Anand Patwardhan: Storming the Reality Asylum

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By John Akomfrah

Originally published in PIX 2 (January 1997, edited by Ilona Halberstadt, distributed by BFI, London). Republished by Tate Film on the occasion of ‘A Cinema of Songs and People’, curated by The Otolith Collective. Anand Patwardhan will be our guest for the next DISSENT ! session, on 8 November. John Akomfrah will be our guest on 20 and 21 November.

Anand Patwardhan occupies a unique place in documentary filmmaking. Very few documentarists are accepted as auteurs; among those, few are both directors and technicians; and from this elite corps, even fewer come from the so called Third World. Over the last twenty years Anand has consistently taken strands from different documentary filmmaking practices – the Cuban and Latin American Imperfect Cinema style; the more self-reflective political documentaries of Chris Maker and the Dziga Vertov group; the lyricism and attention to detail of the ethnographic school – and put them to work on a series of stunning documentaries.

From Bombay Our City to Father, Son and Holy War, his films have dealt with some of the key questions of our age – the ubiquity of difference in modern lives; masculinity as a source of conflict and power; the absurdities of political power. Except for his first two documentaries, his subject-matter has come from successive political crises in India : the Emergency; the rise of fundamentalism and communalism; the growing political polarisation. He has been holding a mirror to the Indian psyche, to see how it reflects questions of class-belonging, gender and political voice. It is unusual for a documentary film-maker of his caliber to have spent so much time and energy working on what are essentially local questions. The questions acquire an immediacy by being intensely regional in their raison d’etre and their outcome. Paradoxically, by interrogating the local questions over and over again, he has not only arrived at a refined vision of the state of play in Indian culture and society in the nineties, but also in the world at large – forms of fragmentation, the growing alarm with which people protect their ‘identities’, emerging forms of power – all are prefigured in his work.

These are films driven as much by absences as they are by presences. What is absent are agendas imposed rigidly on people, politics or places. Instead, the films are fixed by interests pursued relentlessly, selflessly, ethically. In Patwardhan’s films there is always a sense that what we are watching is a product of an inquisitive impulse – a search for answers through what people say and how they say it, the rhythms of the everyday, the gestures and actions of individuals.

Nowhere is his interest in the absence/presence dichotomy used to more effect than in Bombay Out City. In this film he investigates the relation between the culture and life which goes with being an affluent Bombay-dweller and what you do when you are poor in Bombay – what streets you sleep on. The relation between absence and presence is made tangible. Patwardhan interviews a lot of slum dwellers who feel that their condition is not natural – that the reason why they are in that position is because of someone’s neglect, incompetence, or the willful manipulation of their life chances. In this way the rich are evoked as a ghostly presence and their traces are etched deeper as the interviews are intercut with images of facades, the rich going about their daily business.

All his films deal with events which over time acquire political and cultural significance. But there is also the question of aesthetics which is rarely commented on – when people look for aesthetic insights they rarely turn to political documentaries. And yet the way in which Patwardhan investigates the complex relationship between figure and ground – the way he places people in the frame and the space he gives them to express themselves, merit special scrutiny. Through this scrutiny we discover a sustained attempt to think through the ways in which people construct oppressive political languages and motifs for resistance.

We also begin to see the complex aesthetic and formal questions raised by the attempt to provide the narrative for political activity; the attempt to release events in India from the confines of the stereotype. Central to this deconstructive gesture in his films is the question of repetition. In the repetition of motifs, one glimpses the dark power that images, symbols and motifs acquire in the lives of people. In Father, Son and Holy War, the colour orange signals the Shiv Sena’s public rallies and speech-making. Gradually this colour comes to stand for the circulation of notions of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’. The process by which the film effects this marriage of political extremism and a particular colour is very complex and yet one is struck in the end by how effortless the whole thing seems.

In Patwardhan’s films symbols and icons are both a source of strength and a site of conflict. In Memory of Friends is not simply a biography of a Sikh Marxist who died fifty years ago, but is also about the way in which a number of conflicting groups – the State, Sikh Fundamentalists and fighters for communal harmony – fight over the symbol of Bhagat Singh as a political figurehead in contemporary India. In the film, photographs of Bhagat Singh, both in turban and deracinated, European clothes, are among the images which give clues to the uses and abuses of history. So what starts off looking like a hagiographic exercise on one political symbol from the Indian past becomes a complex film about how people empower themselves and the role icons play in that process.

Part of the attraction of the films lies in the fact that Patwardhan lives those events as a filmmaker. He practices what he preaches – a politics of tolerance. In a period of extreme political intolerance, in which a certain kind of politics exists simply to delegitimise other people and their right to be part of the State, the filmmaker enters, willing to confer on all the social actors the same respect. He goes in prepared to listen to people as individuals and they acquire their status as villains – or heroes – after the fact, because of what they say and do. All the films are narratives about Indians talking, or in some cases not talking but killing one another. But crucially they are about their actions, gestures and rhetoric. He observes the everyday, the unfolding fabric of Indian life as a discreet set of activities before these acquire the status of events. He is not interested in stories, but rather in the fragments which make up the story and the role that particular individuals play in it.

In his films we not only see events acquire the status of the real but get an insight into the complicated process of selection via which particular events attain the definitive status of the real; an insight into the convoluted process of legitimation through which patterns of extreme behaviour become the norm; the Indian reality, condition and fate. Along the way, a few of the mystifying and patronizing platitudes on India – its piety, its fatalism, its extremism – are shown to be ever-evolving historical dramas with living social actors, fragments from a mosaic lived and constructed by social groups.

In In Memory of Friends, there’s a man who is a minor player when Patwardhan first meets him – he does not have written on his forehead: “Hero – this man will save the day.” But in the process of observing, filming and interviewing him, it becomes clear to Patwardhan; and therefore to us, that this man has the right ideological and emotional make-up to provide a solid centre for the film. So gradually he gravitates towards him. It is as if he was there to watch this man make up his mind to stand against extremism. This may explain Patwardhan’s fascination with documentary: its privileged rendezvous with history; its uncanny prophetic power; it’s ability to give us an insight into the connections between actions and consequences. In the best documentaries we always glimpse the future. Take a look at Father, Son and Holy War and you’ll see my point.

Documentary film-making at its best – Flaherty, Rouch – is a complicated interrogation of reality. The quest to undermine cultural and political assumptions is central, particularly, the stultifying claims of the stereotypical, the cliché-ridden, the teleological. They are supreme acts of deconstruction. They do not try to replace an ossified image of a more real India. Rather, they work with and through the conventional images by seizing hold of them as frames and exploring how their reality is both manufactured and lived.

Let us take the assault on the mosque in Ayodhya. It was widely monitored by the media and people thought: how terrible, those fanatics in India, they are always doing things like that. But in the film [In the Name of God], we watch young men going on a march before they become the mob that tears down a mosque. You hear their opinions and so you follow a trajectory of rage which leads to the outcome. However, we are made aware that many options were jostling to become reality; we get to understand how this option (a mob will attack a mosque ) becomes the logical recourse in a perverse chain of reasoning. In another incident, the central figure in In Memory of Friends was killed by fundamentalists after the film was made. I was all the more shocked because in the course of watching the film I felt that the circumstances which led to his death were not a foregone conclusion; that reality is open-ended. Ultimately this is the value of Patwardhan’s films. They remind us that reality is a many-headed beast – wrestling with it requires both courage and flair.

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Interview with Anand Patwardhan

By John Akomfrah and Ilona Halberstadt

Originally published in PIX 2 (January 1997, edited by Ilona Halberstadt, distributed by BFI, London).

John: Within the range of independent Indian work disseminated and discussed here, films by Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray etc. there seems to be a different assumption about your work. Namely, that because it is politically engaged the questions it raises are so transparent that one could almost forget that it was the product of film-making. Your films don’t seem to be discussed in relation to the artistic medium.

Anand: No, those questions never get asked anywhere. It’s as if the film-making is invisible although there’s no attempt on my part to hide the camera or the processes of filming. But I take it as a compliment that people are drawn into the subject matter directly and are not conscious of how the film is being constructed.

John: So let’s talk about that for a change. You do your own camera as well as the editing. As far as I know there are only two or three international documentary makers – Molly Dineen, Dennis O’Rourke – who also directly control the frame by doing the camera work.

Anand : I think the main reason I do camera is that the films are unpremeditated. They have a very long gestation period. If I was doing a shoot which was well organised and over a short period of time, then I could afford to have a cameraperson. As it is, by the fourth film I became the cameraperson out of necessity, but I began to like it. I began to feel impatient when I did have a cameraman if there was no eye contact between me asking the questions and the person speaking into camera. I liked the directness of somebody speaking into camera. There were also obvious things like saving raw stock, because when you are doing interviews, you waste lots and lots of footage, but if you are the cameraperson you can switch off and then on again whenever things get interesting. There were moments when somebody else did camera I liked, and perhaps the cameraperson whom I could recruit happened to be in town at the right time. I would then do the sound recording and I would be happy that I was not doing camera because I was able to tap into more than my own immediate visual image. Sometimes I’m so concerned about the content of what’s being said and so involved in what’s happening that, being the cameraman, I have done the minimum to get the story told. Slowly I’m imposing a discipline on myself saying that OK, this was the exciting bit but I also need to get into where we are and what other things are happening -it’s like having two cameras, one camera which covers the main subject and one camera which picks up on incidental things.

John : Do you find yourself having to develop another eye then, so that there’s a kind of eye that you use to pick up on interviewees and there’s another eye that is concerned with landscapes ?

Anand : Not so much landscapes. I was brought up in the school of thought that believed that aesthetics for its own sake wasn’t worth it. The shot has to be integrally connected to what the film is saying.

John : Which school of thought is that?

Anand : Well, I guess I trace it to Imperfect Cinema – the political logic of Fernando Solanas, Patricio Guzman and the other Latin -Americans, who were making films in the Sixties about Liberation Movements and felt that beauty for itself was not on.
I now find that my films work better when I provide breathing-space, moments which are connected but are not absolutely dictated by the story. There’s lot of intensity in different sections of the film and you need to have time to absorb what has happened before moving on to the next thing. In that sense I do find I use more of those moments now than I did before.

John : I never found that there was an absence of those moments of breathing – space. How do you achieve it ?

Anand : I guess one such example is where I stay on the characters after they finish speaking. The camera doesn’t switch off immediately, it lingers on. I find that a good way of staying focused and yet providing the space.

John : I agree absolutely with you and for me this is connected to the question of how dead time and songs work in your films. Literally each film at some point uses a popular song to illustrate an argument or provide you with moments when you can cut together a set of shots which would otherwise not cut together. So at the centre of all these films there is always this use of song.

Anand : Playful moments where you can get out of being immediately literal and are able to jump.

John : But there’s also a second register in the films which is relevant to our discussion on breathing-space – to do with the use of dead time. Your cuts are also sometimes quite elliptical but you don’t cut as fast as a number of mainstream film- makers.

Anand : No, I also don’t cut as fast because I find it disrespectful of the person I am talking to. Quite often I cut out very fast on the people I don’t like because then I just get the punch-line, the nasty bit that they’ve said and then I juxtapose it to something else. But, when it’s a sympathetic person that I’m talking to, I tend to stay on that person for longer because that person has other dimensions from the immediate dimension of what is being said and that has a visual dimension – it’s a way of saying that we don’t want to leave you right now but we have to do something else.

Ilona: But you often also shoot sympathetically the people with whom you don’t agree.

Anand : There’s a difference in my attitude to people I sympathise with but don’t necessarily agree with. A good example is the young Sikh militants in In Memory of Friends. They are at the same time victims and victimizers. They are victims of the State and also of a minority syndrome which has put them in an ideological trap. At the same time they are capable of killing people.

John : In each film there’s one or more people who a lot of care and attention is lavished on, not necessarily by being given more time but by bring framed differently, they’re returned to – for instance, in the new one [ Father, Son and Holy War ] there’s the woman…..

Anand : There are two women – there’s a working class Hindu woman who, against all odds, is against the Sati*. (*Sati – an outlawed practice which at times resurfaces in modern India, where a wife is burnt alive on her husband’s funeral pyre) All the other people around her are pro-Sati, and had been brought into this manipulation but she had not. And she taught herself through adult Literacy Courses and had come out of it and is very, very strong. In the second part of the film there’s the Moslem woman whose husband was killed and she was raped but she has incredible humanity. After all the things that have happened to her, she has no hatred and she says: “My Hindu sisters are helping me through this and so it’s not a question of Hindu/Moslem”.

John : That leads me to ask you something about the intentions of the films. When you set out to make them, do you have in the back of your mind an ideal figure who should figure in the frame?

Anand : No.

John : So how do you come across those people?

Anand : Accident.

John : Always accident?

Anand : Almost always accident – that’s the advantage of shooting for such a long time. Most of the films have been at least two or three years in the making and over that period you run across exceptional people, who do not necessarily speak very well but whose experiences are very important for the film. So that in terms of framing them, that’s quite unconscious. When I like somebody, or when I get into it, there’s probably technically something which I can’t define, which is not pre-planned. May be something happens and my respect for the person gets translated direct to the camera, or the cameraperson, in the framing, and everything takes a form.

In In The Name Of God, for example, there is a Hindu priest who we come back to again and again. He was murdered last year so my intuition about him being a very central figure in the whole drama that was unfolding was right. He was somebody whom they couldn’t allow to stay alive because he was a Hindu priest who was against the (Hindu) fundamentalists. He was right at the heart of Ayodhya, he was the Head Priest of that temple speaking out against them. For some incredible reason the media was not focusing on him and even after he has been murdered they hardly ever talk about it.

John : Over the last decade and a bit you’ve been dealing with a set of questions. What would you say those questions are ?

Anand : The main thing I have been obsessed with is the rise of fundamentalism; fundamentalist violence. If it was harmless, I would ignore it. But in India everyone can see the kind of hatred that’s resulted in increased levels of mindless violence against those whom the people who are killing don’t even know; anonymous murders for a cause, which make no sense, not even for the people who are doing it. The horror of that violence has kept me occupied for a decade.

John : How many films have come out?

Anand : Three. There was supposed to be one film. The material I was shooting became too complex so I had to separate it into three films which add up to a total of five and-a-half hours. So you can imagine how much more material there was.

John: How did you fund it overall ?

Anand : The only actual hard cash I’ve been able to raise was from Channel 4 – sales or pre-sales through Alan Fountain. I raise small amounts of money by selling films after they are made and I put it back into the next project.

John : Paradoxically, you work in political documentary filming but there is a clear connection between the way you work and the avant – garde – your films have a diaristic quality.

Anand: It would have been nice if I’d found the diaristic voice of : ‘Here I am. This is happening to me’. But I felt uncomfortable saying that I am important to this event. I was caught between not wanting to have an objective voice-of-God narration, saying: ‘ This is how the world is’, and not wanting to say : ‘This is how I see the world and this is all coming through me – through my interrelationship with the people that you see’. It’s obvious but I didn’t want to have to state it in the voice.

John : I meant diaristic in the sense that the Polish journalist Kapuczynski has defined it. When asked how he got this personal quality to his work, he said “Well, I do what is called in Latin, silva rerum – I live in the forest of things, and so what you get in my work is me bearing witness to these things.” Now, it’s clear watching your stuff that you’re also living it. The signature is your voice. We can always hear your voice in the background, prodding people, cajoling them, seducing them most of the time, to confess things they would otherwise not confess, pauses in the way you ask questions. You’re not simply stumbling across things. It’s clear that you’re also living through these things.

Anand : OK. Let’s put it this way. It’s diaristic but it’s not confessional. I haven’t got to the stage where I want to bare my soul on camera.

John : I think you are nevertheless revealing yourself. You largely shoot and edit your own material – you’re not the director in the traditional sense, ordering others to organize images for you. We can hear your voice, and we’re also watching your choice of images and frames for people.

Anand : I think what I’m doing is basically saying : ‘Here’s a liberal humanist who’s inviting other people’ – I believe other people are the same if only they would recognize it, and so – ‘come and see it this way’. What I choose to film are moments of terrible, irrational, inhuman behaviour which don’t make sense to anybody, once they happen to look at it in that perspective. So I’m just inviting people to look at it in that perspective. In real life all these terrible iniquities get mixed up with lots of grey areas. I choose moments that are very clear in themselves and then string them together. I’m always looking to find the moment of greatest, the most obvious contradiction which anyone can see, focus in on it for a while…

For instance, [in In the Name of God] there is the whole question – is it a temple or a mosque? There are people who believe that Ram was born in this spot and are willing to kill for it. But when I asked them when was Ram born, they had no answer to whether Ram was born millions of years ago or thousands of years ago. So that extreme logical perversity became revealed through one question… On the bridge to the mosque-temple in Ayodhya there are these guys who are so angry that they reveal they are quite happy that Mahatma Gandhi was murdered. They think it’s perfectly all right – that he deserved to die. Normally the fundamentalists would hide this deep nastiness. But if you catch them at the moment of passion and they reveal that, then the audience can see where it’s all coming from. There’s another example in In Memory of Friends, the film shot in the Punjab about Bhagat Singh, a Socialist, who wrote Why I Am An Atheist. We focus on the young boys, Sikh separatists, who had appropriated Bhagat Singh’s memory and were saying that after all he was a Sikh and he was martyred and we are like him. I say, ” What about the book – Why I Am An Atheist?” They say, “No, no no – that’s not written by him, that’s written by a Congressman”.

John : Last night I was thinking about your work and it struck me that in all your films you’ve been painting triptychs made up of three words – People, Power and Politics. But that over the years from Prisoners Of Conscience onwards there have been shifts and refinements clarifying questions in all three areas. For example, in Prisoners Of Conscience, there’s a very clear emphasis on who has power and where the battle lines are. By the time you get to In Memory of Friends or Father, Son and Holy War

Anand : The situation itself has been changing. I have not changed that much. At the time of Prisoners Of Conscience there was the Emergency in India; martial law. The best minds in the country had been murdered or put in jail because they believed in social justice and revolution. So the film talked about political prisoners and State repression. But since then India became semi – democratic again and the situation has become more complex. The State was not the only enemy any more; there was fundamentalism. The State encouraged fundamentalism on the one hand and pretended that it was the secular force on the other.

John : The State has receded more and more in the work.

Anand : Because the State is no longer the big, bad… it’s too naïve now to say, if we get rid of the State we’ll be in great shape. Who is the ‘we’? Who are we talking about ? In 1977/78 when I made Prisoners Of Conscience, there was a naïve hope that the Left, the amorphous Left would come to power one day and create a just society. But the Left was divided even at that time and I was trying to create this unity on film.

John : Do you think you then switched from being interested in what served the Left to being broadly interested in what was in the national interest?

Anand : Even in Waves Of Revolution I already integrated the non- violent movement with the Left. The film is about the non-violent movement in Bihar, a student movement which was accused by sections of the Left of being too vague. They accused it of being pacifist and robbing people of more revolutionary methods. Then, in Prisoners Of Conscience, I covered Jayprakash Narayan (a Gandhian Socialist ) and non-violent methods of class struggle, as well as Maoist Revolutionaries who were talking about armed struggle. In this naïve and idealistic manner, I put them all into one boat as people who were fighting for justice, which I still believe they were. But there were obviously all kinds of contradictions which I wasn’t getting into. So in that sense there was always a mix between Marx and Gandhi, my ideal was always mixed.

John: You always oscillated between the two?

Anand: I didn’t oscillate between the two but saw the validity of both approaches. I never believed in armed struggle. I thought of armed struggle as being unfortunately necessary in some places like South Africa, but as it turns out, even in South Africa, non-violent methods worked much better.

John: But were you consciously going for a synthesis in the work or were these just influences that you felt you had to work with?

Anand: Pretty consciously, even in my forays into academia which were miniscule; I wrote a paper in 1971 trying to integrate Fanon and Gandhi. I went to America on a scholarship to Brandeis University in Boston. I took courses in the Black Studies department. The Black Panthers were active. The anti-war movement was at its height. We had to choose between whether we were on this side or that side. Then, I was obviously on this side. Lots of Indians were on that side because they didn’t identify with the Black Movement – as an Indian at that time you could choose whether you were White or Black.

John: But how can Fanon and Gandhi be integrated?

Anand: Basically Fanon made a fetish out of violence and Gandhi a fetish out of non-violence. They over-emphasized the means. Actually they were both being practical in their own terms. For Fanon violence was necessary to overcome the sense of inferiority that the black man had internalized. Only by striking back could he dispel this image of inferiority. For Gandhi, only through non-violence could you dispel this inferiority. In fact he temporarily called off the struggle in 1922 when in one incident a policeman was killed by the mob. I talk about this in the film In Memory of Friends as this is the moment when Bhagat Singh left the Gandhian movement.

The main point where Fanon is right is that he was warning against the danger that the independent struggle can easily mean Brown rule replacing White rule, because there is no attention being paid to class struggle. And where Gandhi is right is that human beings dehumanize themselves by the act of violence, that revolutionary violence degenerates into terror. So you have examples of both things: the Indian bourgeoisie taking over from the British. You have the example of many parts of Africa where violence continues, the most horrific forms. It’s only Mandela who integrated Fanon and Gandhi. It’s not the question of the means itself – but how do you participate in the liberation process without dehumanizing yourself or the other? For Fanon the act of violence is a liberating process. Maybe he was talking psychologically, that it wa not meant to be done by actual killing.

John : I must admit though, when I came to your house [in Bombay ] this year, suddenly you made complete sense.

Anand : You saw my posters. [Posters of George Jackson in Soledad Prison, the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, Cuban films…]

John : I saw the posters but I also saw photographs of your mother and Gandhi together, so that suddenly it didn’t feel like this weird, exotic mix, because it was something which related to your family background.

Anand : Well, family background was unconsciously part of it. I never thought it out. For instance, when I was growing up I was totally frivolous in college in Bombay, in terms of my uncles who had been in and out of jail for twenty years for opposing the British : one was a Gandhian and one was one of the founders of the Socialist Party. I loved them but I rejected active participation in anything. They themselves had rejected participation after independence because they saw the corruption that had begun in all the parties.
The Congress Party and even the Socialist Party were split up. One uncle was a Socialist who was disillusioned by Stalinism. They rejected politics as Politics with a big P, but they did social work. One started a rural university – an agricultural university. They worked mainly in the field of education.

Ilona: And your mother?

Anand : My mother’s a potter.

John : Well, this is the second bit which I thought was kind of interesting, because when I went to your house I suddenly realized that you came from this family in which art and politics were integrated in a very broad sense.

Anand : My mother went to Shantiniketan, which is Tagore’s arts university – started by Tagore before independence.

John : Which is in itself an attempt to synthesize art and politics – Tagore’s university is a product of that conjunction, isn’t it, the attempt to bring it together : Bengali nationalism and aesthetic internationalism. Suddenly within that broad, post – Tagorean Universe you made perfect sense.

Anand : Well yes, but it’s more complicated. My mother was from a traditionally business community, so being an artist was itself a rebellion of a kind. Luckily her father, my grandfather, though a businessman, was also a secret supporter of the independence movement, knew people like Nehru and Aruna Asaf Ali, and put some of his earnings into the freedom struggle. So he could not object when my mother decided to marry my father who was not well off but was from a socialist family that was fully immersed in the struggle against British Rule.

John : One of the reasons why I was keen to bring it up is that your work is distinctive in that it is not located by region or idiom. Clearly in the Patwardhan universe there’s always a wrestling with a national voice.

Anand : National and probably international, not only in the sense that I’ve spent so many years abroad now. Over the years I’ve spent at least five years outside the country but, before I went abroad, there was a search for a national voice, or a human voice, because that was something we were always brought up with – no boundaries.

John : Why documentary?

Anand : I fell into it by accident because when I was a student at Brandeis University in 1970 the anti – war movement was very strong. Brandies was the East Coast student centre of demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Berkeley was the West Coast one. So we were right in the middle of the anti – war movement. Angela Davis, Marcuse, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin – all came from Brandeis which was this tiny university of three thousand people.

I went there to do English Literature, to have a good time and go back to India and be a publisher or whatever. I wasn’t even that keen on being a publisher but at the age of twenty whatever you think that you want to do is complete guesswork, so this was a possibility. I liked literature until I started to take it up academically and then I got bored with it.

John : And how did that lead to documentary?

Anand: So I switched to Sociology at Brandeis. This was a big change from India, where you had to mug things up by heart and produce them in the exam. Then, in America you could pick different subjects of your choice. So I did a course on Theatre Arts and borrowed film equipment and did a small film : I shot a film of anti -Vietnam War demonstrations. Then I made a film on students at Brandeis trying to raise funds for Bangladesh refugees. In 1971 Bangladesh hadn’t been created, but there were very many people dying of starvation. So we tried to raise funds by organizing a fast, asking people not to eat for a day and send the money to the refugees. I interviewed people on that day on whether they were fasting or not. The film was called Business As Usual because most of the interviews were about people saying : I’ll give some donations but I’ve got to eat to do the Chemistry test or, I’ve got a basketball game, or whatever. I inter-cut that with shots of the refugees. It was crude but funny.

John : I’ve never seen it.

Anand : I’m embarrassed. I have long hair and speak with a slight American accent…. So anyway, since you ask : Why documentaries? It’s not just why documentaries but why film? After this first small film and after I finished university and got arrested for opposing the Vietnam War… my visa was gone; so then I worked with Cesar Chavez in California – the Farm Workers’ Union made up largely of people of Mexican origin. I then went back to India and worked in a village for a few years. There I didn’t do anything with film but I had a still-camera and we made a tape-slide show about tuberculosis, which was one of the problems there, to motivate people to keep coming to the clinic after taking the initial treatment. People used to take the initial treatment and then not do the follow-up and get sick again.

I didn’t do anything with film until 1974 when I’d gone to Bihar to join a student movement against corruption, or to observe the movement, and then got involved in it. They asked me to take pictures on a particular day when demonstrations were being planned; a big demonstration where there was going to be police repression, so they said : take pictures as proof. So I went back to Delhi and instead of a still camera, I thought I’d shoot it on film. I borrowed a Super 8 camera from a friend and took that friend back, and we went and shot that day’s demonstration. Eventually we thought we could do more than just having some dramatic footage on Super 8. We projected it on a screen and shot it with a 16mm camera. That became the basis for Waves of Revolution. Then the Emergency was declared in India and all the people who were in the movement that I was filming were put in jail. The movement was crushed. I could have been in jail as well but I got a teaching post in Canada to do my Master’s and smuggled out this film in pieces and reassembled it in Canada, and then started showing it against the Emergency in India. So again, no film-making between that time and much later when the Emergency was over and I made Prisoners Of Conscience. In twenty-three years I’ve made only seven films. Now I see it is the only useful thing that I can do.

John : Let me get this right. I’m sure you don’t mean that you had an Aaton [movie camera] and a Steenbeck [editing table], and made all that sort of space by default, I mean clearly…

Anand : By that time I was clear. This happened quite a long time ago – at least ten years ago I figured out that I was primarily a filmmaker because I saw how this was being used and also this was the most fun that I’d had. I was happy being able to feel useful as well as doing something that I enjoyed.

John : Which film were you working on when you realized that you were, for better of worse, a filmmaker?

Anand: I think it was between Prisoners Of Conscience and A Time To Rise, which was the film I made in Canada. The fact is that after A Time To Rise, economically things became better for me in that I didn’t have to borrow money all the time to make films. Until Prisoners Of Conscience and even till halfway through the making of A Time To Rise we were forever in debt, borrowing money from friends, living off goodwill. But once A Time To Rise was made and won an award, the Tyne Award in Newcastle, then Channel 4 bought telecasts of it and I slowly developed a relationship over the years so that I could get some money for the films, so that I didn’t have to run around raising money all the time – I guess that from there it became a kind of career. At least it became viable to make films, financially.

John : At the time that you were politically engaged and saw films as just one more tool to be used in an ongoing struggle, were you already interested in the theories of Imperfect Cinema?

Anand : I don’t want to over-emphasize that because I’ve never been very theoretical. It wasn’t reading Solanas and Getino’s or Espinosa’s articles. I don’t think I’ve even fully read “For an Imperfect Cinema”. It’s not particular articles or particular theories that I’m referring to. Actually, it was there in the air everywhere. It was not just coming in through film theory. It was there as a political ideology of helping the movement, so I guess my formative years were at a time when the weight was not on aesthetics or theory. It’s not that I am unaware of the aesthetic but the aesthetic is not something that I try to achieve. It’s there as a by-product of the process which is the only aesthetic I trust, even in other people’s work. It’s in Marlon Riggs’ Black is and Black ain’t which I have just seen.

John : [We met for the interview in November 1994, the day after the screening at Marx House of Father, Son, and Holy War organized by Women Against Fundamentalism and the Alliance Against Communalism and For Democracy in South Asia.] How did last night’s screening go?

Anand : It was full – we had people standing. The place is very small, so there was almost a hundred people there, in a seventy- people place, and the projector didn’t work so we wasted an hour and lost some people – we got it going again. After this new film is screened, I’ve noticed it takes a while for the conversation to get going – it’s really slow.

John : Do the same questions always come up?

Anand : One question that always comes up eventually is : Are you saying that women are better than men? – which is funny because it never got asked when my utopia was class struggle. Nobody said : Is it true that when workers of the world rule everything will be all right?

John : [On 10 May, 1995 Anand Patwardhan was passing through London after having shown the film in the US.] Did they ask the same questions?

Anand : Yes, but two other questions. One: Why no class-consciousness in the last film? Two: Why is the view of women essentialist?

Ilona : And what are your replies?

Anand : Class is running through it like a red light, but they didn’t notice. My reply to the second question is in the voice-over at the end of the film. Father, Son, and Holy War is not so much about the predicament of women as it is about the brutal socialization of men. In contrast to many of the men in the film, women may appear to have been romanticized, but a closer reading should reveal that this is hardly the point. A woman at the last screening was shocked that a man can make this film. She said that patriarchy victimizes females – males have no right to complain about patriarchy because they are privileged. Obviously patriarchy does not only victimize females.

Ilona : What kinds of films influence you? Do you love cinema?

Anand : I don’t think I love cinema in the abstract. I wouldn’t call myself a cinephile. Obviously there are some films that I love.

John : There was an interesting moment. I went to see Anand. We hadn’t seen each other for about two years. We were sitting down talking and it became clear about halfway through that the only way we were going to proceed in the conversation was through a film. So he said, “Well, I have a collection of Amos Gitai’s films and a collection of Ogawa- which one would you like to watch?”

Anand : I’d just got a tape by Amos Gitai which I hadn’t seen. I’d read about Amos’ work but I hadn’t had a chance to see anything until I got some tapes.

John : But the interesting thing was that we sat down, two friends who hadn’t seen each other for years, to watch Wadi, I think It was.

Anand : Ogawa’s film also was incredible. Shinsuke Ogawa died a year-and-a-half ago – a Japanese documentarist who made incredibly engaged films. He made one film in ten years, after living with the people for years. He made those films about the peasant and student takeover of the airport in Narita. They engaged the Japanese authorities for years and years, not giving up the expropriated land.

Ilona : But you didn’t as a child spend your time at the movies, or as a student, or at any time in your life? It wasn’t that sort of thing?

Anand : I have a funny story about that. As a child I hated cinema. I was scared. My parents took me to see Robison Crusoe and I was so scared because I thought that people really died on the screen. I was in tears. I refused to see any films after that for years because I was too scared. Finally, at ten or eleven they took me to a Walt Disney movie which had no human beings in it – The Living Desert. Then I got scared of the snake eating the rat.

John : Authentic Gandhi even then.

Anand : So then the film that I liked was Peter Pan and I went to see that many, many, times. I don’t know why I liked that. I haven’t seen it recently.

Ilona : So this is when you were a child. And your parents weren’t particularly film-goers either?

Anand : Yeah, they went. They were part of a Film Society. The Bengali connection with my mother meant she knew all sorts of filmmakers.

Ilona : What about Satyajit Ray? When did you first see him? Did you see Pather Panchali first?

Anand : I didn’t see Pather Panchali until I was twenty, or thereabouts. My Ray story concerns my film Prisoners Of Conscience. Ray was one of the few filmmakers, who refused to support the Emergency. Lots of other well-known filmmakers, whom I won’t name, went along with the Emergency because they were too scared to oppose it; some even made propaganda films for the government. But Ray refused to do that and Prisoners Of Conscience was about political prisoners during the Emergency. Even after the Emergency it didn’t get a Censor’s Certificate because it included sections about Maoists in prison. We were doing a campaign to get the film cleared by the Censor Board and Ray wrote a letter on my behalf to the Censor Board, after which it got passed.

John : Did you ever meet him?

Anand : Yes. He came to see the film and he wrote a letter. Once after that I saw him. He was a true liberal, in the best sense.

John : But you didn’t then see some connection between his values as a liberal and his value as a filmmaker, or did you?

Anand : I never chased up Satyajit Ray’s films but inevitably you have many chances to see them because they’re shown so much in many, many places. Over the years I’ve seen many of his films that I developed a liking for. I like Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne [ The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha ] a lot. It was very playful and it was a lovely children’s story: the good moral allegory. I liked Charulata and Days and Nights in the Forest, although in retrospect Days and Nights in the Forest has problems about having somebody made up as a tribal person. Maybe they could have developed a rapport with indigenous people so that they could have played themselves.

John : Is that one of the major advantages for you in making documentaries?

Anand: Yeah – there are so many reasons for doing documentaries rather than fiction, but one reason is that I am not confident enough to create. I wouldn’t feel that I trusted myself enough to make up the whole story and the character, and so many other things that you do in fiction. I feel much happier with found material; with things that are there. My job is to record those things. Obviously there’s some creativity involved or some manipulation in the way that it comes out on the screen but I’m not starting from scratch in terms of what is in front of the camera. In fiction, the responsibility of creating every element in the whole thing is mind-boggling.

John : This is connected to my earlier question on the confessional element in documentary. One of the ways in which you are obviously present is through the editing. Do you have any particular ideas about how you approach editing, or is it – this shot works, next I cut to another shot?

Anand : I think the style or the structure of the films is determined by the material rather than by pre-planning. My last film, because it was made over such a long time doesn’t have a clearly linear story-line, while the other two of the three films that I’ve done on religion were more linear. Although In Memory Of Friends is also not linear in the sense that it uses Bhagat Singh’s writing and it moves in between the past and the present. In The Name Of God has a linear logic that goes from point A to point B by following the chariot journey, leading up to the attack on the mosque. In between, different things are woven which eventually help the audience to understand the growth of Hindu fundamentalism. I knew when I was shooting that this was important and that was important, but I didn’t know exactly how they were connected to each other. So, in all the films, I’ve been editing sequences which held together. For instance, when I did the interview with the woman from Rajasthan, whom we talked about earlier, I edited her, kept the things that I thought were important, left it as a chunk and then moved on. As I’d shot over the years I edited different sequences, boiling it down to what was important, but not necessarily at that point connecting them all up. Other things I just left separately. Over many years a whole mosaic developed. Then basically, six years after I had started shooting, it all fell together, the pattern began to emerge.

John : Did you just wake up one day and it all kind of made sense?

Anand: No. By which I mean that if I had finished the film two years ago it would have been a totally different structure. For instance, 1993 was the year when the Bombay riots occurred, so obviously the Bombay riots are a very important part of the film. But I’d already been shooting for six years before that and I may have finished it earlier but I never felt, I wasn’t clear what to do with everything, how it all linked together. But when the Bombay riots occurred it…

John : Crystallised things.

Anand : Yeah, crystallized things. It also became the most explicit example of what the other material was talking about anyway.

John : I hate it when people ask me this question, but I thought I’d ask it anyway because you might have a slightly more sophisticated way of answering it than I have. It’s to do with motifs in film. All of your films have these motifs – sometimes they’re visual, some-times they’re political. You mentioned that the second film culminates at Ayodhya – the journey to Ayodhya punctuated…

Anand : The journey to Ayodhya is the backbone…. In the Punjab film the writings of Bhagat Singh are the backbone so everything was hung around that.

John : In this one, this new one?

Anand : In this one, the Bombay riots are the motif that comes to mind, the fire of the riots and the fire of sati. They all get linked. That’s why the first part is called “Trial By Fire” because “Trial By Fire” is the fire which the Hindu god Ram subjected Sita to. Sita was his wife and Ram made her undergo an ordeal by fire to prove her chastity. She had been abducted by the enemy king and after being rescued she was forced to prove that she had not been violated by sitting on fire. In the Hindu religion, fire is a symbol of purification. And the concept of ‘purity’also brings up the question of religious, caste or race “purity”. Or, in other words, the definition of difference or ‘otherness’ which is at the heart of fundamentalist violence.

Ilona : Can you give an example of editing and how it ties up to question of motifs?

Anand : Take the child with the wheel who wanders off into the foreground [in In Memory of Friends]. There are possible meanings to that but they are free-flowing. At the literal level the child has its own meaning – a child is innocent – a little Sikh boy in the village playing just before a sequence when women are cooking and they are saying, “there is no difference between Hindus and Sikhs” – ordinary rural life which is integrated. In the same sequence it cuts to a top shot of many bullocks eating out of one trough and pans over to the countryside; in a sense it illustrates but it doesn’t have to be seen in that way.

Ilona : Who distributes you? Who sees the films?

Anand : In India the main method of distribution is TV but, because of the nature of the films, there has been a big battle to have them shown. Only one film, Bombay Our City, has been shown on TV, after a four year court case which reached the Supreme Court. The film had won the National Award for Best Documentary of 1986 and there is a general principle that award winning films are to be shown on national TV. We argued that not showing the film on TV was a denial of Freedom of Speech and of the public’s Right to Information, both guaranteed in the Indian Constitution. TV at that time was Government controlled and there was one channel. They could not find constitutional grounds to counter this argument. At present the Bhagat Singh film as well as In the Name of God are in the Bombay High Court because despite winning national and international awards they are not being shown on national TV. The latest film Father, Son and Holy War won 4 international and 2 national awards, and will inevitably follow (legal) suit. These court cases take years to get resolved but at least they help to keep the films in the news.

The films are in Hindi [and in the languages of the participants ]. In the absence of TV – film societies, trade unions, women’s movements, civil liberties movements show the films. In the old days, the 1970s, we used to show them on 16mm projectors but now the screenings take place in video. So my main method of reaching people in India is distributing video cassettes. They are bought mainly by activist groups; each cassette is shown hundreds of times. Because they are tied to movements for communal harmony they have a campaign value: people who are campaigning against fundamentalism have very little to use as material. Same in Britain, America, Canada as there are so many Indians there. They are shown in festivals, universities, departments of sociology, political science, anthropology – in South Asia, America and Canada.

John : You’re now clearly an international documentarist of some repute. You get invited to festivals. You sit on panels….

Anand : But it’s still a struggle getting my films shown. I still feel at most festivals totally marginalized. I feel that even, for instance, here in London, the screening [at the London Film Festival, November 1994 ] was marginal in that it has no effect on the real consciousness in England or anywhere else – it hasn’t any impact on a larger reality. It’s OK to develop a coterie of friends and people who like your work; there are always enough to fill one or two auditoriums but you can’t justify that what you’re doing is politically useful if it stays at that level. The question is how many people are seeing it and thinking about the issues raised in it. They are still totally ignored by the mainstream media. It would be written about maybe in a few alternative papers [ a few months later Anand shows us an enthusiastic review in Variety. ed.]. I don’t know what it is actually. I don’t know why films like this have to be in the margin. Because it’s not as if they are boring.

John: Do you find that there’s been a kind of shift in the relationship in an international sense between documentary and features? Clearly films at festivals still make an impact. They are a very particular kind of film, so is it simply that a particular kind of film now achieves greater prominence, sometimes at the expense of another. Or had this always been the relationship…

Anand : Between fiction and documentary?

John : I mean, has documentary lost the ground in how it’s programmed, perceived, disseminated…?

Anand : There’s definitely a shift from the 60s and 70s – I wouldn’t even distinguish between documentary and fiction – but between say, for want of a better word, politically progressive films and the mainstream commercial films. Not necessarily commercial but whose raison d’etre is either straightforward entertainment or playing up to people’s expectations. Even what is considered alternative is defined by the same people who define the commercial.

Ilona : [March 1996] When will we see Father, Son and Holy War on Channel 4 ?

Anand : In the past, Channel 4 showed all my films, but I’m afraid the respect for independent and alternative voices has eroded. They asked for the film to be “reversioned”. I even agreed to do the cut-down myself – it would have meant sacrificing fifteen minutes from the original two hours. But they did not invite me to the editing table. They wanted to do it themselves. I had to refuse. I am deeply disappointed, as everyday something happens to illustrate the continuing relevance of the film to the times we live in – whether it is the rise of Hindu fascists to power in the State of Maharashtra where I live, or the sight of men in India and Pakistan demanding blood each time their cricket team loses a match.

[In mid-July, the Bombay High Court ruled in favour of Patwardhan’s petition to compel Doordarshan TV to screen ‘In Memory of Friends’ in prime time on one of its two main channels. Doordarshan’s inconsistent contentions that the film offended religious sensibilities, promoted atheism and class consciousness while simultaneously affording a platform to Sikh nationalism were rejected in toto by Justice A.P.Shah. His judgement vindicated both the integrity and public interest of this documentary. It is difficult to envisage comparable recourse to constitutional law guaranteeing public freedom of information in Britain. Channel 4 did screen Part 1 of ‘Father, Son and Holy War’ in the small hours of 6/6/96, but there are no plans to show Part 2.ed.]

Ilona : What is your most recent film?

Anand : ‘A Narmada Diary’. Narmada is the name of a river. It was shot on Hi-8 video and documents the struggle against the dam over five years. It was produced and directed with another filmmaker, Simantini Dhuru, who also shared the camera work and editing. Her sister is an activist in the movement. The film began as an informal archiving of various events. Over the years we became very close to the movement and the film reflects this intimacy.

DISSENT ! Anand Patwardhan

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8 November 2013 20:00, Flagey Brussels.
Talk with Anand Patwardhan in the context of Filmer à Tout Prix, in collaboration with LUCA and INSAS. The talk will be preceded by a screening of Anand’s latest film ‘Jai Bhim Comrade’ (18:00).

“I would like my films to make a difference in the real world. I’m not content to make a film and let it sit idle or let it go only to some film festival or museum and be appreciated by a tiny fraction of well-to-do people. I want the films to be in the mainstream and do as much as I can to get into that mainstream, so that they have an impact in the real world.”
– Anand Patwardhan

Behind the images of an aspiring pluralistic democracy and a rising economic superpower, there exists an other India. One that is swept by continuous waves of religious and ethnic violence, more often than not abetted by the highest levels of government and law enforcement. One that is haunted by an acute rise in mass poverty and social inequality, to some extent still hinging on the enduring legacy of the caste system. One that is driven by a quest for militarism, steeped in a long history of Partition and nationalist militancy. This reality of India, a complex and painful entanglement of religion, ethnicity, warfare, gender and class, has been systematically neglected by most if not all traditional mass media, locally as well as internationally. One could say that countering this indifference is exactly what defines the value and politics of Anand Patwardhan’s documentary work: the commitment to report on the harrowing injustices that are left on the wayside of contemporary history, to oppose the hegemonic discourses and intervene in the debates raging through the political landscape. Moreover, in relentlessly focussing on the struggles that his own country is facing, his films do not only address local questions, but also stir up some of the key issues playing out in the world at large, notably problems of identity, community, racism and populism. And yet, the practice in which his films are inscribed is not the informative or investigative model of journalism, it is altogether something different: cinema. It is precisely through the aesthetics of cinema that Patwardhan accomplishes what is perhaps the essential politics of his work: the construction of a multifaceted world in which actions, gestures and words are displaced from their frame of common assumptions of condition and fate, and are given as possible tools of empowerment.

Filmer à Tout Prix will show two films by Anand Patwardhan: Bombay: Our City (1985) on 6 November 22:00 and Jai Bhim Comrade (2012) on 8 November 18:00 .

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

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About DISSENT!

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

Black Audio Film Collective interview

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By Coco Fusco

Originally published in ‘Young, British and Black’ (1988, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, N.Y.).

Coco Fusco: Rather than asking you when the riots took place and when you came together, I would like to get a sense of what ideas, what arguments were being debated at the time that you all began to work.

Lina Gopaul: I’ll just open by saying that there was always a sense of the lines we didn’t want to pursue, lines which were more didactic. That the riots, for example, happened because of x y z, and that these are the reasons and these are the solutions for it regardless of whether they were being thrown out by the Left, be it the white or the Black Left. I think our coming together at that time was an expression of not wanting to take up one of those particular positions. And by choosing not to we threw ourselves into a field that was very grey. We then tried to pull out certain themes that we agreed with – what Stuart Hall (1) might have been saying at that time, or what Paul Gilroy (2) might have been saying. They weren’t as didactic.

John Akomfrah: But you’re not just talking about making Handsworth Songs (1986) are you?

CF: I’d like to go back further prior to Handsworth.

LC: Even before that our position was not one of which you could actually say that it takes its meaning from this or that.

CF: It seems that there was a strong cultural nationalist position that was generated by the Black activist community – and to some extent the more conventionally oriented Black media sectors. But speaking in terms of ideas, in terms of theorizing race and nationality, such activity was not coming out of those sectors.

Reece Auguiste: They were the residues of the 1970s, of the Black Power movements that existed here, which did have a very strong nationalist slant. What motivated us was not wanting to rearticulate past political positions but rather to engage with broader theoretical issues which had not yet been addressed, or at least not in the way that we wanted to address them.
There were many discussions in the ’70s and early ’80s about the post-pan-Africanist vision, or the pan-Africanist vision. And a lot of that was, in many respects, undertheorized. So what we did was to combine, very critically, elements of those debates, drawing also on our own theoretical background which we had developed at colleges. We are in many respects a kind of hybrid: we are able to draw from Foucauldian (3) discourse, psychoanalysis,
Afro-Caribbean discourse, and colonial and neocolonial narratives. I was going to signpost Jacques Lacan, but in many respects I think that Franz Fanon (4) would be closer to what I am communicating. Expeditions (1983), which was our first cultural project, was a way of testing those ideas and trying to extend the power of the images and debates around the colonial and postcolonial moment. In order to do that we had to articulate a particular language and vision of that moment. We felt we could only do so by drawing on those European, theoretical discourses.

JA: If you look at the moment of becoming for the Black film and video sector in this country, there are a number of words which were key. One of them obviously was representation. The other was more a category than a term: colonial discourse. The minute you begin to work out the political etymology of those terms themselves you are effectively charting the histories and trajectories of those individuals and collectivitities.
The notion of representation has been jettisoned into the forefront by a number of discussions in post-Althusserian (5) circles. Different political currents in this country had interest in it for different reasons. What was being debated was the value of a Left political culture and how one represents that culture in discourse theory. Gramscians (6) had an interest in it because they had come to the conciusion that political power and cultural symbolic power were organised around consent. In terms of a Black interest – on one level a number of collectivities, including ourselves, were familiar with the semiologic activities of Parisian intellectuals who were interested in fashion and so on.

CF: You make them sound so trivial. The English talk about politics, and the French talk about fashion.

JA: The interesting thing was when they stopped talking about fashion and started talking about spaghetti.
So all those currents inform how the collective was set up. Four years ago in England you couldn’t sit through a discussion, a film meeting, without representation coming up about fifteen million times.

CF: What was meant by that?

LG: It goes a bit further than that. Before the issue of representation comes about, we were involved in doing work with Expeditions in an attempt to put another phrase or category on the political agenda – colonial discourse. It wasn’t being discussed everywhere, mostly in discussions in particular academic circles. And what we wanted to do was to address those debates, those theories, and to bring that onto a visual landscape.

JA: People used the term representation for a number of reasons. The different uses give you a sense af the complexity of the trajectories involved. At one level people used it to simply talk about questions of figuration. How one places the Black in the scene of writing, the imagination and so on. Others saw it in more juridic terms. How one is enfranchised, if you like, how one buys into the social contract. What is England and what constitutes English social life? Some interests were broadly academic, but we were focussing on how to turn our concerns into a problematic, to use an Althusserian term, in the cultural field. We were interested in representation because it seemed to be partly a way of prying open a negative/positive dichotomy. It seemed to be a way of being able to bypass certain binaries.

CF: Are you referring now to the negative and positive image debates?

JA: Yes! and its specifically English variant – which is obsessed with stereotypes, with grounding every discussion around figuration and the existence – presence and absence in cinema in terms of stereotyping. It was a way of going beyond the discussions which would start at the level of stereotype, then move on to images, and then split images into negative and positive, and so on. We wanted to find a way to bypass this, without confronting it head on. I think that the lobbies which were really interested in debates around stereotyping were too strong, to be honest. And we were too small to take them head on. In a sense the negative/positive image lobby represented all that was acceptable about anti-racism, multiculturalism, etc. It’s the only thing that united everybody who claimed they were against racism.

Everybody was talking about a non-pathology of racism. The Labor party activists would talk about it. So would the Liberals. For the anti-apartheid groups it was the limit-text, if you like. We sensed that it had political inadequacies, and cultural constraints, and that the theoretical consequences of it hadn’t been thought through. But we didn’t know exactly how to replace it. We did not want to try to set ourselves up as another interest group to combat the multiculturalists or the anti-racists.

CF: Can we discuss Expeditions more specifically than in terms of mapping out a political etymology?

RA: The positive/negative image discourse had become the organizing principle of what representation was supposed to have been about, what representation was. Expeditions was an attempt to critique that discourse on positive and negative images. We wanted to go beyond purely descriptive categories and try to forge another kind of analytical strain, which could then open up that space in which we could begin to articulate our own ideas about representation by problematizing representation itself.
When Expeditions was first completed we had a number of theoretical, political and cultural battles with those who had very defined ideas about what representation was. The first point that was made was that it was inaccessible, because we were using language which was grounded in Foucauldian ideas, and Fanonian ideas, and so on. Second, there was the issue of the kind of images we used, which had not been used before. The way, for example, in which we would actually appropriate from English national fictions – like the Albert and Victoria Memorial – going back and really engaging with the archive of colonial memory. We were not only constructing a colonial narrative, but also critiquing what was seen as the colonial moment -critiquing what was seen as the discourse around empire.

JA: When we were making Expeditions, a number of tentative voices were beginning to challenge what was effectively an orthodoxy history in English cultural debate, which was the notion that colonial history and the colonial narrative was past – that it was the instrument of a past English glory which has now foundered. Before there was colonial history, after there’s postcolonial history. And we wanted to problematize that very obvious splitting of memory into past and present. It seemed that the only way we could do that was to pay less attention to what historiographers and political commentators said about past and present, and look at what the iconography of those moments signified now. We weren’t really interested in whether the Victoria and Albert was built in 1898. Nor did we believe that was the only moment that it meant anything, because it is still here and it is still in the middle of London. And ten thousand tourists see it every day. We felt then that the politics of signification was alive.

Avril Johnson: What was also happening around this time was the Falklands war, which had begun the year before. Margaret Thatcher called upon a notion of British identity in which, supposedly, all true Englishmen could identify.

LC: And there were many who argued that the fact that we were chronologically in a postwar era made everything different – that we were postwar theoreticians engaged in a postwar agenda.

CF: I have a clear sense from what you are saying about how this relates to the politics of social life in contemporary England, but I wanted to ask some more aesthetically-oriented questions. Many of the images of empire you use are ones that had already been displaced from classical civilization. The recycling of images that you were playing with for political reasons taps into an aesthetic discourse of neoclassicism that connects you to postmodernism and the transavant-garde.

JA: Two things were happening at the time. On the one hand, formalist photographers and artists – such as the constituency around Block (7) – were becoming much more interested in the expressive qualities of the remnants of the English national past. They were using these remnants in a very formalist sense, as a kind of backdrop against which one mapped out one’s anxieties of difference onto the past. You could see that people were drawing on the neoexpressive qualities of those statues and icons, without necessarily thinking about questions of desire.

CF: One of the desires of postmodernism in its most Eurocentric form is to sever the tie between the political implication and the formal manifestation. In Expeditions you use similar strategies of appropriation with a different motor. Do you see these as two postmodernisms hitting off one another? Were you misread because of this?

JA: Our enterprise emerged before the category of postmodernity meant anything in English aesthetic debates. At the time not even Victor Burgin (8) or any of the high priests of avant-garde theories and debates in this country were using it.

RA: One of the problems of the discourse of postmodernity lies in what it excludes. The crisis that the postmodern is supposed to address is seen as something internal to the logic and the rationale of Western Classical Civilization. In philosophical discourse there is the crisis around reason. Then there is a crisis around form, as manifested in architecture. What interests me most about these debates is the exclusion of the so-called neocolonial world. To me the crisis doesn’t have so much to do with what’s happening to the West, to the internal discourse of the West, as it does with what the non-European world is doing to the West. The crisis now is in Lebanon, in South Africa.

JA: In terms of the beginning of making Expeditions, it’s important to say that there are two convergences there. On the one hand, we realized that there was a kind of reappropriation, which we now understand to be postmodernist reappropriation of the past, taking place in very formalist circles, such as the kind of work that Victor Burgin and others were doing in photography. What we decided to do -which again, with hindsight, we now realize places us firmly in that camp – was to appropriate classical or neoclassical images. But we appropriated them using methods of avant-garde photography which effectively begin with Alexander Rodchenko (9) – extremely angular kinds of framing, etc. That was the key difference. If you look at the formalist work on the other hand, the methods of composition were extremely straightforward. Henri Cartier Bresson (10) could have done it. What people found unnerving about what we were doing was that the play of postmodernism wasn’t there. This parody and pastiche was underpinned by biblical sounding tones concerning colonial narratives and expeditions and so on. We wanted to say that it was an expedition, that on the one hand you went through these exhibitions – you pack your bag from different aesthetic fields, from neoclassical architecture, from Russian formalist photography. But the interest was in colonial narrative. The interest was not, in the end, in play.

CF: Let’s move on to Handsworth Songs. I am interested in the symptomatic qualities of the responses to it. I do think that the fact Handsworth Songs has been the subject of controversy has to do with something larger than the film. It has to do with a desire to damage the kind of position you represent. Salman Rushdie’s frequently mentioned review in The Guardian (11) doesn’t really address the film – he demonstrates no relationship to the filmic aspects of the work. He juxtaposes the notion of an authentic voice to image manipulation.

LC: I think this goes back to what we were saying about where we located ourselves in relation to the political and theoretical positions that prevailed prior to our existence as a collective. When we emerged people tried to didactically map out the cultural and visual terrain for us to slot into.
If they are not actually addressing the film, well then what is it that they are addressing? Transgression, basically. Why is it such a strong response not to the film, but our existence? To what you represent? Those who criticized us most vehemently were prioritizing a line about community and people in the streets. There was no other way of representing yourself other than the way they put forward. That’s what I think is largely behind the sometimes almost violent responses to us.

JA: The question of paternity and transgression was very important. One of the things which people would always say to us was, isn’t Handsworth Songs too avant-garde? Quite simply, the problems we faced in making Handsworth were very practical ones – to do with melodrama – orchestrating means of identification, rather than distancing people and dazzling them with techniques. The editing might be considered unconventional, but the techniques are very straightforward. So it’s not avant-garde in that sense. My mistake was in assuming people wouldn’t see it as a transgressive text.
In terms of the established boundaries of discussion – aesthetic interventions around race – there were questions of paternity at stake. In other words, who was the holder of the law – the law of enunciation? Who had the right to speak, who had the right to map out and broaden the field that everybody had to speak in? It was in that sense that the film was received as a transgressive text, because it clearly didn’t fall into line with the established concordat concerning the Black intelligensia and their discussion of race. That then makes the film an avant-garde text. Those who were willing to live with a more mixed economy of dialogue around figuration and race accepted it, and those who didn’t, didn’t accept it.
That was one symptom, but the morbidity also has to do with the inability of cultural workers to make any meaningful sense of that moment. One has the sense that people were trapped in their own rhetoric, claiming that the 1981 riots occured because of unemployment, etc. having to signpost all the social reasons why Black people take to the streets. The minute we began to speak and give the impression that somehow one was going to reopen the questions rather than repeat the answers, people got very nervous.

AJ: Those people who felt trapped had benefitted from what happened in 1981. They don’t want to recognize that the problem still exists.

LG: It was also a move away from the specificity of location. After 1981, there was a generalized understanding of the riots, whereas in 1985 it was different. How can we begin to understand this situation, people would ask, in Birmingham, which didn’t riot in 1981? Birmingham has a very specific Black political history. It’s one of the central spots for Black political development and for anti-racist development. It has a number of institutions, like the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which are based within those communities. There is something quite specific happening there.

JA: We have to be careful not to overestimate the transgressive potential of certain kinds of aesthetic intervention. At a certain point, the nightmares which weigh on the brain are not necessarily historical ones – they are very conjunctural ones. The fact of the matter is that a number of things were collapsing at a certain point. And the film in many ways mirrors that collapse. It’s not an avantgardist intervention, in the sense that it doesn’t frame a series of devices that would get us out of the crisis. It mirrors those forms collapsing, and it says what a shame.

CF: How did people respond to that sort of mirror?

JA: When people saw the film they saw all the fractures, all the uneveness – which are quite deliberate. Part of the problem that we have has to do with the question of whether Black people should be involved in visual arts, in creating aesthetically challenging visual work. The assumption when we foreground avant-garde technique is either that we don’t know anything else, and have stumbled across it by accident, or that we are imitating other forms.

LG: Or that we have no foundation in the Black communities, that we’ve left that behind too.

JA: The idea of prefacing the film with a phrase – “There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories” – and then to work on it in terms of splits and unevenesses and so on without trying to center it was what alarmed many people. The triumphalist vision of race and community operates on the assumption that there is essentially a core of affect that is structured around oratory, around song – giving it an irreducible unity – which wasn’t present in the film. It played with it, at some stages discards it, it takes it on board, then it says it’s probably not possible, do not work with it, but there you are, and so on. But the film doesn’t fix its sentiments around it. That is what was frightening. It then leads to the discussion of whether avant-garde techniques, or disruptive techniques, profilmic techniques, are in safe hands when they are given to Blacks. Both certain Black theorists and the white theorists would say that; they would want to know whether authorship is really safe with us.
If the notion of diaspora has any credibility, it has to be understood as a formation which exists both on the margins at certain points, and at the center of English social life. And if it plays those dual functions, then it’s bound to be negotiated into a series of practices, visual or otherwise, which exist in this country. So that even if a visual history wasn’t present in our “history,” the very fact of communality at the center of the metropol makes it impossible to ignore, to put it crudely, that every little Black kid in this country, at one stage or another, will have the chance to go to an art college, or to take part in art classes at school.

CF: And they live in a world that is absolutely innundated with images, although the vast majority of them do not include Black people. Would you want to venture into theorizing around what this absence does to the psyche, and the question of representation and race?

JA: In terms of reproduction in the very classical sense, Marxian or otherwise, of social relations in this country, I know that the Black independent sector, which has organized itself around questions of representation and collective practice, represents the new wave of English filmmaking. I also know that in terms of the kinds of questions raised by filmmaking practice in this country, which took its cue from Jean-Luc Godard, from Chris Marker, the Nouvelle Vague, political cinema in Russia and so on – this new wave comes to it with a certain kind of agnosticism and skepticism around its transgressive potential as we hit the 1990s. And I also know that our interest in filmmaking as a new wave possibly gives English independent film practice a chance to breach what has been an impossible gap between the mainstream and independents. We are obviously aided by the existence of television – nevertheless, we are the fortunate inheritors of that confusion, that growth, that progression. And I don’t think it is possible to be that closely associated with all those things without having some very deeply entrenched familiarity with the visual landscape in this country. That’s what I know. What I don’t know is how we then proceed. What I don’t know is what to say to people who say, well how can Black people be in that position.
One of the problems that the independent sector always faced in this country is this crisis of identity around collective security – it never really understood its strategic power. It never truly understood where it stood in relation to mainstream audiovisual culture in this country,. People always assumed that the very act of doing something is transgressive. In a culture where the transgressive is in fact the cutting edge of advertising, that makes your identity very unstable.

CF: How do you respond to the claim that while you get attacked for the forms you operate within, the fact that you choose to work within those forms makes it easier for your work to be aired on television, whereas a more straightforward, monological documentary on a politically controversial issue, like The People’s Account (12) cannot.

JA: On one level, we’ve had people wholve “told it like it is” in their documentaries. That has to be said with a certain element of skepticism, because ultimately one needs to challenge the assumption that you can tell it like it is.
Can we talk about where aesthetics used to belong in classical philosophy? The term “aesthetic” was coined by Baumgarten, who was an ally of Herder, who was working with Kant. Black filmmaking has and will probably continue to be straddled with what Kant calls the categorical imperative. People assume that there are certain transcendental duties that Black filmmaking has to perform. They assume that and because of that Black filmmaking has to work with the understanding that it’s in a state of emergence. And because it is in a state of emergence its means always have to be guerilla means, war means, signposts of urgency. When that begins to inhibit questions of reflection – doubt, skepticism, intimacy and so on – then the categorical imperative does exactly what it is supposed to do – it imprisons.

CF: It is precisely the arguments around urgency that foreclose entry into aesthetic practice, or any discussion of aesthetics as the property of a Black artist. How can you start to talk about a term that exists within aesthetics, when you’re supposedly not engaged in aesthetics?

JA: Because the transcendental duties are always a priori, because they are always there before you start. Everything else is only given contingent licence. Aesthetics, efficacy, are each given tentative license. Their only use is the extent to which they take you closer to your transcendental mission, which is to announce that we are here and we can’t take it anymore.
If the situation of war is an apt metaphor, and in many ways it probably is, then I would say that our position of dissidence is that one resolutely refuses to be turned into cannon fodder. We would like to take our bread and hit the mountain because it is safer to be a guerilla. The struggles we’ve engaged in have had some moderate successes. We’ve argued that we don’t just live beneath our navel.

CF: In what sense do you deal with sexuality and gender in your films?

JA: We’ve decided to deal with these questions in different ways. It’s a very complicated question for us. On the one hand we try to deal with it by working with Pratibha Parmar one her videotape Emergence (1987), trying to make an input into an area which is already defined as one of sexuality. On the other hand, we try to make sure that it gels into the mesh of concern that we have for the Black subject in our own work.
When Isaac Julien’s Territories (1985) appeared it was obvious that we were beginning to swap one set of transcendental clothes for another. Once you stop being angry you had to be another other, and adopt another transgressive tone. And we began to think of ways to slip past that. If there is a voice of dissidence that echoes and strains in our work, it’s an attempt to find a position from which to speak certain questions – which beguiles expectations and is genuinely uncanny in many ways. It was obvious that once Territories appeared, with the kind of reception that it got in this country – it was then supposed to be the beginning of a convention. Regardless of what one’s interest in the politics were. I don’t think, in the end, that we don’t deal with sexuality. But we try to find a much more complicated dialogue with the issues than was expected of us once Territories appeared.

AJ: The other thing is that we are not making sexuality a cornerstone. We are making it something that is mediated, not necessarily the central process. It’s informed by a number of different things.

LG: There are times when people prioritize sexuality as a singular issue, which is what tends to happen in moments of struggle or crisis. But after that -how do you then bring it back into an everyday part of your life, and then into a filmic practice? I find that far more difficult than addressing it head on. People don’t live like that.

JA: We are also in a position to take a number of things for granted. The search for intimacy, the reflective quality of Handsworth Songs, does not simply have to do with a reallignment of Black discourses. They have to do with our sensitivity to questions which are raised in other sorts of politics, not necessarily racial ones. Obviously, Black women talk about questions of femininity. We try to make sure that the text you operate with is open enough to allow for those kinds of interventions.
Two articles appeared in the London Review of Books a while back – I didn’t realize how informative they were until much later. It was a debate between Richard Sennett (13) and Michel Foucault. And it’s also a kind of debate that has taken place since then in the gay community.

CF: What were their positions?

JA: They had to do with whether or not when one forged a politics around identity, placing it in the public arena – whether doing that was simply allowing oneself to become inserted in a well policed arrangement of things. What does calling yourself a Black collective entail, or imply? Is it possible to work through identity politics without having to announce the name of your identity? I was left with a deep sense of skepticism around identifying identity and
championing it in a very triumphalist way.
Blacks are expected to be transgressive in English cultural life. To me this is just as wearying, just as draining as the old “you must be the conscience of the nation” approach. Either one of them requires a certain act of a kind of emancipatory front – for the nation. We don’t have the strength or the energy. So there may be reticence around these questions on our part.

CF: Africa has an extremely important symbolic function in the history of Black film and Black images – and in the Black consciousness movement – as the promised land – the age of innocence. With your new film, Testament (1988), which was shot in Africa, you seem to have walked into a rather overloaded symbolic minefield.

JA: It is loaded. In many ways, Africa is one of the key primal scenes, one of the primal moments in diasporic culture. I suspect that what we are going to do with that understanding isn’t going to please everybody, but there you are. That is the way of the world.

RA: Specific histories of subjectivities is not the issue. The issue is that within the Black community, there is a lot of innocence and naivete about the continent Africa. There is a certain kind of romantic engagement with Africa, which is one of the residues of the neonationalist moment. On one level, Africa should be celebrated; on another level, people in the diaspora should critically engage with the continent. And in particular they should engage with those historical figures who have supposedly ennunciated Africa, or the pan-Africanist movement. All those Africanist leaders are still held in a frame of innocence. What that has done is to project a certain kind of retardation in thought. It’s feeling and not thinking.
What we are saying now is that after 20-25 years of independence, no one can argue that the problem in Africa is something outside – that it’s the West, always the West. There are real problems that are internal, that are specific to the continent. In order to break away from this romantic engagement one has to recognize and smash that innocence and rip it up and see what is really taking place. Otherwise we are engaged in transcendental thinking about the continent, which doesn’t get those out here in the West thinking about the continent very far.

JA: Let’s speak about it also in terms of the aesthetics of that primal moment. If the dichotomy in Black art is between protest and redemption, or protest and affirmation, and if Africa as the primal scene functions significantly in the affirmation moment, as the moment of liberation, of catharsis, what if – and this is an aesthetic question we pose in the film – what if you have a character for whom that redemption is a problem? What if you have a character who can’t live with that primal moment? One of the things that the character says in the film is that perhaps I am a new kind of animal for whom the very thought of peace is a burden. We have a number of alternatives – we can debunk the lore, with reference to sociology, or we can take the rhetoric of the primal scene seriously and say that it does exist, and that it has real effects on people’s lives. There are people whose lives have been made much more complicated, destroyed almost, by these sorts of assumptions around Africa. That seems to me to be a starting point. We must go there and find a character for whom Africa is not a place of redemption, precisely because Africa thinks of itself that way. We have to come out with a character like that. That is the aim of the film. Once you decide that the primal scene is that borderline, which people cross in different ways – once you have defined it in those terms you get stuck on one side or the other. What I am not exactly sure about – it doesn’t worry me or anybody else herewhat we are not sure about is whether that person actually comes back or gets swallowed up by the border.

CF: Perhaps we should also talk about the U.S. as a place of redemption. Black American culture carries a tremendous amount of weight here in England. You touch on it in the film with references to Malcolm X and the dialogues and questions that are raised about a legacy of radicalism.

AJ: It has to do with what you hear on the news – that what happened in America ten years ago happens in Britain today. And I think that is because Black people have been there in much larger numbers much longer – and in a sense people still look to what Black Americans are doing. And it is also easier not to look at what is happening here.

JA: The connection goes back a long way. At each moment of Black radical life in this country there has been an interface with concerns around race in America. You can go back to the discussions around emancipation here. Black people who lived in this country at that time, their concerns with slavery here and in the Americas were always interlocked. The founding of the pan-Africanist conference was always only possible when in many ways the anticolonial fighters began to take W.E.B. Du Bois (14) seriously and work with him in some ways. Marcus Garvey went to America and then came here. There has always been a sense of exchange, if you like, between the two spaces. And there was that famous conference in this country in 1967 called “The Dialectics of Liberation”, where people were first exposed to the personages of Black Power – Stokely Carmichael turned up and made his famous speech in which he said that the only place for a woman is prone. This first symbolic contact with Black Power left a very contradictory legacy in this country.
1968 itself – the founding of the New Left in this country – was deeply implicated in a kind of dialogue and exchange with Black American culture.
Now if we are talking about our own fascination with America I suspect that it is split in very different ways – there is a kind of aura around American life in its different manifestations, which you find in different spaces. For Black women’s politics in this country, Black American women writers have almost canonical significance.

LG: There is a sense that they had all done it before we had done it.

JA: There is sense that Black American culture throws down a certain gauntlet which people then have to pick up and live through and with.

CF: What about in film?

JA: In film I don’t think the connection is there that much.

AJ: It also has to do with the Caribbean. Most of us come from the Caribbean, where America is it.

JA: Wim Wenders said that Americans have colonized our unconscious. In many ways he is right. Anywhere in the world – in the darkest part of Manchester even -y ou find counter-culture which premises American life in some form, be it hip hop, or whatever. And it is in that very generalized sense that America has been useful. But I don’t think I ever really seriously thought that Black American independent filmmaking was something to take
a cue from.
RA: I think we have been more interested in the New Latin American Cinema, the so-called Third Cinema.

Notes
1. Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, Stuart Hall is one of the founders of Black cultural studies in Britain and one of the leading spokesmen of the New Left. He was the first editor of New Left Review and assisted in organizing the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCS) at the University of Birmingham. He is currently professor of Sociology at Open University. He is coeditor of many CCS volumes, such as Culture, Media, Language, and coauthor of Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and law and order.
2. Paul Gilroy is senior lecturer in in Sociology at the Polytechnic of the South Bank. He has also worked as a musicianf disc jockey and journalist. He is coeditor of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in ’70s Britain, and the author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union lack: The Cultural
Politics of Race and Nation
.
3. The reference here is to the writings of the French theorist Michel Foucault, whose books include Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, The Archeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, and The Uses of Pleasure.
4. Franz Fanon was born in Martinique, studied psychiatry in France and worked in Algeria during the Franco-algerian War. He is the author of Black Skin, White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth, and A Dying Colonialism.
5. One of the leading Marxist philosophers of the 1960s in France, Louis Althusser is the author of For Marx and Reading Capital. Known for having emphasized the implications of Marxism for philosophy and aesthetics, Althusser developed a concept of ideology as a “lived” relation between human beings and their world. He saw this as different from science in its giving more weight to the social and practical modes of understanding, rather than theoretical forms of knowledge. He employed Freudian terms such as condensation, displacement and overdetermination to explain how contradiction – the dialectical process of historical development – can be understood in relation to its time and place in history.
6. Antonio Gramsci, the most important Italian Marxist theorist of the early twentieth century, is the author of The Prison Notebooks. He is best known in England for his theory of hegemony and the concept of national-popular politics, which provides the groundwork for understanding cultural and ideological production and reception and for analyzing the politics of the modern nation-state as effective through consent, rather than force. Like Althusser, Gramsci also employed categories from Freudian psychoanalysis.
7. Block is a British art magazine.
8. Victor Burgin is a British photographer and theorist and the editor of Thinking Photography (London: MacMillan, 1982).
9. Alexander Rodchenko, the Russian constructivist artist and photographer of the early revolutionary period.
10. Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer and photojournalist.
11. See here for Salman Rushdie’s article, “Songs doesn’t know the score,” from The Guardian (London), January 12, 1987, p. 10.
12. Another Black workshops in England, Ceddo, produced a documentary about racially motivated riots, entitled The People’s Account (1986). It was commissioned by Channel 4, but has not yet been aired, due to an unresolved conflict involving Channel 4 and the Independent Broadcasting Authority (1BA). The IBA found the original version of the documentary unacceptable for its accusations against the British state, even after Channel 4 lawyers had submitted requests for minor changes and had them attended to.
13. Richard Sennett is the author of The Fall of Public Man and Authority.
14. Poet and essayist W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the greatest and most influential Black American writers of the late 19th and early 20th century. He is the author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

DISSENT ! John Akomfrah

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20 November 2013 20:30, Cinematek Brussels. In collaboration with le P’tit Ciné.
Talk with John Akomfrah proceeded by a screening of Handsworth Songs.

Black Audio Film Collective, Handsworth Songs

1986, 16mm, color & b/w, English spoken, French subtitles, 60′

“People assume that there are certain transcendental duties that Black filmmaking has to perform. They assume that and because of that Black filmmaking has to work with the understanding that it’s in a state of emergence. And because it is in a state of emergence its means always have to be guerilla means, war means, signposts of urgency. When that begins to inhibit questions of reflection- doubt, skepticism, intimacy and so on- then the categorical imperative does exactly what it is supposed to do- it imprisons.”
– John Akomfrah

“There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories”. The phrase lingers over the film like a haunting refrain, reverberating across and between the ghostly traces of lived moments floating over the surface of the screen, somewhere between faded history and tainted memory, between the historical and the allegorical. Handsworth Songs was the first film John Akomfrah made with the Black Audio Film Collective, a group of artists, critics and filmmakers who set out to intervene in the cultural debate about black identity and representation that was raging all over Britain in the 1980’s. The spark that lit the fire was arguably the “civil disorder“ of 1981, when a wave of violent unrest swept through some of England’s inner cities. It was this event that painfully exposed the gap between the dominant discourses on ethnicity and “Britishness” and what was intimately felt and experienced by the “bastard children of 1968”, those who were profoundly shaped by what Derek Walcott called “the absence of ruins”. The challenge then, became one of generating counter-narratives, to look for aesthetical forms which would allow for a space to deconstruct the hegemonic voices and articulate states of belonging and displacement in dissensual ways. The question of form turned out to be one of dealing with absence: the lack of “ruins” made it necessary to look into the dark mirror of the past in search of images, words and sounds to attest to the intangible presence of diasporic histories. In Handsworth Songs, a response to the second Handsworth riots in 1985, Akomfrah discards the didactic panoptic impulse of the documentary film tradition in favor of a polytonic structure in which eye-witness accounts, mediated voice-overs and a mosaic of sounds intersperse with a poetic montage of archival footage. It is here, in unearthing the phantom narratives of the past to give them a new place in the present as a promise to the future, that can be found the essence of john Akomfrah’s work, up until this day.

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.

On 21 November John Akomfrah will also be presenting his film Testament at KASKcinema, Gent.

The visit of John Akomfrah has been made possible with the support of Brussels Arts Platform and VUB Doctoral School of Human Sciences.
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About DISSENT!

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

A tale of disappointment and struggle

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“Il faudrait plutôt comprendre la totalité de ce qui s’est fait ; ce qui reste à faire. Et non ajouter d’autres ruines au vieux monde du spectacle et des souvenirs.”
– Guy Debord, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps

”The dream is over”, a voice tells us at the end of Chris Marker’s Le fond de l’air est rouge. Just a few years after the explosion of May 1968, all leftist resolve seemed to have withered away: in France, Chili, Portugal and elsewhere the revolutionary movements fizzled to rupture and defeat, in Italy and Germany the hopes of the radical left collapsed into violence and despair, in China the Cultural Revolution turned out to be a cruel failure leading to famine and chaos. And so mourning began: mourning for failed hopes, mourning for possibilities that turned in on themselves, mourning for a sense of togetherness that somehow collapsed into contorted factionalism. A mourning without end. Soon enough the energies of militant histories were overturned by some of those who had once fully embraced them: all the “children of Marx and Coca-cola” and their actions had accomplished, so they argued, was to pave the way for a rekindled capitalism, allowing our societies to become free aggregations of unbound molecules, whirling in the void, deprived of any affiliation, completely at the mercy of the law of Capital. All resistance was said to be futile, even suspect, in any case causing more harm than good: revolt could hardly change the world, it could only give rise to cruelty and catastrophe. History was identified as an enormous catastrophic ruin, continuously piling wreckage upon wreckage: the memory of the Gulag dissolved all memories of revolution, just like the memory of the Shoah gradually replaced the remembrance of antifascism. In claiming, as Alain Badiou puts it, to have “delivered us from the ‘fatal abstractions’ inspired by the “ideologies of the past'”, Western capitalism, and its political system, democratic parliamentarianism, presented themselves as a universal shield protecting us from all forms of terror and totalitarianism. “Capitalism won the battle, if not the war”, the voice says, “but in a paradoxical logic some of the staunchest opponents of Soviet totalitarianism, these men of the new Left fell into the same whirlwind.” The whirlwind continued to swirl after the fall of the Berlin wall, when the “end of utopias” signaled the retreat of social-democratic politics, the disintegration of the Soviet system and the abandonment of emancipatory movements all over the globe. And so we witnessed the arrival of “capitalist realism”: capitalism now being the only game in town, one that could hardly be called “perfect”, but could at least guarantee public freedom, free market and free choice. We begrudgingly came to admit that recuperation is the fate of all forms of revolutionary thinking: to oppose is merely to consolidate – after all, as Slavoj Žižek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism itself. Rather than evolving towards a revolution that would take us beyond it – which was of course the basic assumption of Marxist thought – it was made clear for all of us that capitalism just capitalizes – it simply produces more capitalism. In the years that followed, more and more moralizing discourses trumpeted a new disaster: the excess of democratic mass individualism, resulting in an infinite drift of narcissistic consumers who care for anything else but the instant satisfaction of their own needs and desires. The same criticism that used to denounce the mythology of consumer ideologies in view of possible change started to turn on itself, trapping itself in an endless vicious circle in which the power of the market could no longer be distinguished from the power of its denunciation.

At the same time as the leftist era crumbled under the weight of historical fatality, a certain utopia of cinema was also believed to have come to an end. Serge Daney once claimed that Pasolini’s death in november 1975 marked the moment when cinema stopped playing the role of “sorcerer’s apprentice” and became a consensual landscape rather than the space for division and confrontation that it used to be. The re-politicization of cinema, whether in content or in form, associated with the upheavals and the hopes of the 1960’s and 1970’s, gave way to a general feeling of disillusionment and powerlessness. Just like the failure of the October revolution accompanied the end of the utopia of cinema as a mystical marriage between art and science, poetics and community, the implosion of the leftist dreams accompanied the dissolution of the idea of cinema as realm of discord or weapon in struggle. What was left was nothing but lost illusions, utopias gone wrong, ruins amidst the ruins. After the deluge, with the disappearance of the material reality of the struggles and the horizon that gave them meaning, the existing forms of “political” cinema could no longer be sustained. In the hour of the shortest shadow, the same procedures that previously claimed to criticize the mechanisms of injustice and exploitation by laying bare the reality beneath the surface (driven by a “passion for the real”, as Badiou would have it), were now used to interrogate this form of criticism itself. In this “cinema of between” (between one image and another, visual and sound, signified and signifier, active and passive, filming and being filmed), the question was no longer what there was to see behind the image, but rather how to find a way in, in order to create fissures and escape the endless chain of images. “The background in any image is always another image”, Jean-Luc Godard stated. Cinema became a vessel to move from one surface to another, a guiding tour demonstrating what it means to see, to hear and to think, a hall of mirrors where the spectator could catch his own gaze. But the same “radical regressism” that aimed to chirurgically deconstruct the various elements of cinematic production and reception also rendered them compatible with what Daney called, in the beginning of the 1990’s, the “infinite games of the media”. What was meant to disrupt the circulation of images, was annexed by that same circulation: “deduction, autonomization, division, humor”, once the main tools of critical cinema, had become the “catch phrases of the current landscape”. In line with the thinking en vogue at the time, Daney set forward a landscape of mass individualism where images could no longer “show” but only “signal” emotions and experiences that had already been produced elsewhere. “Images are no longer on the side of the dialectical truth of “seeing” and “showing”; they have entirely moved over to the side of promotion and advertising, which is to say the side of power.” Increasingly, wrote Daney, images only refer to themselves and no longer to anything “other”. For Jean Baudrillard, this loss of referent meant that appearance and truth could only be one and the same: ultimately every reality vanishes into image, lost amidst a potlatch of signs. In the end the critical tradition that called for an unveiling of the reality behind the surface slowly morphed into the idea that everything is surface, where, as Jacques Rancière writes, “all things are equivalent, where everything is equivalent with its image, and every image with its own lie”. The dogmatism of the hidden truth became the nihilism of the ubiquitous lie of the market: every attempt of resistance could only be recuperated as spectacle, inevitably accomplice to the reign of mass consumption.

“But we can not continue much longer on the way of desillusion”, wrote Daney towards the end of his life. Despite his growing disenchantment with the dissolution of the cinema he had cared for so much, the ciné-fils still put his wager on optimism. “Between the spectacle and the lack of images, is there a place for an ‘art of living with images’, at the same time demanding them to be ‘humanly’ comprehensive (so to know better what they are, who makes them and how, what they can do, how they retroact on the world) and keep at their core this remnant that is inhuman, startling, ambiguous, on the verge?” With Daney, we can ask: how can we regain a renewed trust in the power of the image? How can we get out of the fatalistic skepticism that the critical tradition has bestowed on us? It is clear to us now that the believe in the causal relation between affection, understanding and action that once provided the basic foundation for “political” cinema is no longer valid: the lack of any horizon of change has made sure of that. It has also become increasingly clear that the overwhelming feelings of disorientation and disappointment, the sense of something lacking or failing arising from the realization that we inhabit a violently unjust world, all too easily sweep us away into the never-ending depths of fear and nihilism. Now that cinema, being unsure of its own politics, is once again encouraged to intervene because of the absence of proper politics, the question is then how it can generate a new power of affirmation, one that is in line with the interruption of the logic of resignation evidenced by recent uprisings, one that breaks with the “febrile sterility” of the contemporary world. In a time when capitalism has colonized most of our dream life, can cinema once again become a laboratory of distant dreams, invigorating a new sense of the impossible, something to hold on to, hold on dearly? How can the defaitist melancholy of the left, which has been feeding on its own reflexive impotence for so long now, be toppled over into a re-enchantment of worlds other than the one we are experiencing today, one that is shivering from cruel injustices, growing inequalities, intolerance, insecurity, complacency, corruption, to the point of exhaustion? One thing is for sure: we cannot revert to the old refrains that we got stuck in: we are done with the idea of spectacle, we are done with the sorrow of lost illusions. We can no longer resign ourselves to ongoing disorientation as a choice of lesser evil: if – when – we decide to chase a spark of hope in the past, let’s do so in order to look for the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. When we decide to work our way towards the future, let’s do so in order to break with the pervasive monotony of the present, to rehabilitate the idea of change from its predicament as structural stagnation. Perhaps, as Badiou argues, we do need a new kind of heroism: surely not one that can be identified with the omnipresent figure of the individual warrior in the throes of destiny, or the bruised spirit stepping towards grace out of the shadow of damnation, but one assuming new symbolic forms for collective action. And perhaps this is one of the frames in which the possibilities of cinema can be thought of today: as the invention of a sensible tissue that can contribute to the constitution of a new communal trust, a sense of sharing that exceeds the limits of our social and vital determinations, leading the way to a recovery of agency and imagination. It is time for us to start exploring new countries, to put our trust in invented worlds that are not down on any map (true places never are). One of them could be “a supplementary country, called cinema.”

(image: Sylvain George, Vers Madrid (The Burning Bright)!)