Film review: Hito Steyerl, November, 25'

Hito Steyerl, November, 25'

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Review by OK

‘Images do not represent reality, they create reality, they are second nature’

November is a visual investigation of the role of images in the revolutions. It explores how visual languages have the power to even shape different realities. In this short video essay, Hito Steyrel takes us with her on a journey to see how one particular image of a seventeen years old German girl was used for the Kurdish cause many years later, after her execution as a terrorist somewhere in northern Iraq by Turkish forces. In her exploration, Steyrel thoroughly uses archival materials from a vast variety of resources, from Bruce Lee and Martial Arts movies, to American B-movies, from documentary footage films about the Kurdish cause, to a commemoration of the Soviet Bavarian Republic in Münich.

At first, this video seems to be an autobiographical piece about Steyrel’s best friend, Andrea Wolf. Together they had shot a feminist Martial Arts B-movie in 1983, in which Andrea was ‘its glamorous star’. In this movie, which was never finished, three girls are continuously fighting the bad guys, and in the end, it was Andrea who could kill them and disappear into the horizon, riding a motorcycle. This was fiction, a non-reality in which Andrea had become the hero in fighting evil.

We don’t see what exactly happened to Andrea after this amateur Martial Arts movie, but many years later, she appeared in some documentary footage on Kurdish satellite television. There, Andrea explained that she had participated in the revolution left in Germany, and through them got to know what was going on around the world. She talks about the party and their ideology, something that she had to go through a year and half of political education and training to fully absorb. The goal for her is to bring all the knowledge back and make use of it in Germany. Finally, she got to go to fight alongside the PKK, in the Kurdish regions between Turkey and northern Iraq. When she was killed in 1998, no one knew about the exact location of her death, and her body never came back, but that was not the end of Andrea Wolf’s story.

‘A mixed zone is created where the boundaries of war blur in the definition.’

In the second half of November, Hito Steyerl examines the spectrum of interrelationships between territorial power politics and the individual forms of resistance. On the macro level, we learned that Germany has supported Turkey in the conflict in Kurdistan. After the fall of the Berlin wall, the weapons of the former national people’s army of the GDR were given to the Turkish army. On the individual level, we hear about the story of a Kurdish girl who set herself on fire in Manheim, in 1994, as a protest against restrictions imposed against the PKK in Germany. It was after this incident that Andrea decided to join the PKK.

When asking a friend to translate the documentary footage from Kurdish television, Steyrel found out that its director was living in Berlin a few blocks from her. Many Kurds and former fighters lived in Germany, while many Germans, such as Andrea, had fought in Kurdistan for the PKK. ‘It was then that I realized Kurdistan was not only there, but also here.’

We hear the voice of a former fighter, recorded in Berlin: ‘That war took place in a vacuum. There are no witnesses. And in this situation everything is possible. All the bad things you could imagine are possible.’ And that is why the representation is so vital, because the truth about the war cannot be grasped that easily. ‘In every war the principle applies that the truth is the first thing to be sacrificed.’ Both sides use all they have in order to create their own version of reality.

When Steyrel went to a demonstration against the Iraq war as a camera person, she unintentionally got involved in propaganda, through the appropriation of her own image. The director of the camera team who was filming the protest knew about her film project. He suddenly took over the camera and asked her to put a flag around

her shoulder. The director gave her a torch and told her to look sad as if she was thinking of Andrea. When the film of the protest was broadcasted it turned out only one feature of the demonstration was used in the film, and that was her face. Her staged emotions and pose was used to transfer an ideological message to its audience.

We should remember that what is missing from the mainstream media about Kurdistan is that all the crimes that the PKK itself committed against the Kurds are unknown and unheard. We never hear about all their unfair treatments against the Kurds, their executions, and war crimes. It is important to be aware of the power of images and the realities they create within their contexts.

‘November a new reactionary form of terror has taken over which abruptly breaks with the tradition of October. Now we are in the period of November. In November the former heroes become madmen and die in extra-legal execution somewhere on a dirty roadside. Andreas’ death was known to us in early November.’

After her death, Andrea was honored by Kurds as an ‘immortal revolutionary’. They started to use one shot of her face, from the Martial arts movie, as a revolutionary pin-up, on the banners and posters used in their protests. Andrea’s image traveled around the globe, passed from hand to hand, copied and reproduced by printing presses, video recorders, and the internet. Her image became an unfamiliar kind of icon, from being a hero in a feminist martial arts movie to the point that she was proclaimed a martyr for the Kurdish cause.

After all her investigation, Steyrel concludes that on a metaphorical level, the pose and the role Andrea took in their amateur movie later became her actual life. What if Andrea Wolf took her character so seriously that she was no longer happy with the symbolic action? What if she had decided to become the image that was made of her? To become the hero, to not be fiction anymore. These are the questions we don’t know the answers to, and the movie finishes like that.

‘In 1983 we made a feminist martial arts film and Andrea Wolf was its glamorous star. Then, this amateur fiction film suddenly turns into a document. Now, some of these documents have turned back into fiction. And this fiction tells us only one truth.

The truth is only in fiction Andrea disappeared into the sunset. The truth is that only in fiction I have died for my ideas. Only in fiction have women become stronger than men. Only in fiction were German weapons not used against the Kurdish population. Not even in fiction are the heroes innocent. And only in fiction does the good ultimately prevail.’