject, is marked by the absence of ruins – ruins that suggest a kind a civilizing trace. There’s no Acropolis, no elegy marble, these are places formed on the basis of an ever present. It struck us that the absence of ruins characterizes all diasporic lives. It’s the sine qua non of the diaspora. It’s marked by an absence of tangible traces to your existence. The available means are partly the archival records and you have to look not only for what the archival trace says but also what it doesn’t say. Because sometimes it’s hidden there. So all the words we used in the project were ones we rewrote because we believed those sentiments, silent though they are, were present as well at the time when those images were shot.

“He said to her, Remember Bunny Enriquez and Greta Borg and Lady June Barkerî.
Remember Countess Corblunska with her black velvet top her skirt of figured net over satin.
Remember the nights of Coruba cocktails and Curuba sour, their secret pregnancies, your wet nursing and me nappy washing.
It ís about time we had our own child.
Our own master George Hammond Banner Bart.”

All of those names are from real people, based on research into Caribbean upper class life in the 1940, so they are the very many people in the film would have left to get away from, because migration is a profoundly utopian act – you leave because things are gonna be better in the future, somewhere else. But by virtue of it being utopian it’s also a dystopian critique of where you’re leaving. It suggest that they are in flight. A number of the voice-overs were either to suggest what might be the reasons for flight or what might arrive – what you would meet in what Naipaul calls the “enigma of arrival”, because in the very real sense you are being made into something new. The journey of migration is the journey of diaspora. By the time you arrive you are something else. And you will never be the same again; you will never be a fola or wolof, you will now be something else and that something else is what that life you’re about to lead is about to discover, the implications of that something are what you about to discover. These are deeply held sentiments that we felt the writing should aid people to understand. “I walk with my back to the sea, horizon straight ahead.” Well, which horizon? “Night time, I am the sea”. In the evening you might go the Caribbean, in your dreams, but in the daytime you will be here in this cold, in this space, this impossible space that you have chosen. This is the awful thing about migration, no matter how awful things are for you, you made that choice. So you have to deal with it, you have to process this decision that you’ve made. That’s the importance of the writing.

In the 1980’s, when it became clear that the legacies of the Bandung moment and its varied postures of nonaligned sovereignty had effectively come to an end, the narratives of liberation and overcoming that sustained the force of the politically engaged cinematic practices from the 1960’s could no longer hold the critical salience they once had. This was especially felt in regards to the legacy of the so-called ‘Third Cinema’, referring to the often militant cinema forms that were developed in subaltern cultures as an answer to the hegemony of western cinema and an instrument in the process of decolonization. “Inscribed in the militant and nationalist pretensions of the term ‘third cinema’,” wrote Akomfrah in 1988, “is a certainty which simply cannot be spoken anymore. A certainty of place, location and subjectivity. What now characterizes the ‘truths’ of cinema, politics and theory is uncertainty. “ In times of uncertainty we can no longer hold on to these stories of salvation and redemption, depending upon a certain utopian horizon or a prospect of homogeneous collectivity toward which the emancipatory history is imagined to be moving. In times of uncertainty, as Cyrille Offermans wrote about Michel de Montaigne’s essays, other fictions tend to be created, reports of wanderings without preconceived maps or destinations, forms of inquiry that are not in search for the one and only Truth, but for a sincerity of small truths. As David Scott has written, there is a need of fictions that embrace the “unknowing” and oppose the view of history as a chain of events on a ‘road to salvation’ with that of a broken series of paradoxes and reversals in which action is ever open to unaccountable contingency, chance and peripeteia.

“The quote is from a journal that I co-edited. It was really about trying to grapple with what we called the “politics of location”. Now it seems to me that the politics of location debate is connected to the question you were asking about diaspora and the notion of uncertainty. Just to make it real simple, if I speak to my mum – or rather, when I could speak to her when she was alive – she would say “we Ghanians, we do this”. There was a certainty that underpinned the utterance of identity that I couldn’t use. Because I couldn’t speak with the same assurance, the same certainty about what a Ghanian was. For the simple reason I didn’t really know – she did. The lack of not knowing has to do with this business of diaspora, of relocation. Because I am being formed in her home, in the care and love and concern of her home. At the same time as I am being processed by something else: a school, an outside. So I have to work on the assumption that this uncertainty, this döppelganger in my head saying “everything’s ok, don’t worry, you are really like everybody else” – that döppelganger has to at one point meet the other phantom on this side of my shoulder saying “if you’re really like everybody else how come you are being treated in different ways”? In other words, you’re split psychically and culturally in ways that you begin to understand are references to how the society in itself is split towards you and people like you. At that moment you choose something. You say “I will be the product of this and that”. And it seems to me that this need to make uncertainty a militant gesture, the need to make the hybrid identity a condition of speech, this is what diasporas do. At some point you say “I will sit here and I will sing about river Jordan”. Because I now know that I’m not wholly of here, and will probably never be of there. So whatever I am going to become, has to be made of my will, effort, gestures which we’ll have to take from both somewhere. Uncertainty becomes the condition of speech.

David’s point, which I think is a really important one , was that there were moments when a certain political narrative could become endear to explain certain actions, certain moments of anti-colonial struggles. But in the absence of those things, do we measure the effectivity of current actions in relation to the so-called pregivens, the narratives of a past? In other words, if a bunch of kids is out on the streets, even helping themselves to 10.000 nikes, if you can’t explain it by the discourse of socialist action, is the problem the theory or them? That’s what David is trying to grapple with: what happens in post-political times when the categories are not adequate to explaining the acts? What is the act now and how do we make sense of it without recourse to pre-existing ones, which by definition will say that these are not good enough? Because the pre-existing ones have models that are obviously always much more dramatic. In Ghana, in 1949, when Nkrumah started the CPP there was a country of 7.5 million people and 2.5 of them joined the party. It’s a mass party, so of course if you have that model in your head about anti-colonial struggle you’re going to run into problems when you hit the inner cities of London where there may be 10.000 people on the street who don’t and don’t want to belong to any party, and the cause they’re making is not for something clear.

After the 2011 riots in London there was this big event at Tate. Hundreds of people turned up to watch the film and to discuss it. Lots of people told us we had to make another film. But no! I believe very much in generations taking responsibility. The people on the streets in London in 2012 are not 45-55, they’re 25 and they have to find their own way of articulating the reasons why, they have to find a narrative for speaking out. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t help if I was asked but i will not initiate a project on another riot. Because the reason why we did it was because we wanted our generation to have it’s own stake in the argument. I wouldn’t do it for another generation, they have to do it themselves. I would help them but first and foremost they have to make the effort, otherwise it is not worth it.

We were very careful in Handsworth Songs to not take on the militant posture which says “these are revolutionary acts to bring down capital”. I mean that’s not what we were saying there. I’m not saying in Handsworth Songs that there were no criminal acts, but here’s the thing: there’s a tautology at work which you have to unmask. Criminals are subjects, you can’t be tried as a mass for a crime. Crimes are committed by criminals. They have to be able to face the law as subjects. So if you have 10.000 people on the streets committing a crime, then something else is going on other than a crime. Since the singularity is missing. This is a mass act. One needs to discuss how a certain form of sociality in a place at a particular time takes that form. Why? It doesn’t matter how many times you say, “it’s just criminal”. It doesn’t help you to understand that. I don’t believe, as many of my generation said about the event, that these were just kids interpellated by capital, that they just wanted Nike shoes etc. If you want Nike shoes you can go buy them or steal them on your own. When you do that with 10.000 other people, you’re making another sort of statement – as well as the fact that you want Nike shoes. So what is that statement? Why do people choose to bang together to do this in the name of Nike shoes, even if that’s all it was?

The fact that there is no grand narrative at the heart of it may well be their modus operandi. If the modus operandi of an event is “we don’t have a slogan”, that seems to me to be a political gesture, a political statement. Question is: what is it? You need to unpick that. Some lazy cultural theorist who goes “oh, they don’t have a political slogan, they went home and they took the fridge and the Nike shoes”. Do your job, dude! You are the guy who is paid to think about the impossible, they don’t have to. If you read the beginning of The making of the English working class by Edward Thompson, you never find anybody in the opening saying “we are the working class people, our historical mission is to take over capital.” People don’t speak like that. Nobody ever has. Bolsheviks might, but the people who joined the Kronstadt rebellion didn’t say “we are the avant-garde of the working class.” Nobody speaks like this. If you want the language, you have to make analysis, calculations, deductions, based on what you’re seeing or reading about. To expect the actors to announce in pamphlet form or, even better, in three volumes of Das Kapital is an impossible demand. Nobody has ever done it and no amount of young black kids are going to do it for you. It’s that basic. I don’t know of any social formation ever that did that. Including the most powerful one, the working class. There is no record. The moment when people become aware that they’re a class for themselves comes two centuries later, but not when it’s being formed. And that’s an important point to remember when we make these accusations about people without a signal or orientation. People never do have those things. “

Handsworth Songs was made in a time when various “endisms” started to make their way into the political and cultural imagination: the end of all grand narratives, of ideology and utopia, of politics and history, and ultimately the end of any meaningful time whatsoever. What was said to be dead and buried were the optimistic narratives that contained a historical faith in a possible transformation of the dominant world order, and the credibility of the theoretical models that sustained this faith with the promise of providing both the means to entangle the workings of our lived world and the weapons in the struggle for a new one. But this rhetoric also tainted the thinking about cinema: in the aftermath of the golden age of structuralism and semiology, there was talk of the death of the image, of the emergence of a certain post-cinema, a cinema that could no longer keep its promise and renounced its historical and political possibilities. The collective, however, did not concern itself with mourning the ‘end of cinema’ and lamenting the growing banality of signs and images, but on the contrary, with awakening the potential that is inside of them, a potential that is realized in new topographies of the significant and the insignificant, documents and monuments. The sense of mourning in Akomfrah’s film does not seem to be prompted by a loyalty to a world of lost ideals or a helplessness in the face of catastrophe, it rather coincides with a resistance to closure, finality and fixation.

“I started to make Super 8 films when I was very young and then I started up film societies. In fact, I am very proud of the fact that I was once beaten up for showing Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane in a film club. Cinema was really important to me from the beginning. But the collective did start off working in the gallery and at some point, about a decade ago, everybody denied this was the case. I don’t necessarily believe the theoreticians who announce the post-cinema moment, but it’s clear that something is happening. It’s clear that the disenchantment that we feel vis-a-vis the image is not just paranoia, it’s clear that some of the questions that people of my generation and certain generations before felt were the providence of cinema are now being addressed in other spaces, other platforms, other spheres. So I’m trying to respond to all of that.

I don’t love all cinema, there was a time when I could put my hand on my heart and say “I love cinema”, but not anymore. I love certain kinds, forms, practices, authors of cinema but I don’t love cinema in general anymore. Because so much is consciously not for me. So I’m happy to find spaces in which it’s possible to make some of the questions I want to pose. But I also think something happened just after the war. It had a long trajectory but essentially when you watch Bicycle Thieves or Rosselini stuff, you see a certain approach to the real. People say “we will be custodians of what you embody”. A number of institutions then came up , television being one of them, who said “we too will join you in this contract with the real”. I don’t feel that this is the case anymore. I think the real is again a fugitive subject, a pariah subject. Certainly television is like “the real , we don’t do that, we do reality TV but we don’t do real stuff because it involves open-endedness, fluctuation and ambiguity”. Suddenly all sorts of other spaces and platforms are receptive to the messiness of the real and they’re willing to take it on. I’m happy to go there because first and foremost that’s what took me into cinema. Because it was the custodian of that thing. Which it is not anymore, or at least not exclusively. You look at the opening sequence of Bicycle Thieves or Roma, open city and you can see all of these things. The dialogue, the discussions, the critique, it is all there. The fact that it is presented doesn’t mean that everything is accepted. There’s a sort of analytic power at work which is open to the very messy, protean possibilities of the real. Some of my favorite stuff is from television of the 1960’s: you watch it and there’s just this obsession with the insignificant. Now everything means something. It’s so tame, everything is “meaningful”. It’s that disenchantment with the real that I’m talking about, with it’s subversive, protean possibilities.”

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. The visit of John Akomfrah has been made possible with the support of Cinematek, le P’tit Ciné, Brussels Arts Platform and VUB Doctoral School of Human Sciences.

Figures of Dissent : Jean Eustache

8 May 2014 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. In collaboration with Courtisane.

Numéro zéro (FR, 1971, 35mm, b&w, 107′)

“You have to record things; whether they’re pretty or not, they’re important, they’re essential.”
– Jean Eustache

Luc Moullet once described him as a “blue collar dandy”. Legend has it that he aimlessly roamed the streets of Paris, regularly spending his nights in the Montparnasse bars, continually venturing into new romantic liaisons, but the self-conscious Rimbaudian artist was also an autodidact filmmaker whose work was steeped in an artisanal ethos and a penchant for sharp observation and ruthless provocation. This apparent paradox, which was at the heart of many of his films, never sat easily with the French film culture that came after the heyday of the Nouvelle Vague, which all too often succumbed to ideological blindness and bitter antagonism. That is how La Maman et la Putain, arguably his most autobiographical project, was dismissed as “deeply reactionary” on the pages of Cahiers de Cinéma, who put it on the same level as other “petit-bourgeois” movies such as Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe and Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. But Eustache’s character study of the lost children of post-’68 did not rest on ideological premises, but on his intimate understanding of the tremors of disquiet and anguish that ran through the streets of his city. Always the “ethnologist of his own reality”, as Serge Daney wrote in his obituary. Always the artisan who took on everything as it came, memorized everything as it presented itself. Always the non-conformist whose films followed their material right to where it led them, and never to where conventional guidelines were pointing them to. Always the renegade who resembled his times too much to be comfortable or contended. A constant struggle he eventually ended up losing. The film at show here, which has remained unseen for so long, is what he considered to be his “numéro zero”, his tabula rasa with everything that had come before. A film that is unsure of itself, a manifesto without a program, made without any intent or pretense, only answering to a single desire: the desire for cinema.

“There are many reasons why one makes a film. However, as we proceed with the preparation (calling the technicians together, buying the film, hiring the lighting equipment, deciding the day and time to begin shooting), the actual filming (action, cut), the finishing process (synchronizing the images and the sound, editing, post-synchronizing), ninety nine percent of the time we forget what urged us to make the film in the first place. Sometimes we remember once we emerge from the darkness of the editing room and the film laboratories. Without being able to justify the existence of Odette Robert, I can speak of why I made Numéro Zéro, of which Odette Robert is but a fragment. I don’t know whether Numéro Zéro was a film. To say that I was urged to shoot it by the torment I was enduring at the time is not very revealing. I remember walking through Paris, from Montparnasse to the 17th arrondissement, thinking whilst I walked as if I were walking back through time. When I arrived back home, my grandmother spoke to me for quite a long time, and I had the impression that she was telling me extremely important things. When I said to her, “Listen, we should record this”, she said to me, “But really, these aren’t nice things”. “It doesn’t matter,” I replied, “it’s important to record these things, nice or not, they’re important, they’re essential”.
I found a bit of money to buy some black and white 16mm film, hired two cameras, and asked Théaudière to be the cameraman and Jean-Pierre Ruh to do the sound. The duration was as long as the reel of film, with the two cameras working alternately, in relays, without ever cutting. The picture was therefore the story of the film, from beginning to end. At the same time, as I was working as a filmmaker at the time, this was a film by a professional filmmaker, as well as being a family film, like an amateur 8mm film shot on the beach. The two were therefore not compatible. I then asked director Adolfo Arrietta to take a few street shots, and film my grandmother and my son doing their shopping in the nearby street. I wanted this to be the beginning of the film, with no sound or anything, completely separate from the rest, which has sound and where the image remains static.
I had the impression it was a manifesto, but of what, I didn’t know. Perhaps of the fact that, at the time, I couldn’t make films. After this, some well-meaning people introduced me to someone in television who viewed my work. But Numéro Zéro was not suitable for the television of the time, 1971.
To answer the question as to whether Numéro Zéro was a film, I still can’t tell you. I maintained that it was, without actually being very sure of myself.
It is about a journey through time by an old woman, moving between her great grandparents and her great grandchildren, during which we see six generations of
the history of France, told through the eyes of Odette Robert, my grandmother. In the original Numéro Zéro, I didn’t cut anything. As to what I later called Odette
Robert, fragments of the original film, I don’t know whether this has become a film in the meantime. Numéro Zéro was an anomaly, limited by the length of the reel of film. To split it in fragments meant deciding what to edit, as editing implies a choice. I had to decide upon the editing and make a choice. However, I don’t think that the original anomaly has disappeared though. I just cut out a few people, as I had to reduce the length by half. I strongly doubted that it was a film at the time, in February 71, as I had never seen anything like it before. Since then, I have discovered things that resemble it a little, namely Godard’s video programmes, which, a few years down the line, were the only things you could compare it to. Of course, I had no prior intention when making this film, I was simply eaten up with suffering, and this film was a response to that suffering.”
– Jean Eustache

“It happened in 2001. It was a beautiful winter afternoon. At a bistrot Jean-Marie turns to me: ‘There’s this film by Jean Eustache… I was one of the eight chosen schmucks that he invited to the screening… He was always so unsure – he kept telling us how he thought the film was a useless piece of shit… And when the lights came on, we were all stunned! I told him it was one of the greatest films about the history of France, as great as Renoir’s La Marseillaise. Perhaps the only film ever that you can call an important piece of sociology, without trashing the words film and sociology. I think it’s a film for you.’ Well, that did it. Of course, I had always admired and loved Eustache’s films, and out of the blue comes this mysterious Numéro Zéro: I had to find it! One or two months later, a miracle in Paris: Eustache’s son Boris on the phone, ‘Yes, I think there’s a working print of Numéro Zéro under my bed.’ I called my friend João Bénard da Costa, the late great director of the Portuguese Cinémathéque: “Bring it over, ASAP!” So, the Lab at Film Archives in Lisbon proceeded to restore this magnificent 35mm negative and one day we all sat in the theatre to watch it… and it was my kind of movie all right.”
– Pedro Costa

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

Response to an invitation

One fine day you find yourself being invited to propose some films for a program of screenings and discussions dealing with the “return of Marxism”. How can one who has never read Marx respond to this kind invitation? Indeed, the notion of Marxism seems to have regained a new force of attraction and legitimacy, even – or especially – for those who have come after the insurgence and the subsequent dissolution of the emancipatory movements in the period of the “long 1968”. Even for those who decided early enough in life to dedicate some humble time and energy to the cultivation of cinema, this bastard art that one particular adept of Marxism once proclaimed to be “the most important of all arts”, the time has come when, for them too, politics becomes the order of the day. How does one who has always preferred the darkness and safety of the cinema space to the obscureness and uncertainty of that strange place called society, deal with the realization that this constant struggle that is politics concerns him, and has perhaps always concerned him? You do what you can: you relate everything you don’t understand to what you know and love. And even when so much of what you thought you knew starts crumbling down on you, and your whole world view with it, the love does not wither. It only grows stronger.

One night you find yourself in the company of a great filmmaker, who reminds you that it’s allright to let yourself be vulnerable, that it is something to work with. And he talks about the fear that we are all experiencing, a fear that is caused by that which we are told we do not have and can never have, a fear so great it freezes us away from the things we care for the most. We stall it whenever we can, taking refuge in the certainties that are laid out before us, continually following the paths that define what is generally accepted as common sense, sometimes cuddling up in the dark spaces where fabricated dreams of light and shadow instill us with a sense of comfort. Against the pervasive sense of anxiety and conformity, the filmmaker points out the need to invent other worlds, to take risks and explore pathways that might enable us to exceed our limitations and suppressions. In life as in cinema. And he expresses his love and admiration for two filmmakers who have persevered in doing so, creating an exceptional cinema that makes us perceive life in all its possibilities, makes us feel the torrent of the world in all its intensities. A feeling that is seeing and not only recognizing. One that confronts us with the sense that we do not live in the best of possible worlds. And you start to see that too.

One day you come to realize that your sense of disorientation and disquiet is shared by many, and you begin to understand that the narratives of lost illusions and shattered dreams you have been passed on for so long no longer say much about our world. And you feel that, for those who do not know how to live in this broken world, to act has to become a matter of putting trust in what is uncertain, in that unknown space of possibility for which we desperately want to take responsibility. Realizing that, perhaps, it is the only thing for which we are confident we have a responsibility. To act can no longer start with projecting an ideal destination in some faraway future, but with producing a break in the present, a shift in how we choose to perceive its coordinates. Without maps, without a dictionary or directory to guide our search, we begin to look towards the emotions and sentiments that might comprise a world of affects to be shared, and less at the visual evidence of the state of the world as we know it. This is how cinema can give us courage: by reframing what is given as evident, by proposing a world that resists the pronunciation of the vanity of all action, by participating in the constitution of a new collective sentiment. For those who feel out of place, undignified, exploited, humiliated, a search for trust inevitably involves a negotiation between one sense and another, between the intelligibility of our world and the sensibility of an other. And isn’t that, after all, one of the tensions animating Marxism?

24 April 2014 19:30
Université Populaire de Bruxelles, Brussels.
At the invitation of Arenberg Cinémas Nomades.

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub
Sicilia!
IT, 1999, Italian with French subtitles, 66’
Based on Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily, narrating the return of an intellectual to his native Sicily after a long absence. Moving beyond the original’s immediate context—the increasing oppression of pre-war Italy—Straub/Huillet offer a touching look at the state of permanent exile common to all of those who can’t go home again.

Umiliati (Humiliated)
IT, 2003, Italian with French subtitles, 34′
The survivors of World War II wander throughout liberated Italy, searching for their past and a future. Tired of wandering, a group of men and women who’ve lost everything, decide to try to restore something from among the rubble and to set out on a new life. Based on extracts from Le Donne di Messina by Elio Vittorini.

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Par un beau matin, je me suis vu invité à proposer des films pour un programme de projections et de débats autour du « retour du marxisme »….

Comment quelqu’un qui n’a jamais lu Marx peut-il répondre à ce genre d’invitation ?

Il semble en effet que la notion de marxisme retrouve aujourd’hui une nouvelle force d’attraction, une nouvelle légitimité, même – ou plus spécialement – envers ceux qui sont arrivés après l’insurrection , et la dissolution suséquente des mouvements émancipateurs en ’68.
Même pour ceux qui ont choisi assez tôt dans leur vie de consacrer une humble partie de leur temps et de leur énergie à la culture du cinéma , cet art de bâtard qu’un adepte du marxisme a un jour défini comme « le plus important de tous les arts » , même pour ceux-là, le temps est venu où la politique revient à l’ordre du jour.

Comment, celui qui a toujours préféré l’obscurité et la sécurité d’une salle de cinéma à celle, plus incertaine, de ce lieu étrange appelé «la société », comment peut-il gérer cette prise de conscience que cette lutte constante qu’est la politique le concerne, et l’a sans doute toujours concerné ?
On fait donc ce qu’on peut : on relie tout ce qu’on ne comprend pas à tout ce qu’on apprécie et connaît….et même si beaucoup de certitudes commencent à s’effondrer, et avec elles notre regard sur le monde, notre amour ne se flétrit pas. Il se renforce.

Un beau soir, vous vous retrouvez en compagnie d’un grand cinéaste qui vous rappelle qu’il est intéressant de rester vulnérable, qu’il faut travailler avec cela. Il vous parle alors de cette peur qui nous touche tous, la peur causée par ce qu’on nous dit qu’on n’a pas, et qu’on ne pourra jamais avoir. Une peur si forte qu’elle nous glaçe et nous éloigne de ce que nous avons de plus cher.
Cette peur, nous la mettons de côté et nous nous réfugions dans des certitudes préexistantes, suivant inlassablement le « bon vieux sens commun », doucement bercés dans des espaces sombres, par les rêves d’ombres et de lumières pré-fabriqués qui nous offrent un sentiment de confort. En réaction contre ce sentiment diffus d’angoisse et de conformisme, le cinéaste insiste sur la nécessité d’inventer d’autres mondes , de prendre des risques et d’explorer les voies qui pourraient nous donner la force de dépasser nos limites.
Dans la vie comme au cinéma.
Il exprime alors sa grande admiration pour deux autres cinéastes qui ont choisi cette voie et qui ont créé une cinématographie exceptionnelle, capable de nous ouvrir à une nouvelle perception de la vie et de ses infinies possibilités. Un cinéma qui nous donne à ressentir toute l’intensité de la marche du monde, qui nous donne le sentiment de voir et non pas seulement d’aperçevoir, qui nous montre que nous ne vivons pas dans « le meilleur des mondes »…. Et ça, vous aussi vous commencez à le voir…

Un jour, vous réalisez alors que votre inquiétude et votre impression de désorientation sont partagées par beaucoup. Et vous commencez à comprendre que les histoires de rêves brisés et d’illusions perdues qui vous sont racontées depuis si longtemps ne disent pas grand-chose du monde dans lequel nous vivons. Vous sentez alors que, pour ceux qui ne savent comment vivre dans ce monde déglingué, agir devient une manière de mettre de la confiance dans ce qui nous semble incertain, dans cet espace inconnu de possibles dont nous voudrions tant prendre la responsabilité.
Et vous rendez compte que c’est peut-être la seule chose dont vous être sûrs d’être responsables.

Agir, c’est arrêter de se projeter dans un futur idéal et lointain, agir c’est créer une rupture dans le présent, une manière décalée d’en déchiffrer la carte. Sans plan, sans dictionnaire ou répertoire pour nous guider, nous explorons les émotions et les sentiments et nous partageons ces « affects » plutôt que de simplement proposer une illustration visuelle évidente de l’état du monde que nous connaissons.

C’est ainsi que le cinéma peut nous donner du courage : en recadrant ce qui est donné pour évident, en proposant un univers imperméable à l’expression de la vanité de nos actes et en contribuant à la naissance d’un nouveau sentiment collectif.

Pour tous ceux qui ne se sentent pas à leur place, les indignés, les humiliés, une recherche de confiance implique inévitablement la confrontation des avis et une négociation entre l’intelligibilité de notre monde et la sensibilité d’un autre.

Après tout, cela n’est-il pas aussi l’une des lignes de tension qui anime le Marxisme ?