Polemic
Surplus An interview with Erik Gandini While not yet on mainstream release in the UK, copies of Erik Gandini’s documentary Surplus have been circulating the underground of anarchist film groups, anti-globalisation initiatives and Trotskyite collectives on the ‘new left’. A technically dazzling tour de force of editing, Surplus is, variously, a satire of ‘infomercial’ television, an angry anti-consumerist polemic and a visual poem of silicon, plastic and the dirt that lies beneath. ‘... we cannot let the terrorist frighten our nation to the point where people don’t … where people don’t shop!’ It is the plastic grins of the G8 leaders that greet us as the film opens with the Genoa riots, where protestors dodge the rubber bullets of riot police, smash shop windows and overturn cars. This is as good a demonstration as any of political property damage; enacted by the most radical anti-globalisation protestors, articulated by the thinker John Zerzan, a major contributor to the film. He sees civilisation as a ‘monstrously wrong turn’ with awful long-term implications. When another contributor, Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn, wonders ‘so what is left for us?’, Zerzan’s is an extraordinary answer: undertake a massive project of dismantling, and return us to the Stone Age. To Zerzan, artificiality and the Hobbesian function of ‘symbolism’ as a means of control (everything from art to language itself) are responsible for ‘numbing’ humankind to their environment, all the better to then tear it apart in an orgy of consumption, a boom waiting for a cataclysmic bust. Most potent of controlling symbols are those logos most famously identified by Naomi Klein – the McDonalds arch, the GAP sign – that arouse such passion in us, whether as bugbears – or fetishes. There are many, many bones to pick with Zerzan – his anthropology is frequently naïve and partial, his primitivism too obviously the bi-product of deflated 60s radicalism. Which is perhaps why Zerzan expresses little patience with ‘peaceful protest’ – for him, a mere symbolic act of self-gratification, offering countersymbols rather than genuine alternatives, a carnival that ensures the continuation of ‘business as usual’ once the subversive urges are tastefully expended. But, he argues, if you smash the symbols – the
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McDonald’s arch, the GAP sign, the property itself – you punch through, in time, to the base reality. ‘Distancing over closeness … efficiency over playfulness’ And as for fetishes, few moments in documentary film can have been as creepy as Gandini’s visit to a factory specialising in luxury sex – no, ‘love’ – dolls. As their manufacturer proudly demonstrates the (undeniable) craftsmanship and idly squeezes the silicone breasts of a ‘petite model’ a sense of despair is near unavoidable. But perhaps it is the excruciating excerpt with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, whose screams of ‘I. Love. This. Company! Yeah!’ (repeated again through the ventriloquist’s dummy of Fidel Castro) that most aptly sums up the sheer madness of our blind infatuation with ‘things’. Is infatuated love for – and in the case of the $7,000 sex-dolls, making love to – the artificial our defining predicament, the firmest barrier to what Lasn calls a ‘simple, fulfilling life’? As Zerzan speaks of ‘distancing over closeness’ Gandini and Sodherberg supply a montage that intersperses painting the nipples on to the sex dolls – and then, at ‘… efficiency over playfulness’ – glum company operatives exercising at their desks. In such circumstances, manufactured or not, we might find ourselves inclined to say ‘yes’. ‘No real story and no real protagonist’ Surplus thus, has a manipulative element, borne of its pastiche of commercial programming and MTV editing. There is something of the surrealist in Gandini in that he portrays ‘our things’ as extensions of a collective (and frequently absurd) neurosis. Surplus is deconstructionist in that there is no possibility of a clear or unambivalent narrative – in Gandini’s words, ‘no real story and no real protagonist’ – for global consumerism does not provide a sovereign to decapitate. On the grainy film stock cannibalised by the filmmakers, Berlusconi and Bush seem interchangeable. For sure, Ballmer, as portly prophet of rampant mediocrity, seems rabid enough to make us consider all sorts of humane measures to alleviate his condition, but surely Surplus is such a queasy experience because we recognise that we are as
much a part of this system as he is? Consumerism does not, after all, work through active or explicit support for Microsoft or other multinational giants (who we, in polite company – symbolically – disapprove of), but our passive consumption of their products. We go out and we shop at the supermarket and then maybe visit our local art-house cinema or unpack our (imported) DVD of Surplus and sit – passively (?) – watching a film about the wider consequences of just such a simple, straightforward transaction. And then? MM How was the film put together? Surplus started in a very experimental way – first we collected footage of places that somehow made you think about consumption when you visited them. Tyre graveyards in California, ship-breaking in India or Shanghai with its endless skyscrapers and its stock exchange (the largest in Asia) and its car fair where people more than anywhere in the world are caught up in the rush of a newly gained consumer life style. At the G8 riots in Genoa I was really shocked by seeing property damage and how it became an icon of a whole era. There Surplus took a clear direction with John Zerzan as a main voice. Cuba was shot late after a first period of editing, as a case study of an alternative and in search for a character in contrast with Svante (who also was part of the film from a very early stage). Then a lot of editing and a lot of test versions that made people fall asleep and a long process of slowly solving all the problems of storytelling with this kind, no story and no real protagonist.
If Berlusconi could decide – and he can – then people should live happily devoting their life to the search for the new type of shampoo, car or toilet paper. He has monopolised TV culture the past 20 years spreading the idea that a perfect consumer should be the only identity you as a citizen are supposed to embrace. As if life is just about having a new car, new shampoo brand, cookies, clothes. ‘Let’s have fun: the food is good, the girls look good, we are laughing in good company, let’s sing and dance and be happy ...’ Well, I’m not happy. I’m more and more unhappy. And my unhappiness (in this privileged part of the world where there is apparently no material reason for being unhappy) started the whole idea of Surplus. Because there is a form of terrorism in consumer culture: it is massive, monopolising and not really successful in the pursuit of happiness. The truth is that it is even counterproductive: many people are, like me, alienated and detached from the joy of materialism. Not only in the politically aware environments. I believe a lot of ordinary people share the same feelings expressed in Surplus. I have received (unexpectedly) many positive reactions by ordinary people or who are part of the business world and politically far than from the left; this is an existential matter rather than a political one. And that feeling of alienation that may touch any Westerner while walking through a shopping mall or watching bad TV is one of the strongest sources of change one can imagine. It’s a very positive reaction to empty values, a feeling that could save the world from collapsing from over-consumption. So if advertising is promoting, in a very emotional way, the joy of owning A NEW SUV, then why not promote, also in an emotional way, the existential emptiness and ecological sadness, of sitting and driving A NEW SUV? So, yes, Berlusconi has been an inspiration.
The soundtrack is extremely important to Surplus. Is this something that you pay equal attention to in all of your work? I have always used a lot of music in my films, except in my first documentary, Raja Sarajevo, about the war in Yugoslavia, made in a very realistic, cinema vérité style. Editor Johan Söderberg has a great musical input in the film. He is a percussionist that has translated rhythms into editing in a very unusual way. We worked together in Sacrificio – Who betrayed Che Guevara? (co-directed with Tarik Saleh) and I really enjoy working with him. In other interviews, you have referred to ‘Berlusconiland’ and your formative years there. He seems an almost negative ‘inspiration’ for you. How much is this film an indirect critique of him and what he represents?
In Surplus you show an acute understanding of the way mass media operates to put forward a ‘message’. How, in your view, did the mass media play its part in using Iraq as a means of getting people to ‘go shop’‚ again? When I was about to release Surplus in Sweden, in April 2003 at the same time as the invasion of Iraq was about to start, I read an issue of Newsweek magazine entitled something like ‘WHY BUSINESS WANTS THE WAR’ (10 February 2003). People from the corporate world and several economists agreed on the fact that Consumer Confidence had been dramatically low since September 11 and that the best way to restore it was a quick and successful war in Iraq – as if it was a matter of a psychological mass disease. In an economical system like the North American, that relies heavily on mass consumption, the decrease of ‘will to buy’ is the worst thing that can happen. So lots of measures are taken to keep it high. One of the reasons why George W. Bush after the
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WTC attacks gave his by now famous ‘shopping speech’ was to get people back in the malls (a speech that we used in Surplus: ‘... we cannot let the terrorist frighten our nation to the point where people don’t shop’). Would you say that Surplus is a propaganda film? No, propaganda is when the ideological manipulation is hidden. In Surplus it is totally open. John Zerzan and his ideas are very much at the centre of the piece. Given his opposition to industrial society, and that film is perhaps THE industrial art form, how did you get him to participate? John Zerzan is a very discrete person who has chosen a certain lifestyle for himself away from civilisation but is no hermit. On the contrary he is very active in discussing his ideas in campuses, debates and through his books. His phone number is listed and I guess he would talk to anybody. Reading Zerzan’s work, he is very much concerned with attacking the symbols and fetishes that our object-obsessed society holds dear, what you call ‘a rage against items’; Surplus seems to do very much the same. To what extent are his views your own? I don’t engage in property damage. I have the privilege to make my voice heard with film. Yet I can share the same anger at brands and powerful corporations, as many ordinary people do. Meeting Zerzan is inspiring. As an outsider, an anarchist and a thinker he is a kind of mind you don’t have access to through mainstream discourse. I see a value in sharing his ideas with others, even though it is easy to ridicule his ideas about future primitivism and going back to the Stone Age (he would say ‘going forward’). He is, after all, the first to explain the idea of property damage so that it makes sense in a broad life-style perspective. Property damage has been a major part of the past half decade and has widely interested the media and the public – it is necessary to see its connection to the general existential ferment than the usual simplification as ‘vandalism’. Compared to Zerzan, Che Guevara is a madman, the greatest icon of the left since the 60s, engaged in killing human beings with unconventional guerrilla warfare methods for the sake of the revolution. Aside from John Zerzan, how did you choose the other participants? I chose people who had a strong personal link to the subject, either through direct life experiences, as Tania and Svante (they don’t express opinions read in a book, it’s their life they’re talking about), or a very strong theoretical or political relationship to consumption, such as Zerzan and Lasn, or George Bush and Bill Gates.
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At the end of this film, when we consider the tyre mountains, the special vehicles for traversing rubbish heaps and, of course, the love dolls, when Kalle Lasn warns that this current state of affairs is unsustainable, it seems irrefutable – we have to wonder what is left for us to do about this. Did this film provide you with any answers as to how we get back to a ‘simple, fulfilling life’? Yes. A lot of strength – especially as I can find the words that I was missing before. Before the invention of the strike as a method of protest, there were no ‘strikes’. Not even the word STRIKE itself. In the same way this film has given me the ability to articulate an attitude I didn’t really know how to find or had words for within myself. The ‘simple fulfilling life’ – a tool I find uses for every day ...