THE FIRE NEXT TIME 03.04 04.04 KASK GENT AFTERLIVES OF THE MILITANT IMAGE
The Fire Next Time is a two-day program of interventions and screenings dealing with the militant image and its resonances. It is organized in conjunction with the exhibition L’œil se noie, Eric Baudelaire and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc in KIOSK (05.04 – 15.06.2014). The Fire Next Time is part of The Uses of Art – The Legacy of 1848 and 1989, a project initiated by L’Internationale with the support of the Culture Program of the European Union. It is organized in the context of the research project Figures of Dissent by Stoffel Debuysere at KASK / School of Arts and in collaboration with the Courtisane Festival. With the support of the research groups S:PAM & PEPPER (UGent), art centre Vooruit, BAM institute for visual, audiovisual and media art, Embassies of Mexico & France, Eye on Palestine. Thanks to KASKcinema and Minard.
THE FIRE NEXT TIME AFTERLIVES OF THE MILITANT IMAGE There was a time when cinema was believed to make a difference, to be able to act as a weapon in struggle, to operate as a realm of discord. The so-called ‘militant cinema’ was not only considered as a tool to bear witness but also to intervene in the various political upheavals and liberation movements that shook the world in the 1960s and ‘70s. What remains of this unassailable alliance between cinema and politics? After the flames had died down, all that seemed to be left was a wreckage of broken promises and shattered horizons. Today it feels like we have been living through a long period of disappointment and disorientation, while the sense of something lacking or failing is spreading steadily. An overwhelming melancholy seems to have taken hold of our lives, as if we can only experience our time as the ‘end times’, when the confidence in politics is as brittle as our trust in images. Perhaps that is why, for those who came after, there is a growing tendency to look back at an era when there was still something to fight for, and images were still something to fight with. Can a re-imagining of old utopian futures shed a new light on our perceived dead-end present, in view of unexpected horizons? Can an understanding of past dreams and illusions lead to reinvigorated notions of responsibility, commitment and resistance? Can a dialogue with the period in question help us to find the very principles and narratives capable of remedying its impasses? And how can this questioning help us to think about how cinema, unsure of its own politics, can be ‘political’ today? In light of a potential rebirth of politics, would it still be possible for the art of cinema to appeal to the art of the impossible? 3
03.04 04.04 2014 2014
5
Program
KASKcinema, 4 Godshuizenlaan, Ghent KIOSK, 2 Louis Pasteurlaan, Ghent Minard, 15 Walpoortstraat, Ghent
03.04 & 04.04
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THURSDAY 10:00
FRIDAY
KASKCINEMA
10:00
Irmgard Emmelhainz, Militant Cinema: from Third Worldism to Neoliberal Sensible Politics
Screening * Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) (FR, 1976) * Hito Steyerl, November (DE, 2004) Talk + S creening
13:30
KASKCINEMA
Sabu Kohso & Go Hirasawa, Land scape / Media — an Investigation into the Revolutionary Horizon, Reloaded
Screening * Masao Adachi & Koji Wakamatsu, Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War) (JP/ Palestine, 1971) Talk + S creening
KASKCINEMA
Olivier Hadouchi, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Basia Lewandowska Cummings, Memories of upheaval and tropical insurrection
Screening: * Santiago Álvarez, Now! (CU, 1965) * Ugo Ulive, Basta (VE, 1969) * Santiago Álvarez, 79 Primaveras (CU, 1969) * Nicolás Guillén Landrián, Coffea Arábiga (CU, 1968) * Nicolás Guillén Landrián, Desde La Habana 1969 (CU, 1968) * Humberto Solás, Simparelé (CU, 1974)) Talk + S creening
13:30
KASKCINEMA
Subversive Film (Mohanad Yaqubi & Reem Shilleh), Splicing the Militant Cinema
Talk
16:00
KASKCINEMA
Evan Calder Williams & Victoria Brooks, Destroy Yourselves as Our Bosses
Screening * Sophie Bissonnette, Martin Duckworth, Joyce Rock, A Wives Tale (CA, 1980) Talk + S creening
20:30
Cinema Performance
22:00
Screening: * Daphné Hérétakis, Ici rien (FR/GR, 2011) * Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro, Vida Extra (SP, 2013) Talk + S creening
20:00
Cinema Performance
KIOSK
Eric Baudelaire & Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, L’œil se noie
MINARD
Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, When we act or undergo, we must always be worthy of what happens to us
KASKCINEMA
Raquel Schefer, Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro, Daphné Hérétakis, Dissident Images
MINARD
Angela Melitopoulos & Bettina Knaup, Möglichkeitsraum (The Blast of the Possible)
16:00
Exhibition opening
22:00
MINARD
Julius Eastman, Crazy Nigger & Gay Guerilla
AFTERLIVES OF THE MILITANT IMAGE
Concert
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Program
THURSDAY 03.04 10:00 KASKCINEMA TALK
SCREENING
Militant Cinema: from Third Worldism to Neoliberal Sensible Politics Irmgard Emmelhainz Jean-Luc Godard’s Ici et ailleurs (19691974) as well as Chris Marker’s Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977) crystallize the histories of militant engagement and political filmmaking in the 1960s, a time in which Marxism was a vehicle for cultural as well as actual revolution here and elsewhere. From both films, lessons about this era of militantism can be drawn. Moreover, they announce a turn in the 1970s and 1980s toward minority politics (tied to de-colonization struggles) and humanitarization –which implies an ethical, as opposed to political relationship to the elsewhere, as well as the utopia of globalization. Bearing this in mind, Irmgard Emmelhainz will discuss the changes in the meaning of ‘politicization’ and political work from the 1960s from what is known today as ‘Sensible Politics’: a form of politicization active at the level of encoding unstable political acts in medial forms. Taking up Jean-Luc Godard’s plea for texts and poetry (inspired by Aristotle’s and Hannah Arendt’s understanding of political action as speech), in his film Notre musique, she will argue that most of the current politicized images are compensatory devices to the ravages caused by neoliberal reforms implemented worldwide in the past two decades.
Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent writer and researcher based in Mexico City. In 2012, she published a collection of essays about art, culture, cinema and geopolitics: Alotropías en la trinchera evanescente: estética y geopolítica en la era de la guerra total (BUAP). Her work on cinema, ‘Question of Palestine’, art, culture and neoliberalism has been translated to French, English, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew and Serbian. She is currently co-editing an issue dedicated to Mexico City of Scapegoat Journal, and teaching a course at the Esmeralda National School of Engraving and Painting in Mexico City. Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) FR, 1976, 16mm, color, French & Arabic with English subtitles, 53' A film of the in-between, of the AND. Between then (1970) and now (1976), between here (Paris) and there (Palestine), between what is shown and what is seen, between sound and image. In 1970 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin travelled to the Middle East to shoot a film about the Palestinian liberation struggle, a film that was initially titled Jusqu’à la victoire. A few weeks after returning to France, the Amman massacres took place. After that, it took Godard more than five years to find a form for the images and sounds he had captured, five years to come to terms with a sense of loss and failure, with the death of so many of those he had filmed, with the demise of so many revolutionary dreams. The only way for Godard to escape from the irresolvable contradictions between cinema and politics and the souring dilemmas of the militant filmmaker, was to radically turn cinema in on itself, in a meditation on the power and powerlessness of the image. A labor of mourning, of which we haven’t seen the end yet.
03.04 & 04.04
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THURSDAY 03.04 13:30 KASKCINEMA
Hito Steyerl November DE, 2004, video, color, English spoken, 25' “My best friend when I was 17, was a girl called Andrea Wolf. She died in 1998, when she was shot as a Kurdish terrorist in Eastern Anatolia... This project tackles the question of what is nowadays called terrorism and used to be called internationalism once. It deals with the gestures and postures it can create, and their relationship to figures of popular culture, namely cinema. Its point of departure is a feminist martial arts film Andrea Wolf and I made together when we were 17 years old. Now this fictional martial arts flick has suddenly become a document. November is not a documentary about Andrea Wolf. It is not a film about the situation in Kurdistan. It deals with the gestures of liberation after the end of history, as reflected through popular culture and travelling images. This project is a film about the era of November, when revolution seems to be over and only its gestures keep circulating.” (HS)
TALK
SCREENING
Landscape/Media – an Investigation into the Revolutionary Horizon, Reloaded Sabu Kohso & Go Hirasawa The development of ‘Landscape Cinema’ and ‘Landscape Theory’ took place during the short period between the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in Japan, while the ‘60s movements were declining and the militant line of guerrilla warfare was rising. It embodied a collective effort to grasp a new horizon of revolutionary struggle and the possible location of its agency in the form of film productions and critical discourses. Initiated by an enigmatic film, AKA: Serial Killer (1969), the cinema/theory sought to confront ‘landscape’ as the main terrain for the power operation, seen by the gaze of a migrant worker. Then Red Army/PFLP – Declaration of World War (1971) was produced, embodying the second stage of the development in which tactical uses of reportage were juxtaposed over the everyday landscape of Palestine guerrillas. Although the film was produced in collaboration with the Japanese Red Army, it involves multiple messages including critical reflections on a broad orientation of Japan’s radical left. Screening the latter film, Hirasawa and Kohso seek to decode the problematic complexity of the cinema/movement, that tackles the mechanism of capture by landscape/media and the resistance therein, in order to approach the apocalyptic feature of planetary crises today.
AFTERLIVES OF THE MILITANT IMAGE
9
Program
Sabu Kohso is a writer and translator. Living in New York since 1980, he has published several books in Japan and Korea about urban space, radical politics, and the philosophy of anarchism, and has translated books by theorists such as David Graeber, John Holloway, Kojin Karatani and Arata Isozaki. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, he co-edited the website jfissures.org, and has written several articles on the problematic of post-nuclear disaster society in English.
and Octavio Getino. In order to break out of the conventional distribution system, Red Bus Screening Troops were organized to travel across Japan. The English and French subtitled versions were produced so that they could be shown across the globe, including in Palestine.
Go Hirasawa is a researcher at Meiji-Gakuin University working on underground and experimental films and avant-garde art movements in 1960s and ‘70s Japan. His publications include Cultural Theories: 1968 (Japan, 2010), Koji Wakamatsu: Cinéaste de la Révolte (France, 2010), and Masao Adachi: Le bus de la révolution passera bientot près de chez toi ( France, 2012). He has organized several film programs on Japanese Underground Cinema. Masao Adachi & Koji Wakamatsu Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War) JP/ Palestine, 1971, 16mm to video, color, Japanese & Arabic with English subtitles, 69' Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu visited Beirut on the way back from the Cannes Film Festival in 1971. In collaboration with the Japan Red Army fighters and the PFLP, they produced the film there, involving styles ranging from manifesto, newsreel, critical reflection (of the Japanese left) to reportage (of everyday activities of the Arab guerrillas). A fusion of ‘Tactical Media’ and ‘Landscape Cinema’ inherited from AKA: Serial Killer (1969), the film was considered an epitome of cinematic engagement in revolutionary practice, along with the works of the Dziga Vertov Group (Jean-Luc Godard/ Jean-Pierre Gorin) and Latin American directors including Fernando Solanas 03.04 & 04.04
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THURSDAY 03.04 16:00 KASKCINEMA TALK
SCREENING
Destroy Yourselves as Our Bosses Evan Calder Williams & Victoria Brooks The connected talks of Evan Calder Williams and Victoria Brooks develop a feminist history of, and approach to, militant cinema from 1973 to 1983. In particular, they focus on critiques, both filmed and written, of how even allegedly radical movements reproduced a hierarchy of “legitimate” concerns that consistently framed the issues and modes of struggle posed by women as secondary to the cause at hand. This sidelining and its proprietary relation to politics has a history inextricable from labor movements themselves, but it becomes particularly visible with how practices of cinema directly engaged in social struggles negotiate what is literally foregrounded, drawn forth, or edited out. The first talk focuses on the Italian situation in the mid-’70s, considering “free newsreel” projects and experimental documentaries and reading their recurrent focus on the factory and piazza through the fierce critique articulated by Italian communist feminism in those same years. The second talk deals with films focused on women’s relation to factory and mining struggles in Ontario. These films, including those by Sophie Bissonnette, Joyce Wieland, and Sandra Lahire, developed a complex vision of histories and voices continually pushed to the side of movements
fighting for access to basic necessities of survival. Victoria Brooks is a curator and producer based in Troy, NY. Prior to joining EMPAC (Experimental Media & Performing Arts Centre) in 2013 as curator of time-based visual art, Brooks was a London-based independent curator, co-founding the itinerant curatorial platform The Island, co-curating Serpentine Gallery’s artist-cinema program, and producing Canary Wharf Screen for Art on the Underground. Together with Evan Calder Williams, she is currently organizing Third Run, a new yearly film journal and colloquium series to be launched in fall 2014. Evan Calder Williams is a writer, theorist, and artist. He has a doctoral degree from the Literature Department at University of California Santa Cruz, where he wrote a dissertation entitled The Fog of Class War: Cinema, Circu lation, and Refusal in Italy’s Creep ing’70s. He is the 2013-2014 Fellow at the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons, where he is developing a theory of sabotage. He is the author of two books, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse and Roman Letters, has written for Film Quarterly, Mute, La Furia Umana, Viewpoint, and The New Inquiry, and writes the blog Socialism and/or Barbarism. Sophie Bissonnette, Martin Duckworth, Joyce Rock A Wives Tale CA, 1980, 16mm to video, color, English & French with English subtitles, 73' A film about the women who supported the 1978 miners strike against Inco, the multinational which owned the nickel mines in Sudbury, Ontario. “As the women became increasingly involved in the strike, they questioned more and more their traditional supportive role. This provoked many heated discussions among the women and obviously not without upsetting husband, family,
AFTERLIVES OF THE MILITANT IMAGE
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Program
union — and company… This situation forced us as filmmakers to find a cinematic approach that could capture this reality. It is difficult (impossible) to take ‘pretty pictures’ under these conditions: kitchens are small and don’t well suit the movements of a film crew; children scream and cry in the microphone, making it hard to hear… we often packed up our equipment and decided not to shoot because we felt it would be a betrayal of the trust we had established with the women. You may perhaps be disappointed not to witness a family feud…So we shot a film that doesn’t in fact show ‘everything.’ hoping that what is not obvious comes from between the lines, between each frame of the film.”
THURSDAY 03.04 20:30 MINARD CINEMA
PERFORMANCE
Möglichkeitsraum (The Blast of the Possible) Angela Melitopoulos & Bettina Knaup The Blast of the Possible is a project containing the creation of a temporary performance and lecture platform, a space for exhibiting video and film archive materials belonging to the history of activist media since the 1960s. The design of the platform is based on the idea of an extended postproduction studio in that all functions of montage are spatially presented. This theatrical archive space recalls the archaic function of theatre being a switching panel for different modes of language flows that foster potentials of experimentation, learning and the relation and agency between language-modes. The imaginary developing from an index of the databases and from the materiality of the archival documents will be transformed and preformed through the live energy of performance and speech. ‘Language,’ as Walter Benjamin states, ‘is mediating the immediacy of all mental communication, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic.’ Angela Melitopoulos & Bettina Knaup propose to concatenate different languages modes and work on their boundaries with performances that mind the gap between memory and matter. The exhibition becomes a place
03.04 & 04.04
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in that we sense the time quality of mediated images, their historical context, their possible figures and pathologies, their spatial order and their construction and segmentation, their open or closed logic of montage. Through these interventions we can re-read documents and documentation, the construction of representation and identity, the imaginary of the past and the potentialities of becoming. Angela Melitopoulos studied fine arts with Nam June Paik at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf. She has been working with electronic media since 1986 and has created experimental single-channel tapes, video installations, video-essays and documentaries, her work of art often based on research and collaboration with other knowledge spheres like sociology, politics and theory. She has recently been appointed professor in the Media School of the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen. Bettina Knaup is a cultural producer with a background in political science, theatre, film, TV studies and gender studies. She has been involved in developing or managing a range of interdisciplinary and transnational cultural projects operating at the interface of arts, politics and knowledge production, including the open space of the International Women’s University (Hanover) and the trans-disciplinary Performing Arts Laboratory, IN TRANSIT (Berlin).
THURSDAY 03.04 22:00 MINARD CINEMA
PERFORMANCE
When we act or undergo, we must always be worthy of what happens to us Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri The militant cinema and image, taken in a more strict sense, have historically tended to push toward the real and toward the truth and toward the overcoming of capitalism, colonialism, and sometimes patriarchy among other things. They have worked to uncover, to lay bare, to expose, to clarify and at times to destroy existing regimes of order and/or truth. Occasionally, there have also been engaged comrades who have chosen the path of militancy as an arena to also investigate the truth claims of the image itself and its production. Of questioning the regimes of images themselves whether as spectacle or as contested fables or fictions. The utopic in the latter camp assumed cinema must be destroyed in the struggle. The more skeptical of this group, (in the philosophical sense not the everyday sense) returned to the cinema as a place of diagnosing the limits and failures of movements, as well as the images movements produced. This film is not about this history and the antinomies of these various modes of militancy in cinema, here reduced to a kind of caricature (quite common in historical accounts). It attempts instead to loiter around the shards and remnants of the processes, struggles and gestures that
AFTERLIVES OF THE MILITANT IMAGE
13
Program
were produced in these varied forms of militancy in the hopes of discovering the latent forces and insights they may retain for contemporary struggles. Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri work together. Ayreen writes in fragments, and makes films and videos. She is interested in philosophy, literature, the political and the everyday. Rene is interested in the complex mechanisms that constitute the world. He works within the folds of cultural practice, social thought and politics. Ayreen and Rene’s collaborative projects have evolved a great deal through their frequent contributions to the program at 16Beaver, an artist community that functions as a social and collaborative space in downtown Manhattan, where the group hosts panel discussions, film series, reading groups and more. Ayreen and Rene’s Radioactive Discussion series was a physical counterpart to their fictional Homeland Security Cultural Bureau project. Other collaborations include: Camp Campaign, Artist talk, Radio Active, United We Stand, What Everybody Knows, Eden Resonating, 7X77, Case Sensitive America and more.
FRIDAY 04.04 10:00 KASKCINEMA TALK
SCREENING
Memories of upheaval and tropical insurrection Olivier Hadouchi, Basia Lewandowska Cummings, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history, at a time when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism, how can we rethink the past in order to reimagine a more usable future ? If the longing for revolution, the craving for the overcoming of the colonial past and the reclaiming of national identity that shaped the ‘cinemas of liberation’ of the 1960’s is not one that we can inhabit today, then it may be part of our task to set it aside and begin an effort of reimagining other futures for us to dream of. But how can we go beyond the nostalgia for past horizons that still (or once again) seems to occupy our contemporary scope of imagination ? Can an answer be found in the work of the contemporary artists and filmmakers who are attempting to reinvent and redirect the legacies of militant culture and ‘Third cinema’ ? How to position ourselves today in view of this large corpus of historical film works in a context that is radically different but at the same time dauntingly close ? A selection of formally and politically bold films from Latin-America will serve as the starting point for a dis-
03.04 & 04.04
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cussion on the relation between our ‘dead-end’ present, and, on one hand, the old utopian futures that inspired it and, on the other, an imagined idiom of future futures that might reanimate this present and perhaps even engender in it unexpected horizons of transformative possibility. Olivier Hadouchi is a critic, curator and film historian, based in Paris. He obtained a PhD at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) on Cinema and Liberation struggles around Tricontinental’s constellation (1966-1975). He has written for various publications such as CinémAction, Third Text, Mondes du Cinéma, La Furia Umana and has curated film programs for Le BAL, Bétonsalon. le Cinématographe de Nantes and la HEAD (Genève). Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc is an artist, curator and researcher interested in exploring the history of the colonial encounter and its effects on memory and identity. Amongst others, he is very concerned to engage with film history and the decolonisation of African states in the 1960s. Abonnenc recently took part in the Paris Triennial in the Palais de Tokyo and in group exhibitions in the Fondation d‘entreprise Ricard (Paris) and the ICA – Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, USA). Basia Lewandowska Cummings is a writer, editor and film curator, based in London. She has contributed to frieze, The Wire, Contemporary &, and The Quietus and has curated film programs for Bold Tendencies, Film Africa, the New York African Film Festival, and Gasworks gallery. In January 2014 she became writer-in-residence at Jerwood Visual Arts, London. Santiago Álvarez Now ! CU, 1965, 35mm, b/w, sound, 5' A montage film composed of stills dealing with the discrimination against
blacks in the United States, rhythmically edited after Lena Horne’s song of the same name. Ugo Ulive Basta VE, 1969, 16mm to video, b/w, Spanish with English subtitles, 14' “Through the use of violent symbols (loosely associated with Artaud’s notion of cruelty), some of the consequences of the current social organization in Latin-America are exposed: the alienation, marginalization and reification of men, and the continuous presence of imperialism, considered as rape.” (UU) Santiago Álvarez 79 Primaveras CU, 1969, 35mm, b/w, sound, 24' A tribute to Ho Chi Minh, the revered leader of the Viet Min independence movement who had defeated French Indochina and founded the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The justly celebrated 12 minute sequence in which newsreel footage of soldiers is destroyed exemplifies Alvarez’s declaration that “my style is the style of hatred for Imperialism.”
Nicolás Guillén Landrián Coffea Arábiga CU, 1968, 16mm to video, b/w, Spanish with English subtitles, 18' The Cuban Film Institute commanded Landrián to make a propaganda documentary to show how to sow coffee around Havana. The result is a didactic film, which at the same time man-
AFTERLIVES OF THE MILITANT IMAGE
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Program
aged to betray the official proposal. The great irreverence: the use in the soundtrack of a forbidden song by The Beatles, The fool on the hill, when Castro walks to a podium for a speech. The documentary was exhibited but banned as soon as the coffee plan collapsed.
RELATED SCREENING: Saturday 5 April 17:30 Paddenhoek Elke Marhöfer, prendas - ngangas enquisos – machines (2013) + various films by Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1965-1966) As part of Courtisane Festival
Nicolás Guillén Landrián Desde La Habana ¡1969! Recordar CU, 1968, 16mm to video, b/w, Spanish with English subtitles, 18’ Steeped in verbal and visual repetitions, the film presents itself as a sort of chronicle of the salient and traumatic events of the 1960’s, but it also points out the oppressive effect of inescapable propaganda on daily existence. It was censured for being “inconsistent with the Cuban context.” Humberto Solás Simparelé CU, 1974, 16mm to video, b/w, French and creole with Spanish subtitles, 28' Simparelé synthesizes the primary forms through which the Haitian people have expressed themselves in the centuries since the island’s colonization by the French and the massive importation of African slaves to fuel its plantation economy. The film acknowledges the powerful role which Afro-Haitian culture has played in these people’s political struggle as both repository for people’s history and the raw material from which that history can be reconstructed and transformed.
03.04 & 04.04
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FRIDAY 04.04 13:30
ously-overlooked films, the curating of rare film screening cycles, and the subtitling of rediscovered films. Subversive Film was formed in 2011 and is based in Ramallah and London.
KASKCINEMA TALK Splicing the Militant Cinema Subversive Film (Mohanad Yaqubi & Reem Shilleh) In 1968, a group of young filmmakers decided to establish a film unit affiliated with the Palestinian Revolution newly active in Amman, Jordan. The unit was called Palestine Film Unit (PFU) and was working with Al Fatah, one of the Palestinian Libation Organization (PLO) factions that adopted armed struggle as the only way to liberate Palestine. When the PFU was established, not only did it furnish the revolution with cinematic vocabularies, but it also addressed the decades old dilemma of invisibility of the Palestinian people and would offer apparatus for reclaiming visibility. At a later time the work of the unit became a major part of the Palestinian revolutionary cinema. This presentation tracks life and work of the PFU and its members as an example of a militant cinema practice in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, when filmmakers believed cinema could change the world. Subversive Film is a cinema research and production initiative that aims to cast new light upon historic works related to Palestine and the region; to engender support for film preservation; and to investigate archival practices and effects. Other projects developed by Subversive Film to explore this cine-historic field include the digital reissuing of previAFTERLIVES OF THE MILITANT IMAGE
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FRIDAY 04.04 16:00
Program
of representation, remembrance and oblivion, the acts of telling and re-telling, and the non-coincidence between sensorial memory and audiovisual mnemonics are central issues in her work. Historical episodes are approached through personal and familiar narratives, in some cases embedded in the history of Portuguese decolonization.
KASKCINEMA TALK
SCREENING
Dissident Images Raquel Schefer, Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro, Daphné Hérétakis In 1982, in the short film Changer d’Image - Lettre à la bien aimée (To Alter the Image), Jean-Luc Godard reflected upon the difficulty to produce an image of change likely to induce and formally represent change. Can an image of change give rise to change? Must an image of change be an altered image? A politics of aesthetics underlays these questions, as they point out to the poetics and politics of the film image, to the intrinsic articulation of its aesthetic and pragmatic dimensions. Representing current class struggle in Southern Europe, Daphné Hérétakis’ Ici rien (2011) and Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro’s Vida Extra (2013) reclaim a poetic political cinema, leading a formal creative synthesis between historical legacy and emergent audiovisual forms which undermines established categories. Daphné Hérétakis and Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro will be present to show their work, to discuss these aporias of image, aesthetics and politics, and to rethink the relationship between art and politics in the context of an open collective debate. Raquel Schefer is a filmmaker and researcher. She is presently doing a PHD in Cinema Studies at the Université de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris 3). Politics
Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro works as an independent filmmaker and a film editor. His work, influenced by the thinking of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, reviews political cinema in the light of an overall “redistribution of the sensible”. Vida Extra (2013), inspired by Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resist ance, proposes a cinema praxis based on the recognition and the circulation of new forms of aesthetic resistance. Re-enunciating the novel through refreshed narrative and aesthetic forms, Ledo Cordeiro reverses the relation of facticity and fiction and reconciles the struggle for political emancipation with sensible experience in the time of a returning pavor nocturnus. Daphné Hérétakis is an independent filmmaker and a student at Le Fresnoy. While studying documentary film at Paris 8 University, Hérérakis directed Ici rien (2011), an experimental film shot in Exarhia, prime centre of social protest in Athens. A collective dialogic portrait of a country in crisis, Ici rien is a major example of today’s experimental political cinema as it points out to a synthesis of historical aesthetic forms and a new horizon of political expectations. Crisis is represented through images of a joie de vivre. Daphné Hérétakis Ici rien FR/GR, 2011, 16mm, Super 8 & Mini DV, color, Greek with English subtitles, 30' “The shooting of this film started in september 2008, in Exarhia, a major centre of social protest in the heart of
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Athens. As the months passed and the political situation of Greece evolved, the film became the canvas on which fragments of stories finally found a place, composing the tattered landscape of a country in crisis.” (DH) Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro Vida Extra SP, 2013, video, color, Spanish with English subtitles, 96' “’The revolution is a game you surrender to for pleasure. Its dynamics are those of the subjective fury of living, not those of altruism’. Almost half a century later, few things seem as far back in time as the International Situationist and its idea of deconstructing the left. However, the current European collapse exposes, now more than ever, the need for new forms of resistance against the strategies of evil and their atrocious advance. In his directorial debut, Ramiro Ledo faces that idea of re-enunciating through the only possible path: self-criticism. First part: an assembly after the occupation of Barcelona’s Spanish Bank of Credit. The images don’t exist, they’re just shadows and flashes that, added to the accumulation of slogans and turns to speak, have the effect of a death certificate. Second part: a table talk, the guests expose their fears and doubts about the indignados, the resistance, the pickets, direct action... Both sides, opposed and indivisible, form what is perhaps one of the most uncomfortable and tough Spanish films in recent memory.” (BAFICI)
FRIDAY 04.04 20:00 KIOSK EXHIBITION
OPENING
L’œil se noie Eric Baudelaire & Mathieu Klebeye Abonnenc L’œil se noie is the result of an intuitive dialogue between two French artists whose work stems from a shared interest in the gaps and fissures that make up (hi)stories, as well as the challenges and promises they hold. At the heart of their practices is a desire to open up and accentuate the tensions between what has been, what seems to be, and what could have been, to pick up the traces of forgotten and unresolved questions and divert them towards uncertain destinations, out of the dead end circuits where things and thoughts get trapped in their own finitudes. Indeed, this is an exhibition about ‘unfinished business’, as one of the pieces in the show suggests. Sometimes quite literally, as in the case of Mathieu’s search for Sarah Maldoror’s Guns for Banta, a film dealing with the struggle for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde that has never seen the light of day, or Eric’s ‘makes’ (as opposed to remakes) of some of Michelangelo Antonioni’s unrealized scenarios. In other cases, their work consists of a rewiring of the connections between one sense and another, or between one time and another, as in ça va, ça va, on continue, which highlights the complications implicit in remembering, representing and voicing distant histories of anti-colonial
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revolt and revolutionary insurrection, or Chanson d’Automne, an assemblage of clippings from The Wall Street Journal dated September 2008, revealing a poetry of resistance within the fracture lines of a dysfunctional economic order. At odds with all laments of the ‘death and the image’ and the ‘end of history’, the works in this exhibition propose a renewed faith in the hidden potentialities of the present, puncturing the impasses and aporias of finitude, giving way to spaces for wandering and wondering that are bound to remain incomplete. RELATED SCREENING: Sunday 6 April 11:00 Sphinx Eric Baudelaire, The Ugly One (2013) As part of Courtisane Festival
FRIDAY 04.04 22:00 MINARD CONCERT
Julius Eastman Crazy Nigger – Gay Guerilla “What I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness or a fundamentalness, and eschews that which is superficial, or, could we say, elegant… There are 99 names of Allah, and there are 52 niggers.” – Julius Eastman, Jan 16 1980, Northwestern University When Julius Eastman took the stage of the concert hall of the Northwestern University to explain the titles of the pieces that he and three other pianists were about to perform, he could not have known that this appearance would be the most lasting statement about his music. Having studied with the likes of George E. Lewis, Morton Feldman and Lukas Foss, all signs pointed towards a bright future for this composer. By 1980 Eastman was performing his music all over Europe and the States and he was an integral part of the thriving Downtown scene in New York, where he recorded with Arthur Russell and Meredith Monk. But for all this promise, his self-destructive behaviour inevitably caught up with him. When he passed away on May 28 1980 in a hospital in Buffalo, the news took more than seven months to reach New York. With the scarce recordings and scores of his music scattered all over the place,
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attempts to reconstruct Eastman’s output are doomed to remain incomplete. Only fairly recently a selection of his work has been made available, including the trilogy Evil Nigger, Crazy Nig ger & Gay Guerilla, which represents in so many ways the intense brilliance of this ‘forgotten minimalist’. These compositions for multiple pianos took the minimalist device of additive process to a whole new structural level, building up immense emotive power through the incessant repetition of rhythmic figures, a composing technique he called ‘organic music’. The titles of the pieces exemplify the rebellious attitude of Eastman, as someone who has always struggled with identity, yet never without casting a new life; someone who has steadfastly eschewed compromise, yet giving rise to a body of work that continues to startle and engage. Musicians: Frederik Croene, Stephane Ginsburg, Bob Gilmore, Reinier van Houdt Entrance fee: € 8 / 10 In collaboration with art centre Vooruit.
Next page: Santiago Álvarez, 79 Primaveras (1969) After next page: Robert Kramer, Ice (1970)
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Chris Marker, Mario Marret & SLON, A bientôt j’espère (1967-1968)
NOTES ON THE MILITANT CINEMA 1967-1977 STOFFEL DEBUYSERE
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Chris Marker, Mario Marret & SLON, A bientôt j’espère (1967-1968)
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START FROM ZERO For a brief moment, the world was on fire. Impossible to say how and when the spark was lit, but we know the air had been thick with tense anticipation for quite some time, and it wasn’t long before the flames were crackling all over. What was felt during the ‘long 1968’ did not, as many still seem to imagine, erupt as a momentary and localized flash of lightning in a serene sky, but flared up at the convergence point of multiple smouldering hot spots and flaming areas, dispersed in space, evolving over time. The fires were spreading at a moment when struggles against Western colonialism and neo-colonialism gripped the entire ‘Third World’: at the same time the Vietnam war was increasingly polarizing the world stage, guerrilla groups such as Uruguay’s Tupamaros and Chile’s Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) were sprouting throughout Latin America, independence movements were gaining ground in Portugal’s African empire, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had brought together various forces struggling against Israeli colonialism, and left-wing rebellion was proliferating in various Asian countries, from India and Nepal to Malaysia and the Philippines. Che Guevara’s 1967 call to ‘create two, three, many Vietnams’ was taken to heart by resistance movements all over the world, while propositions to construct new societal forms in Cuba and China seemed to offer fresh, grassroots-based models of socialism. Meanwhile, in France and Italy, a wave of strikes and occupations took hold of factories and universities, coming to a head in the events of May 1968 and the hot autumn of 1969. In the US, the large-scale civil rights protests that had been gathering steam since the mid-1950s boiled over when the surge of demonstrations against institutional racism and the Vietnam War led to
violent uprisings, escalating in the 1968 Chicago riots. The clashes with police and army troops painfully resonated with another event that had happened just a few days earlier, when Russian tanks brought winter to the Prague Spring, brutally crushing the dream of a ‘socialism with a human face’. From Brazil to Japan, from Northern Ireland to South Africa: everywhere, the sky was filled with smoke and ashes. As if there were nothing to be seen but the light of the flames. But behind the haze, there was still a lurking sense of horizon, connecting local and specific struggles to a broader narrative, seemingly bound together by resistance against class oppression and imperialism, holding the promise of another world. Where was cinema, this great art of light and shadow, in all this turmoil? As oppositional leftist politics seeped deeper into all areas of cultural life, filmmakers were increasingly confronted with questions such as: How to contribute to the struggle? How can cinema make itself useful? ‘For filmmakers of all leanings’, wrote French critic Serge Daney, ‘in this near-open battle, in their very craft of film-making, a single problem emerges: How can political statements be presented cinematically? How can they be made positive?’1 The radical cinema that flourished so brightly in those years, on the wings of the various, adventurous ‘new waves’ that had infused the cinematic landscape with a playful spirit of liberation and iconoclasm, was one that saw itself as part of a broader project of national and international socio-political transformation. Its ambition was no longer solely to free up the camera and rewrite the codes of representation, but to make itself into a powerful vehicle for this transformation, by all means necessary. As worldwide revolts gave more and more currency to the idea of revolution, filmmakers were compelled to revo1 Serge Daney, ‘Fonction critique’, Cahiers du cinéma 250, May 1974
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lutionize their own means of production, expression and exhibition. When Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha was working on his fabulous ‘opera-mitrailleuse’, Terra em Transe (1967), he wrote: When film-makers organize themselves to start from zero, to create a cinema with new types of plot lines, of perfor mance of rhythm, and with a different poetry, they throw themselves into the dangerous, revolutionary adventure of learning while you produce, of playing theory and practice side by side, of re formulating every theory through every practice, of conducting themselves according to the apt dictum coined by Nelson Pereira Dos Santos from some Portuguese poet: ‘I don’t know where I’m going, but I know I’m not going over there.’ 2 To start from zero, recharging with every film: for Rocha and many other filmmakers in Latin America and elsewhere, it was not merely enough to dress up political subjects and messages in traditional outfits, as so many colleagues inclined to do at the time. It was hardly enough to proudly raise the red flag and use revolutionary theory as a signpost of good will and sentiment, as Sergio Leone did in Giù la testa, opening with Mao’s statement: ‘The Revolution is not a dinner party... ’. No, these ideas had to be thoroughly explored and followed through within cinema, which meant that the fundamental aesthetic, economic and ideological conditions and conventions of cinema had to be rethought anew. What could a cinema be if it were free from the overpowering influence of what Jean-Luc Godard referred to as the devious pair of Hollywood/Mosfilm? How could cinema be liberated from the clutches of what Guy Debord and his Situationist posse, in 1967, called the immense accumulation of 2 Glauber Rocha, ‘Beginning at Zero: Notes on Cinema and Society’, The Drama Review, Winter 1970
‘spectacles’, keeping the spectator at bay in a state of passive contemplation, separated from life itself? This challenge was not entirely new. Debates on cinema as a possible form of political intervention had been raging ever since the rise of Soviet Cinema in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution – when Lenin commented that cinema was ‘the most important art form’ – and had resurged at various times, not in the least at the pinnacle of the Internationalist Popular Front alliance, when filmmakers such as Jean Renoir and Joris Ivens were swept up in their enthusiasm for communist ideals and the fight against fascism, and after World War II, in the context of the reconstruction of Italy and the revolution in Cuba. The heavy political stakes that were manifest in the 1960s put some of the debates that had been simmering within Marxist thought for decades back on the agenda, leading to radical, if often erratic re-readings of the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Bertold Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Only now it was done in the light of the neo-Marxist and libertarian thinking that marked the time, from the pamphlets of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, the anti-colonialist writings of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire to the structuralist work of Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser. Once again, the fundamental tensions between art and world, appearance and reality, practice and theory, were subject to intense inquiry, centred around the idea of ‘militant cinema’. AMONGST THE PEOPLE But the notion of militant cinema, always ‘at the service of the people’, actually indicated a divided landscape. ‘There are two kinds of militant films’, argued Jean-Luc Godard in 1970, ‘those we call ‘blackboard films’ and those known as Internationale films. The latter are the equivalent of chanting L’interna tionale during a demonstration, while
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the others prove certain theories that allow one to apply to reality what he has seen on screen.’3 This division essentially redoubled a debate that had already been initiated in 1920’s Soviet Union, between those who considered the primary concern of revolutionary art as being the search for new formal and theoretical models and those who saw it as first and foremost a question of effective communication in a form and language that was already understood by the ‘common’ people. In the 1960s, the latter tendency was exemplified by the proliferation of a ‘popular’ model of militant cinema, according to which the camera had to place itself in the heart of the struggle, where the filmmaker’s task consisted of capturing the shimmering traces of life as vividly and ‘authentically’ as possible, plucking the living reality like the flowers that Mao encouraged to bloom. In a way, this notion of militant cinema was already apparent in the work of internationalist ciné-travellers such as René Vautier and Yann Le Masson: cameras were taken to the battlefields and the barricades, to occupied universities and factories on strike, not only to testify to the events, but also to give voice to those who had remained voiceless for so long. This task was taken up by militants and filmmakers worldwide. In Japan, the students of Zengakuren, with the help of documentarists such as Shinsuke Ogawa, started to use cameras to document their battles with the authorities; In Italy, Cesare Zavattini, one of the proponents of the Neorealist movement, successfully promulgated the idea of Cinegiornale liberi; in the US, the October 1967 Pentagon riot led to the establishment of a broad network of “Newsreel” collectives; in the Middle East, the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) dedicated itself to recording the Arab-Israeli conflict, under the motto, ‘gun in one hand, camera in the 3 Godard par Godard, éditions de l’Etoile - Cahiers du cinéma, Paris, 1985, p. 348
other’; and during the May events in France, hundreds of film technicians and filmmakers joined forces in the États Généraux du Cinéma and started to produce ‘Ciné-tracts’. This series of anonymous shorts (some made with the help of established filmmakers) was instigated by Chris Marker, who had previously also set up SLON (La Societé de Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles). It was under the auspices of this collective that Marker put together Far from Vietnam (1967), a portmanteau film made as a protest against the American military intervention in Vietnam, including contributions by Godard, Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Joris Ivens, Agnès Varda and William Klein. ‘How to make a “useful” film?’, asked Klein, ‘Fiction, agit-prop, documentary, what? We were never able to decide, but we had to do something.’ At the time, Far from Vietnam came about not only as a vibrant expression of the solidarity that many tiermondistes in Western Europe and the US felt for the national liberation struggles that were raging all over the world, but it also opened up the question of ‘usefulness’, a concern that has always been central to the debates on art and politics: how does one close the gaps between ‘here’ and ‘there’, between those who take images, those whose images are taken and those who watch them? How does one translate the struggle without re-inscribing the relations of domination between those who have the power to represent and those who are merely represented? And in doing so, how does one create art that can reach the broad masses, not only adopting, but also enriching their own forms of expression? In his contribution to the collective film (a segment with the Vertov-inspired title ‘Camera-eye’), Godard explicitly took up these questions. ‘I am cut off from the working class, but my struggle against Hollywood is related. Yet workers don’t come to see my films.’ Perhaps engaging in the worldwide
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resistance against imperialism and colonialism, and creating a Vietnam in each of us, suggested Godard, can make us aware of what is common to both the filmmaker’s and the worker’s struggle. ‘What can bind us, the workers of Rhodiacéta and me, is Vietnam.’ Godard had actually visited the Rhodiacéta factory in Besançon just after March 1967, when the first occupations in France since 1936 had taken place, and would later also be there for the premiere of Far From Vietnam. On those occasions, he was always in the company of Chris Marker, who, during the production of the film, had been invited by the organizers of the local cultural program to come and take a look. To Marker, who had previously been working in China, Cuba, Israel, and Siberia, they made a plea to give some attention to local matters: ‘If you aren’t in China or elsewhere, come to Rhodia. Important things are happening.’ After a first visit, Marker decided to make a film about the strike and secretly started shooting footage in the factory, interviewing workers, trying to involve them directly in the production of the film. The initial result of this effort was À bientôt j’espère, created by Marker, filmmaker Mario Marret and the SLON team. The film not only provides an account of the strikers’ concerns about working conditions, but also shows how they attempted to escape from their imposed identity, by laying claim to experiences deemed inaccessible and inappropriate to them: culture, education, communication. However, when the film was first shown to the strikers, they expressed a certain dissatisfaction toward it, finding it altogether too bleak, because it lacked perspective, and too romantic because it showed militants and strikes, while skipping over the preparation for the strikes and the training of the militants, which were considered the most important aspects of militant activism in factories. One of the workers, Pol Cèbe, told Marker:
Maybe you believe that audiovisual lan guage, like written language, requires years of study, but we are convinced that this is not the case… We have so many things to say and we have a new way to say it, a new medium, a new weapon. 4 Responding to the criticism, Marker replied that the cinematic representation and expression of the working class should indeed be taken up by the workers themselves, from the inside of the struggle, not by well-meaning explorers coming from the outside. The only way to represent ‘the people’ without relying on the hallowed forms and customs that keep them in their place, so it seemed, was to provide them with their own means of representation. This would be the starting point for a longstanding collaborative effort between filmmakers and workers dedicated to fostering a cinéma ouvrier. They named themselves the Medvedkin Group, after the Soviet director Alexander Medvedkin, who in 1932 had travelled around the Soviet Union in a specially equipped ‘ciné-train’. Starting with Classe de lutte (1968), the collective initiated a model of filmmaking that aimed to annul the division between expert and amateur, producer and consumer, a model that would last in Besançon for almost five years before spreading to other places in France and beyond. The aim was no longer to simply produce militant films about the workers’ conditions, but a militant workers’ film, expressing, as Marker commented, a ‘change of consciousness’, incited by a desire ‘to learn how to see’. LEARNING TO SEE For others, however, the challenge was not to make films about the process of ‘learning how to see’, but to make this 4 Trevor Stark, ‘Cinema in the Hands of the People: Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant Film’, October 139, Winter 2012
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process itself inherent to the production and reception of films. ‘It is not enough to do what Chris Marker did at Rhodiaceta – what The New York Times and Le Monde call “information”. We must rise above sensible knowledge and fight to make it rational knowledge… It implies a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.’ This quote, ripe with Marxist axioms, is taken from Pravda (1970), one of the films that Godard made with Jean-Pierre Gorin as the Dziga Vertov Group, undoubtedly the best-known proponent of the so-called ‘blackboard films’. For these filmmakers, it did not suffice to ‘start from zero’ and explore new sensible forms for new content: it was necessary to ‘return to zero’,5 to go back to the blackboard and start learning all over again, to rediscover the meaning of the ‘simplest’ acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading. This radical-regressive tendency took flight in France, where filmmakers and critics were looking for new tools of inspiration in the theoretical raids that had been traversing the discursive landscape since the beginning of the decade, particularly in the guise of Althusserianism, which in its desire to refound Marxism, brought together fairly heterogeneous theories – drawn from psychoanalysis and semiology – under the concept of Structuralism. The most elaborate application of the structural thinking in the field of cinema emerged on the pages of such magazines as Cinéthique and Cahiers du Cinéma which, triggered by the work of the Tel Quel group, started to cultivate a lively debate on problems of ideological criticism and a potentially revolutionary ‘theoretical practice’ in cinema. After 1968, critical thinking in film increasingly found itself in the throes of a mode of reading associated with what Louis Althusser called ‘symptomatic’: a reading that searches for meaning under the surface of things, lifting the 5 Quoted in Le Gai Savoir (1969)
veil of images to reveal the constitutive presuppositions that make them possible in the first place, the underlying logic that determines what can and cannot be seen and thought within its framework. The key word in this period was ‘ideology’, which was considered not simply a lie made up to fool the ignorant, or the inverted reflection of real social relations (as in Marx’s Camera Obscura model), but as a system of representation with its own logic and materiality: a set of images, myths, ideas and concepts that defined how the world was supposed to be experienced or negotiated. The reality put forward through ideology is not the system of the real relations that govern how we live, but our imaginary relationship to the real relations in which we live. What is generally taken for visible self-evidence should in fact be read as a form of encoding, whereby a society or authority legitimates itself by naturalizing itself, by rooting itself in the obviousness of the visible. According to this logic, all films had to be considered ‘political’, because they were always already overdetermined as expressions of the prevailing ideology, merely reproducing the world as it is experienced when filtered through this ideology. In view of a reality which was considered already coded, the challenge for any filmmaker was to break with reproduction or naturalization of reality, to uncover the unconscious mise-en-scène that precedes any cinematic mise-en-scène. As Serge Daney wrote, ‘Realism must always be overcome.’ Truth was put on the side of the signifier, while the signified was put on the side of ideology, or in Lacanian terms, on the side of the imaginary. Everything that involved a direct relationship between the sign and a referential reality, image and appearance, was suspected of being ideological, conforming to the self-evidence of the given. The only possible counter-strategy consisted in creating an awareness
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Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise (1967)
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of the gaps between referent and sign, between what the image represents and how it represents it. It was this idea of disjunction, this breaking up and questioning the apparent unity of cinema by way of a ‘radical separation of elements’ (Brecht), that was at the heart of Godard’s aim to ‘produce films politically’. Political struggles should not merely be made into an object: film itself should be made into an object of struggle and criticism. Godard did not simply want to create or represent an alternative worldview, but to investigate and deconstruct the whole process of signification out of which worldviews are constructed. Starting with La Chinoise (1967), the Althusserian pedagogy of ‘seeing, listening, speaking, reading’ became the basic rule in his playbook, the fundament of his so-called ‘blackboard films’. La Chinoise is a depiction of the ‘children of Marx and Coca-Cola’ who placed cultural concerns at the centre of their revolt in an attempt to rescue everyday life from the clutches of the ‘hidden persuaders’ which had colonized it. But Marxism not only functions as the subject of representation, it is also the principle of representation. While the Marxism represented here is Chinese Maoism as it figured in the Western imagination at the time – symbolized by the two Red books, Mao’s Little Red Book and the student-run Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes – the film’s miseen-scene is constructed according to the basic ideas underlying Althusserianism.6 The rhetoric and stereotypes of Maoism and Marxism are here merely used as a catalogue of images and a repertoire of phrases from which Godard, as always, had sampled various quotes, symbols and objects, setting them up as part of an extensive classroom exercise. Indeed, this is a film in the making, about learning how to see, listen, speak and read the leftist discourses that were pervading 6 See Jacques Rancière’s analysis: ‘Le rouge de la Chinoise’, Trafic 18, spring 1996
Parisian cultural life, at a time when the Cultural Revolution in China served as a projection screen for the hopes and dreams of the radical left, as an exit route to escape the straightjacket of orthodox Marxism. It is also a lesson on how to see and listen with them, as if they were but a set of illustrations and formulas written on a big blackboard. The scenographic setting becomes a classroom, the dialogue a recitation, the voice-over a lecture, the shooting an object lesson, the film-maker a schoolmaster: always the logic of school. This pedagogic principle is the basis for Godard’s ‘militant’ films: only the application of a Marxist analysis of image and sound was able to bring light to all those roaming in the dark. And there could be no semiology without semioclasm: the unified appearance of the audiovisual had to be broken up, the correspondences between sounds, words and images undone, so that they could speak for and against themselves. In Godard’s films, there is hardly any attempt to point out the origins of the sampled elements. There is not even an attempt to question discourses by others, such as Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lotte in Italia (1971), or Brecht’s lesson on the role of intellectuals in the revolution in Tout va bien (1972). It is merely a matter of looking for other elements to put them to the test, rearranging their connections and reframing their meaning. The urgency of learning anew in order to put a halt to the endless circulation of images, to look underneath the surface of images, to read between the lines: this was the inclination that was feverishly developing among the French cinephiles of that time – the post-nouvelle vague moment of structuralism and the golden age of semiology. Political commitment in cinema once again appeared as commitment to form, rather than to revolutionary content. Against the old assumption that there is no ‘responsibility of forms’,
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there could no longer be a representation of politics without critically reflecting on the politics of representation. BEYOND THE SURFACE In reference to Marx and Engels’ Com munist Manifesto, Godard would say, ‘The dominant class creates a world after its own image, but it also creates an image of its world, which it calls a “reflection of reality”.’7 With the idea that the reflection of reality should be considered an ideological construction, a longstanding debate was once again brought to the fore: the debate on realism. For those who were trying to develop a film critical thinking in a Marxist framework, André Bazin’s longstanding legacy of ‘ontological realism’ was no longer of any use. Everything that constituted that paradigm – the notions of continuity and transparency, the epiphany of the ‘sensible real’ – had to be violently renounced. As Godard had already indicated in the scenario of Les Cara biniers (1963), it is not enough to say how things are real: one has to say how things really are. It was this adage, adapted from Bertold Brecht, that was at the heart of the impulse to decipher the world, the desire to look behind the appearance of things. It was Brecht who, back in the 1930’s, had stated: Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the A.E.G. tells us next to nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reifica tion of human relations – the factory, say – means that they are no longer explicit. So something must in fact be built up, something artificial, posed.8
7 Godard quoted in James Roy McBean, ‘See You at Mao: Godard’s Revolutionary British Sounds’, Film Quarterly, 1970-71, pp15-23 8 Bertold Brecht, quoted by Walter Benjamin (1931)
Brecht’s ideas on realism as the exposure of a society’s causal network and dominant order had already been used as a reference in the film criticism of the 1940s and ’50s, even – mediated by the work of Joseph Losey – in the Cahiers du Cinéma. Throughout the first half of the 1960s, however, another interpretation of Brecht’s ideas would hold sway, one less concerned with film as an art of perception than film as a system of signification. The main inspiration from this turn came from Althusser and Roland Barthes, who treated Brecht’s views as a counterpoint for the primacy of psychology and identification in art, which was considered part and parcel of the bourgeois worldview. It had never been Brecht’s intention to condemn the lies displayed by art, but rather to call attention to the ways in which art can demonstrate to spectators the workings of a society that lies beyond them, and invite them to take part in its transformation. What is stigmatized is the illusion, which tends to present reality as a natural and unproblematic given and which keeps the spectators in a state of passivity, ‘hanging up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom’. An active spectator should refuse identification and remain at a distance, to be able to assess the causes and remedies for the injustices suffered. The mirror of transparent myths in which a society can recognise itself first has to be broken, before it can really learn to know and change itself. In Mythologies (1957), Barthes uses Brecht’s critique of mystification and identification to point out the shortcomings in Eli Kazan’s On the Waterfront, especially in its final scenes when, after having exposed the violence and the corruption of the workers’ union, Marlon Brando’s character decides to go back to work and give himself over to the exploitative system. Barthes wrote: If there ever was one, here is a case where we should apply the method of
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Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Othon
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demystification that Brecht proposes and examine the consequences of our identification with the film’s lead ing character... It is the participatory nature of this scene which objectively makes it an episode of mystification... Now it is precisely against the danger of such mechanisms that Brecht proposed his method of alienation. Brecht would have asked Brando to show his naïveté, to make us understand that, despite the sympathy we may have for his misfor tunes, it is even more important to per ceive their causes and their remedies.9 Similarly, in Brecht’s famous Mother Courage, what is shown in the play is not so much the suffering of a mother figure, but the result of a failure to come to grips with her historical situation. As spectators, we participate in her blindness at the same time as we are made aware of it. As Barthes once observed (in reference to Charlie Chaplin’s films), to see someone else not seeing is the best way to intensely see what he or she does not see. Staging events in such a way that what had seemed natural and immutable is revealed as historical and thus changeable: this is what Brecht called the Verfremdungsef fekt. As a derivative of the Marxist theory of alienation, the formalist notion of oestranenie and the surrealist practice of errance, this strategy consists of ‘turning the object of which one is made aware, to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar and immediately accessible into something peculiar, striking and unexpected’. In essence, it is an effect of displacement, the establishment of a gap between what is on show and how it is experienced and interpreted – or in semiotic terms, between signified and signifier – in order to demystify its apparent inevitability and appropriateness and draw attention to its own artifice, rather than attempting to conceal it. It is an idea that runs through Godard’s 9 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957, pp. 68–69
films of the 1960s and early ’70s, as well as films by Harun Farocki (Inex tinguishable Fire, 1969), Nagisa Oshima (Death By Hanging, 1968) and Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, to name a few. The work of Straub & Huillet is particularly affiliated with Barthes’s interpretation of the verfremdungseffect, according to which actors should speak their lines as verse instead of attempting to make formal and ordered language appear as the natural expression of psychological states. Barthes cites with approval Brecht’s idea that the actor should speak his or her part not as if he were living or improvising it, but ‘like a quotation’. It is this principle of embodied storytelling, of ‘acting out’, that Straub & Huillet have always applied to their films. The title of their first film, Nicht versöhnt (1965), can be read as a Brechtian axiom par excellence: existing divisions and contradictions are not to be reconciled - on the contrary, they should be exposed and accentuated. Inspired by Brecht, Barthes wrote that ‘class division has its inevitable counterpart in a division of meanings, and class struggle has its equally inevitable counterpart in a division of a war of meanings: as long as there is class struggle (national or international), the division of the axiomatic field will be inexpiable.’ 10 This war of meanings is what was at stake in the pedagogical space of the ‘blackboard’ cinema of the 1968 generation. As discourse is always a space of conflict and a form of violence, it has to be unveiled and disclosed as dialectical contradiction, acted out in the form of sheer non-reconciliation – for in contradiction lies the hope. For Straub & Huillet, dialectics meant ‘dividing one into two’, rather than ‘combining two into one’. This is apparent in the mise-en– scène, in which there is always a colli10 Roland Barthes, ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’, 1971
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sion between what is seen and what is heard, between past and present (what Straub called a ‘science-fiction effect’), between words taken from existing literary texts, how those words resonate and those who say them. In Othon (1969), for example, Pierre Corneille’s eponymous text is recited on Mount Palatine, among the ruins of ancient Rome, in full view of the contemporary cityscape of the Italian capital, by a predominantly Italian cast, dressed in traditional togas. In this way, the film sets up a system of gaps and displacements, transgressing numerous historical, geographical and linguistic boundaries in order to unfold a genealogical trajectory of European power structures, from the modern city of Rome, to France in the era of the Grand Siècle, to the ancient Roman Empire. To the 1968 generation, the Straubs suggested that the question of power and class relations was a lot older than imagined. Didn’t the first sentence in the Commu nist Manifesto already state that ‘The history of mankind is the history of class struggle.’? When Othon was released in France, it was heavily criticized in certain leftist circles as an abject film, not only because of the unusual setting and diction (‘the worst recitation in a school context’, wrote a critic), but mainly because of its incapacity to ‘adapt’ and enlighten a historical text for spectators in the present, instead translating it into an incomprehensible film in which no political message could be found. The response of the Cahiers critics was that films such as Othon, as well as Sotto il segno dello Scorpione by the Taviano brothers, Yoshishige Yoshida‘s Eros + Massacre, or Robert Kramer’s Ice – films that had been vigorously defended on the pages of Cahiers – were to be considered political precisely because they were not satisfied with the pure and simple delivery of a straightforward political message. Rather, they ‘start at the beginning (which is also one of the conditions of political analysis) and
carry out on their very materiality – that of the signifiers they put into play, as well as that of the conditions and means of production of these signifiers – a scriptural work which, as such, constitutes political work.’11 In other words, political cinema has to start from its own materiality, examine its own means and conditions of existence, and reveal rather than hide the work which has gone into its making, as well as its production of meaning. Only by refusing the effects of recognition and transparency, by criticizing the illusions of consciousness and unravelling its real material conditions and contradictions, can cinema activate the spectator, prompting him to start where the film ends, completing what it has left unfinished. POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION Can a revolutionary film be made without criticizing the dominant forms of representation? This question, at the core of the many debates on militant cinema, became explicit in the discussion over two French films released in 1972: the Dziga Vertov Group’s Tout va Bien and Marin Karmitz’ Coup pour Coup. The similarity between the two films is striking. Both proposed an account of the class struggle which was stirring in France four years after 1968, complete with factory occupation and sequestration, but in contrast to the various ‘direct’ documentations of particular uprisings and strikes, the filmmakers chose fictional forms with which to depict the workers’ revolt. Additionally, the filmmakers, who shared similar political sympathies which leaned towards Marxist-Leninism, chose to produce and distribute the films through conventional channels rather than the various parallel circuits that had been set up in previous years. So the difference between the two films 11 Jean-Louis Comolli, Film/politique (2) L’Aveu: 13 proposi tions, Cahiers du Cinéma 224, October 1970
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could not be found in the choice of subject or diffusion, but in their formal approach. What characterized Coup pour Coup was an adherence to what Althusserians referred to as a ‘spontaneous ideology’. Karmitz chose to ask real workers to ‘act’ out their actual life in a ‘natural’ way, and filmed them in a dispositive that put the spectator in the heat of the struggle, directly ‘amongst the people’. At last, commented advocates of the film, a voice was given to the people. For once, the working class was shown in their own environment, which is to say in the place of production, exploitation and repression. For once, by reflecting the concrete manifestations of the proletarian class, a film actually provided sensible knowledge of capitalist social relations. As an enthusiast wrote, ‘Confidence was given to the experience and the naturalness of the workers, and that paid off well: life is revealed in all its truth and intensity.’ According to the critics of the film, however, the idea that there was an actual ‘truth’ to capture and communicate through images and sounds completely ignored the fact that truth is not inherent in things, but alludes to a relationship of conformity between an object and its knowledge, between a reality and its reflection. As this relationship is always part of an ideological process, it does not suffice to produce sensible knowledge of capitalist social relations and proletarian class struggles. It is necessary to go beyond that and create rational knowledge of the internal laws of this process. These critics challenged the assumption that a redoubling of reality gives way to an active reflection of that reality: it is not because the reflection of reality on the screen is antagonistic to the dominant vision that they have revolutionary value. Making a film from the point of view of the working class should not be confounded with giving voice to the workers. It can never be an end in itself. To leave things at the level of appearances, of
the sensible, only affirms the ‘cult of spontaneity’ and leaves the dominant ideology unchallenged. Furthermore, as Daney suggested, ‘naturalising’ also implies a denial and an effacement of the dialectics of exclusion that lie at the heart of the dominant order. Naturalism is the game of readjustment where those such as young people, immigrants and peasants who were previously forbidden from making films and were never seen on the screen are now suddenly included in fiction films as though they had always been part of them. They are ‘naturalized’ in every sense of the word, recognized by the law, made normal, natural and legal, and accede to a sort of ‘iconic dignity’. but what is glossed over in this process ... is how and why they break into the story.12 Naturalism – always the bête noire of the Cahiers at the time - is thus seen as a point of view and a way of filming that renders natural what is in fact not. According to the same critics, this tendency towards naturalism in Coup pour Coup is confirmed by Karmitz’ “typecasting” decision to give the roles of the other characters – the bosses and the union delegates – to professional actors, conforming to the idea of everyone in his or her place, in harmony with their ‘nature’, with ‘the way people are’. Class struggle is neither represented nor suppressed, it is simply taxonomlzed. Karmitz essentially reasserts a capitalist division of work, founded on a simplified analysis of class struggle based on relations of repression and resistance. As he himself explained, ‘The form of the film is conditioned by the contrast between repression and resistance. Everything is based on that.’ Godard and Gorin, on the other hand, opposed this mise-en-scene of workers playing their ‘natural’ roles by working with professional actors: 12 Serge Daney, Pascal Kane, Jean-Pierre Oudart, Serge Toubiana, ‘Une certaine tendance du cinema français’, Cahiers du Cinema 257, May-June 1975.
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The militants who distrust actors ask workers to play their proper role. Traditional cinema takes big stars and makes them play the roles of proletari ans. We think that, in the present situa tion, a worker who plays like Jean Ga bin cannot embody his condition but only recount himself. So we have taken actors to play the roles of workers, but downtrodden and exploited actors, who feel the class struggle in their stomach. That has permitted us, by putting them in a correct situation, to really oppose them to the actors representing the chieftains. 13 This choice was rooted in a desire to highlight the contradictions between the status of actors and the social roles that fiction traditionally assigns to them. Casting the well-known French actor Yves Montand, for example, was not based on his natural tendency towards ‘repression’, but because of the dominant idea that actors should stick to their characters. It is precisely because Montand is perfectly able to embody a worker with a flair for spontaneity that they did not ask him to do so. For Godard and Gorin, one cannot transform actors into workers and workers into actors without asking what has to be transformed. Before representing classes, one has to reflect on the ideological conception of that representation, because there is already a dominant idea on how to depict class models, in their way of being, moving and talking. Exploring the theme of class struggle to destroy this idea does not hold up. Rather, the struggle itself has to traverse the work on the film; it has to be extended through cinema. The point of Tout va bien, whose miseen-scene is clearly inspired by Brecht’s lehrstücke (an attentive critic called the film ‘the Sesame Street of political radicalism’), is to take up the contradictions that are left unspoken in Coup 13 Jean-Luc Godard in Nouvel Observateur 388, April 1972
pour Coup – between the practice of cinema and the practice of politics, between the status of workers and the status of actors – in order to make them ‘productive’. This is also why Karmitz was criticized for not using the recordings of the discussions between members of the film crew and the actors before and during the shooting: instead of developing an active reflection of the working process, he chose to give the film a sense of authenticity, covering up what is at stake in the contradiction between politics and cinema. Both Tout va Bien and Coup pour Coup essentially started from the same assumption: that one has to know the world, reveal the reality under the surface of things, in order to be able to transform it. While the first chose to create a reflection of reality, the second chose to expose the reality of reflection. While the first chose to revive a specific struggle and reproduce a sensible perception under the watchful eye of the camera, the second chose to put to work a rational reflection on the internal laws of the struggle. Why else has Marxist thought broken with the notion of contemplation? A film too, it was said, should intervene. BEHIND THE FIRING LINES In Vent d’Est, another film by the Dziga Vertov Group, there is a sequence in which Glauber Rocha stands at a dusty crossroads, with arms outstretched. A young woman with a movie camera goes up to him and says, ‘Excuse me for interrupting your class struggle, but could you please show me the way towards political cinema?’ Rocha points in front of him, then behind and to his left and says, ‘That way is the cinema of aesthetic adventure and philosophical inquiry, while this way is Third World cinema – a dangerous cinema, divine and marvellous, where the questions are practical ones...’ Rocha puts forward what was felt to be
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the main difference between the European ‘counter-cinema’ and the so-called Third World cinema - which is in itself anything but a stable phenomenon. While, for European filmmakers, it seemed in the first place to be a matter of radically opposing, or even, as Godard mentioned to Rocha, ‘destroying’ the industrially and ideologically dominant cinema, for many filmmakers in the Third World, it was not a matter of destruction, but of invention, as a way to escape the stranglehold of (neo)colonization, repression, censorship and underdevelopment. Although Rocha, one of the pioneering filmmakers of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, always expressed a strong admiration for Godard, he was also aware of the deep gap between them: Godard sums up all the questions of today’s European intellectuals: is making art worthwhile? The question is an old one… And that is what is so annoying in Europe today: the issue of the usefulness of art is old, but it is in fashion, and, in cinema, it is up to Godard alone to come to grips with the crisis. Godard is what Solanas is to us in Buenos Aires. The truth, however, whether our intellectual fellow-coun trymen want to hear it or not, is that European and American cinema has gone up a road without hope, and it is only in the Third World countries that there is a way left to make cinema.14 For Godard, Rocha laconically notes, cinema was over and done with. For filmmakers in the Third World, it was just beginning: ‘Godard & Co. are above zero. We are below zero.’ Some of the most prolific explorers of these new beginnings could undoubtedly be found in Latin America, where filmmakers offered arguments for a cine de liberacion, for cine imperfecto, for an ‘aesthetic of hunger’, a ‘third’ or ‘triccontinental’ cinema of decoloniza14 Rocha, ‘O último escândalo de Godard’, Manchete 928, 31 January 1970
tion – all terms that have since framed many debates on political cinema and have become part of the rhetoric of resistance against imperialist oppression, and for the empowerment of the people in the Third World. All these filmmakers were grappling with the rise of nationalism and militancy in the aftermath of several political and social incidents that had erupted throughout the continent, from the unfinished workers’ revolution in Bolivia in 1952 to the military overthrow of Argentina’s President Perón in 1955, and, most significantly, the guerrilla war in Cuba, which led to the establishment of a socialist regime in 1959. It was not only the Cinema novo filmmakers, but also Jorge Sanjinés and the Ukamau group in Bolivia, Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutierrez Alea in Cuba, Miguel Littín, Raúl Ruíz and Patricio Guzmán in Chile, and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in Argentina: they all expressed the need for thinking about cinema as a social instrument, as a weapon in the struggle for national liberation and cultural transformation – ‘with an idea in one´s head and a camera in one´s hand’. ‘We must discuss, we must invent...’ It was this quote by Frantz Fanon that opened the manifesto ‘Toward a Third Cinema’ (1969), written by Solanas and Getino, who in the same year also released La Hora de los Hornos (Hour of the Furnaces), a didactic film fresco produced clandestinely under the Péron regime and signed by the Cine Liberación Group. In the manifesto, arguably the most influential articulation of Third World cinema, Solanas and Getino follow Fanon’s lead and argue that cinema should be ‘placed first at the service of life itself, ahead of art; dissolve aesthetics in the life of society’. Its objective was nothing short of a ‘decolonization of the mind’. In line with the thinking of the Russian avant-gardes of the 1920s, and Eisenstein in particular, according to whom
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films had to ‘plough the mind of the viewer’, cinema not only had to contribute to the development of a new radical consciousness, but should also be instrumental in the revolutionary transformation of society, as a means to an end. According to Rocha, however, revolutionary cinema should be seen as more than a simple instrument that could supposedly push spectators into the path of political consciousness and action: The artist must demand a precise identi fication of what revolutionary art at the service of political activism actually is, of what revolutionary art thrown into the spaces opened up to new discus sions is, and of what revolutionary art by the left and operated by the right is. As an example of the first case, I, as a man of film, cite La hora de los hornos, a film by the Argentine Fernando Sola nas. It is typical of the pamphlets of information, agitation and controversy that are currently being used by politi cal activists around the world. 15 To illustrate the second case, Rocha suggested his own films, which are not composed as theoretical guides for action, but rather as attempts to break with what he saw as bourgeois rationalism and the colonial logics of representation, induced as they were by exotic primitivism and social miserabilism. Rocha claimed that the work of Godard and Solanas, which basically consists of opposing an oppressive logic with a revolutionary one, does not allow for a way out of the deadlocks imposed by imperialism and capitalism. For him, revolution could only be accomplished as a form of anti-reason and irrationalism: ‘Revolutionary art must be magic, capable of bewitching man to such a degree that he can no longer stand to live in this absurd reality.’ The hopelessness of reality could only be overcome through enchant15 Glauber Rocha, ‘Aesthetic of Dream’, presented at Columbia University in 1971
ment; freedom could only be devised through popular mysticism (in favor of ideological demystification), something he saw arising from the historical relationship between religion, folklore and rebellion. This interest in breaking the course of history and advocating some kind of return to the past – not unlike Walter Benjamin’s ‘tiger’s leap into the past’ – was not only something that Rocha shared with the Straubs (Rocha organized screenings of Othon in Brazil, while Straub spoke highly of Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes, from 1969), but even more so with Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose work is also characterized by a certain regression towards religious themes and irrational impulses. There has always been a fraternal, yet heated dialogue between the two filmmakers. Rocha criticized Pasolini’s depiction of the Third World, which he saw as merely an alibi for perversion. Pasolini accused Rocha of having succumbed, as had Godard & Straub, to the blackmail of a certain leftist thinking which prescribed a radical subversion of representation and a conscious frustration of the spectator’s expectations. What is it that Godard, the Straubs and Rocha are supposed to have in common? According to Pasolini, through their boundless provocation and transgression of cinematic codes, their ‘unpopular’ films at the same time render themselves as agent provoca teurs, martyrs and victims: the search for freedom from repression had led to a suicidal intoxication and didactic self-exclusion, veering violently towards the negation of cinema. For Pasolini, who was a great admirer of Christian Metz’ semiology of cinema, there was no doubt that an infraction of the codes is a necessary condition for invention – after all, the first step towards liberation is to let go of certainties and open up to the unknown. But it also implies a refraction of self-preservation, one that opens the way to self-destruc-
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Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino & Grupo Cine Liberaci贸n, La hora de los hornos (1968)
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tion. When the codes are too violently violated, when the front lines of transgression and invention are crossed too far behind the firing line, there comes a point when the codes can be recuperated for endless possibilities of modification and expansion, and any notion of struggle ends up being neutralized. This is when the struggle is no longer fought on the barricades, but on the other side, behind vacated enemy lines, at which point the enemy has disappeared, because he is fighting elsewhere. ‘What is important,’ wrote Pasolini, ‘is not the moment of the realization of invention, but the moment of invention. Permanent invention, continual struggle.’16 THE END OF A BEGINNING Where lines crossed? Isn’t that what happened when the ‘new waves’ of the 1960’s, in their insatiable thirst for freedom, got caught up in the well-intended games of decoding and deconstruction, when the liberties attained led to an endless search for signification, to a point where there was no more sense to give? The new waves had established an adventurous cinematic space of transversals and transgressions, where codes were cut loose from their moorings, images and sounds were set free from their bondage, where drifting took the place of wondering and iconoclasm replaced scandal. Still, it was only a matter of time before the freedom of representation would become a suspension of representation altogether, when the screen was turned into a blackboard, and the art of showing became an act of endlessly revealing. Godard’s work is undoubtedly the best example of this evolution: from the playful liberations of his first films to the Althusserian experiments of La Chinoise and the critical didacticism of the Dziga Vertov Group. In the end, critical cinema was turned on itself, 16 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The Unpopular Cinema’, 1970.
taking “refuge in its own negation. hoping to survive through its death” (Adorno). This impasse is what is at stake in Ici et Ailleurs. The story is well known: in 1970, a year after Yasser Arafat was elected leader of the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Godard and Gorin were invited to make a film in support of the Palestinian struggle. They were not the only ones. Around the same time, other collectives and filmmakers, including Pacific Newsreel, Groupe Cinéma Vincennes, Francis Reusser, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (delegate of the French Maoist party), and Masao Adachi & Kôji Wakamatsu (associated with the Japanese Red Army) also travelled to Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Jordan and the West Bank to record the realities of the struggle. Just a year earlier, the Palestine Cinema Unit, founded under the aegis of three pioneers, Hany Jawhariyya, Sulafa Jadallah and Mustapha Abu Ali, had made the first militant films against Israeli colonization. The aim of Godard and Gorin’s film, initially entitled Until Victory, was to ‘understand the thought and working methods of the Palestinian revolution’. Before travelling to Palestine, they had put together a storyboard that systematically conceived the path towards revolution: the people’s will + the armed struggle = people’s war + political work = the education of the people + people’s logic = the protracted war, until victory. But just a few weeks after the filming, which took place between March and August 1970, Black September happened: Jordan’s King Hussein decided to wage war on the PLO, resulting in the massacre of thousands of Palestinians. Confronted with the death of many of the film’s collaborators and growing antagonism within the Arab population, Godard was forced to rethink the concept of the project, a challenge that became even more daunting in light of the events that took place during the 1972 Summer
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Chris Marker, Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977)
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Olympics in Munich. It took him over five years to find a configuration for the images and sounds they had gathered, five years to come up with a response to the question of how to make sense of the gaps between intention and reality, commitment and failure, then and now, here and there. Godard, together with Anne-Marie Miéville, did what he had always done: take the question and put it at the heart of the film. The film turned into a moving mournful reflection on the impossibility of a filmmaker to intervene in political struggles, and the difficulty of escaping the endless chains of images and sounds in which we are all caught up. Godard bemoaned how self-proclaimed militant films, despite good intentions, tend to ‘put the sound too loud’, always covering up the sound of one voice with that of another, obscuring what really is there to see in the images. As part of a vigorous auto-critique, the film exposes the cinematic trickeries by which we just love to be fooled: how images always deceive us, how sounds always hide something else, how we are to learn to read the signs. The desire to put a halt to the circulation of sounds and images ends up being a lamentation for the end of a certain belief in the power of cinema, accompanying the end of a belief in any change whatsoever. The act of mourning the failure of the Palestinian revolution becomes an allegory for the failure of all revolutions. The end of the leftist era is also depicted in another film that came out around the same time: John Douglas & Robert Kramer’s Milestones. The film portrays the demise of the oppositional movements from the inside, something which both filmmakers, as former members of the Newsreel collective, had experienced first hand. At the end of the 1960s, both had worked on various films denouncing American imperialism, including People’s War, which
aimed to give a view on the Vietnam war from the perspective of partisans in North Vietnam. Kramer had already made a trilogy of films – In the Coun try (1966), The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969) – which explored the limits of a collective desire for revolution and armed struggle. Milestones was an attempt to grasp what had happened to these militant desires once those limits had been reached, and they were redirected towards the exploration of new communal forms. As Kramer said: A lot of people say that the ‘70s are like a time of falling away from political militancy. There is a sense in which that is true – if emphasis is put on the word militant and a strong, sustained confrontation with the powers that be. But there is another sense in which that is not true, because we came to a dead end, and it seemed as though we could not continue to be militant in that same way.17 Kramer & Douglas’s Milestones wanted to make ‘a film about rebirth’, providing a mirror for all those who had been involved in the struggles to look into and evaluate themselves, in order to go further. In a sense, it was not only the rebirth of certain militant ideas and energies that was at stake, but the rebirth of a certain cinema, a cinema of myth and dream, a cinema steeped in tradition and history. Is it any wonder that at the end of their ‘naive’ red period, the Cahiers du Cinéma celebrated the film as a ‘positive’ example of a new militant cinema? Tired of their own dogmatism and voluntarism, exhausted from the terror of the significant, the Cahiers once again turned to their roots, to Bazin and his concern for morality, to American cinema and its mavericks (a few months later Monte Hellman’s Two-lane Blacktop was heralded for its refutation of “the old cine17 G. Roy Levin, ‘Reclaiming our Past, Reclaiming our Beginning, interview with Robert Kramer and John Douglas’, Jump Cut 10-11, 1976
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ma of acute difference and fatal necessity”18). As a sort of counterweight for Ici et Ailleurs, which problematizes any possible reflection on militant history by confronting all discourse with its own lies, Milestones attempted to make the militant left tell its own story, by returning to the foundations of classic American cinema: the travelogue, the Western, the communitarianism of John Ford and Anthony Mann. A strange ‘return of the repressed’. But hadn’t Passolini seen it coming all along: ‘Excessive transgression of the code can only lead to a nostalgia for it’? THE FIRE NEXT TIME ‘The dream is over,’ a voice tells us at the end of Chris Marker’s Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977). When the smoke had cleared, all leftist resolve seemed to have withered away. In France, Chile, Portugal and elsewhere, revolutionary movements fizzled into rupture and defeat. In Italy and Germany, the hopes of the radical left collapsed in 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 had turned in on themselves, mourning for a sense of togetherness that had 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 that 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 18 Pascal Bonitzer , ‘Lignes et voies : (Macadam à deux voies)’, Cahiers du cinema 266-267, May 1976.
hardly change the world; it could only give rise to cruelty and catastrophe. History was identified as an enormous, catastrophic ruin, perpetually piling wreckage upon wreckage. The memory of the Gulags dissolved all memories of revolution, just as the memory of the Shoah had replaced remembrance of antifascism. In claiming to have delivered us from the ‘fatal abstractions’ inspired by the radical ideologies of the past, Western capitalism and its political system of 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.’ In 1977, the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 set a gruesome series of events in motion, the Bologna uprising and the Egyptian Bread Riots collapsed violently, and Margaret Thatcher’s re-initiation of privatization announced the neoliberal turn. In 1977, the Sex Pistols gave voice to the ‘No Future’ generation, Jean-François Lyotard wrote the first draft of La Condition Postmoderne, and former Marxists Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann declared the impossibility of all revolutions. In 1977, Chris Marker presented the first version of his requiem for the revolutionary era (Le fond de l’air est rouge), Robert Kramer documented the aftermath of the last revolution in 20th-century Europe (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal) and Robert Bresson made his portrait of the lost generation of post-May ’68 (Le Diable Probablement). According to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this was a generation that rejected every form of commitment, ‘because commitment for the film’s young characters – whom Bresson seems to understand so well – is mainly an escape into an “occupation” which keeps that commitment
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alive, an escape from the awareness that everything goes on regardless of you and your commitment.’19
called ‘militant’ or ‘political’ film had disappeared in the shadows of a bygone time that was best left to forgetfulness. In 1977, Daney explained why Cahiers du Cinéma, after having abandoned the ideological critique of the ‘non-legendary years’, too lost interest in the familiar models of militant cinema:
A year later, Fassbinder would create his own vision of this ‘third generation’, coming after those who had dreamed of changing the world and those who had faded into violence, a generation ‘which simply acts without thinking, which has neither a policy nor an ideology, and which, certainly without realizing it, lets itself be manipulated by others, like a bunch of puppets’. After the collapse of utopian rebellion into desperate dystopia, all that seemed to be left was an overwhelming sense of bitterness and nihilism. Nothing but lost illusions, utopias gone wrong, ruins amidst the ruins. As if despair, as Godard mentioned in Numero deux, became ‘the ultimate form of criticism’.
It is because it failed to furnish this imaginary encounter with the people, because there were nothing but sectar ian films, made hastily by people who didn’t care about cinema… Today I think that militant films have the same defect as militant groups – they have the Mania of the All: each film is total, all-inclusive. A true militant cinema would be a cinema which militated as cinema, where one film would make you want to see a hundred others on the same subject. 20
At the same time that the leftist era crumbled under the weight of historical fatality, a certain utopia of cinema was believed to have come to an end. Serge Daney once claimed that Pasolini’s death in November 1975 – a few weeks before the release of Salò, which was his own personal cry of desperation – marked the point when cinema stopped playing the role of sorcerer’s apprentice and became a consensual landscape, instead of the space for division and confrontation that it used to be. The politicization of cinema – whether in content or in form – that had been associated with the upheavals and the hopes of the 1960s and ’70s, gave way to a general feeling of disillusionment and powerlessness. Just as the failure of the October Revolution had accompanied the end of the utopia of cinema as a mystical marriage between art and science, poetics and community, the implosion of leftist dreams accompanied the dissolution of the idea of cinema as a realm of discord or a weapon in the struggle. What had once been
After the deluge, with the disappearance of the material reality of the struggles and the horizons that gave them meaning, the existing forms of ‘militant’ cinema could no longer be sustained. Straub & Huillet shifted their dialectical dispositive to a lyrical one (Dalla Nuba alla Resistenza, 1978). Rocha put his remaining energies into a self-destructing anti-symphony (A Idade da Terra, 1980). Oshima’s Brechtian articulations of revolutionary desire in the light of political repression gave way to portrayals of the exasperation and impotence of desire (Ai no corrida, 1976). As if desire could no longer be thought of as a mode of resistance, but only one of escapism: is this not the sentiment that has been haunting us since the end of the 1970s? The overflow of democratic mass individualism, that which the 1968 generation was supposedly seeking all along, has allegedly culminated in an infinite drift of narcissistic consumers who do not care for anything but the instant satisfaction of their own needs and
19 Rainer Werner Fassbinder interviewed by Christian Brad Thomson
20 Serge Daney in conversation with Bill Krohn (1977)
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desires: this is the narrative that the contemporary left has embraced. The same criticism that used to denounce the society of the spectacle and the mythology of consumer ideologies in view of possible change had started to turn on itself, trapping itself in an endless vicious cycle in which the power of the market can no longer be distinguished from the power of its denunciation. As if everything equals everything else, and all resistance is futile. As if we are now all political realists, stuck in an endless refrain of consensual melodies, stuck with the ‘way things are’, this ‘natural order of things’ that the character of Ned Beaty so vigorously evangelized in Network (1976). ‘But we can not continue much longer on the way of disillusion’, wrote Daney towards the end of his life. Despite his growing disenchantment with the dissolution of the cinema that he had so much cared for, the ciné-fils still put his wager on optimism. ‘Between the spectacle and the lack of images, is there a place for “art to live with images”, at the same time demanding them to be “humanly” comprehensive (to better know 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 in-human, startling, ambiguous, on the verge?21’ With Daney, we can ask how we might gain a renewed trust in the power of the image. How can we get out of the fatalistic scepticism that the ‘society of disdain’ has bestowed on us? Can the history of militant cinema, beyond all rhetoric, still infuse us with a much-needed sense of risk, adventure and emancipatory potential? It is clear to us now that the belief in the causal relations between affection, understanding and action, which once provided the basic foundation for militant 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 that arises 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. The challenge, then, is to break with this dominant discourse that tells us that any notion of politics is constantly undermined by disillusionment. Now that cinema, being unsure of its own politics, is once again encouraged to intervene in the absence of the proper political, the question is how it can generate a new power of affirmation, one that is consistent 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?
21 Serge Daney, L’exercice a été profitable, monsieur, P.O.L, 1993, p. 210
Notes on Militant Cinema (1967-1977)
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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS ‘O ÚLTIMO ESCÂNDALO DE GODARD’ IN MANCHETE, N. 928, 31 JANUARY 1970. This year’s talk of the town will be Vent d’est, the latest film by Jean-Luc Godard, made after Le gai savoir and before Pravda. An Italian film. Still a complete mystery. This grande fofoca is possibly of the same stature as La dolce vita. Cineriz, a big distributor associated with Rizzoli publishers, has paid an advance of one hundred thousand dollars to producer Gianni Barcelloni for a “western in colour written by Cohn-Bendit, directed by Jean-Luc Godard and featuring Gian-Maria Volonté”. Does the film meet the requirements of Cineriz? I saw the first, secret screening, in the company of the producer and a lawyer. Cineriz, suspecting that the film would have nothing in common with what they expected, are threatening to sue the producers and ask for their money back, but as yet none of them has seen the film, on which subject the craziest jokes are going around. For example, I met this young guy who asked me, “Have you heard? In Godard’s far-west, there are two horses reciting Mao!” Gianni Barcelloni asked me for a cigarette ten minutes into the screening, and while lighting the match, I noticed he was in tears. Next to him, the lawyer kept his lips firmly sealed. At the end of the row of seats, Ettore Rosbuck, a young millionaire with long hair, was wrapped in silence. After ten minutes, the film is still in its first scene, a scene showing a couple a youngsters lying around in the grass, while on the soundtrack we can hear a political discussion, with the sound distorted – “typical Godard”, a specialized snob would say. But the joke stops there. After the first half hour, the lights come on and the lawyer, in a frenzy, says, “I agree with Godard’s words, but this is not a film! Cineriz will sue us!”
So I answered: “Listen, doctor, what technically determines the definition of a film is the length of printed pellicule, sound and image. Scientifically, the film does exist.” The lawyer answered, “I am a practical man. It is the judge who will say that this is not a film.” So I responded to the lawyer, “Sir, there is no legislation that says what a film is, in esthetic terms. If a judge ever ruled that this is not a film, you can appeal.” In the middle of this conversation, the lights go out and an image appears in which Godard, in his protestant pastor’s voice, asks what a film is. The lawyer breaks out in laughter, and Godard continues with an image showing Gian-Maria Volonté on a horse, dragging along the body of an Indian. What is a film? Every day, the bosses ask filmmakers to make films. The boss could be Brezjnev-Mosfilm, or Nixon-Paramount. The scene we are seeing now is typical of a Hollywood western: an officer of the American cavalry torturing an Indian. The scene is repeated, but this time the officer is reading a fashionable revolutionary book. In this scene we see an image and we hear the sound of a progressive film, such as those presented yearly at the festivals in Pesaro or Leipzig: a film that is the same as the reactionary films we’ve seen before, since it shows the same spectacular images, with false content. After that, several other images are shown and numerous questions are asked about militant cinema, always in the spirit of rigorous self-critique. I tell the lawyer, “You have seen it now: the discussion will go far. If the judge behaves like an ass, call Moravia, Lévi-Strauss, Marcuse, Sartre. A Godard film can take a hit: Cineriz would prefer to loose a hundred thousand dollars than to loose face.”
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The lawyer hasn’t heard me, he’s completely fascinated by the film. Barcelloni is praying. Ettore seems possessed by this bestial silence that captures one in the presence of the indecipherability of a genius. More images follow, filled with quotes and discussions, and then the film ends. The lawyer is even more furious now and I say while getting up, “In my opinion, the only problem with the film is that at this time it will not pass the Italian censorship. Other than that, it is as good and as commercial as all the others.” The lawyer calls me an optimist and leaves. I go out with José Antonio Ventura, the film’s sound engineer, and I tell him several things. “The sound editing is brilliant. Godard will end up making a record one day. It is not a political film as Godard usually makes them: it is rather an anarchist film in the line of Artaud and Jarry.” From elsewhere I call Escorel1 and I tell him all that. We ask ourselves if Paul Emilio Salles Gomes2 would like it. Surely. A bit later, still with Ventura, “It’s a bit of a joke. With a hundred thousand dollars, we could have created a film industry in Brazil!” When I reach Gianni, I say, “There is something in the editing of sounds and images, something that irritates me: a bourgeois anarchism, a destructive moralism, something taking itself seriously. What if, Gianni, Bach had put leftist phrases in his music, in order to make himself heard at a music festival? Or if Mondrian had painted leftist legends on his tableaux? Or even in 1 Eduardo Escorel has been a major figure in Brazilian cinema since the 1960s. He edited, amongst others, Rocha’s Terra em Transe (1967) and O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (1969). 2 Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes (1916-1977) was was a leading Brazilian intellectual and film critic. His writings include a biography of Jean Vigo and Cinema: trajetória no subdesen volvimento (Cinema: Trajectory in Underdevelopment).
Brazil, if Tom3 had succumbed to the pressure, and had utilized leftist words for his music? You know, Gianni, I remember when old Nicholas Ray told me in Cannes, “Whenever I see a Godard film, I’m not always interested in the images, which are very beautiful. The big problem with Jean-Luc is that he doesn’t have the courage to speak himself!” Gianni answers, “Jean-Luc, he worries me.” I turn to good old Ventura, “You know, Zé, Godard’s big frustration is that he doesn’t succeed in creating a political climate; he doesn’t dispose of any violence. He always approaches reality in a theoretical way. When he shows the officer of the American military torturing a student, he doesn’t generate any terror. The shot is extremely beautiful, one of the most beautiful shots in cinema, a shot made to make cinephiles swoon.” “That’s right,” consents Zé, “In the scene in which the officer attacks the demonstrator, he wanted to have a brutal scene, and he really asked me to raise the sound, and what remains, as you’ve seen, is this simple scene, almost lyrical.” “But the scene has turned out brilliantly”, I respond to Zé, “because the four camera movements that he made are absolutely unprecedented in film history.” “Yes, really beautiful!”, whispers Zé. “Zé”, I continued, “the more I think about it, the more I’m against the film, because it’s us who are the weak part in it. This film is an instrumentalization of our misery by a French bourgeois who is doing his own thing, explaining Marxism, a subject that I don’t 3 Antônio “Tom” Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim (19271994), also known as Tom Jobim, was a Brazilian songwriter, composer, arranger, singer, and pianist/guitarist. He was a primary force behind the creation of the Bossa Nova style.
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Groupe Dziga Vertov, Le Vent d’est (1970)
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know very well, but I don’t think he understands it either. If a professor of political science were to help out, perhaps that would please him. Having said that, there is something, perhaps this desperate attempt to explain Marxism, that doesn’t respond very well to today’s problems. And then I don’t know… It seems to me that the film is a big joke!” It is useless to continue to describe my reactions to Vent d’Est. In Brazil, when an intellectual doesn’t like a film from the “new cinema”, he says with the tone of a great wise man: “This is not a film!” A film for intellectuals generally obeys the American model, which they have been seeing since childhood and which they place alongside their Oedipus complex: the least provocation, and it’s immediately taken as pretentious idiocy. One day on the beach, an intellectual from Rio told me, “I don’t like El Justicero4 because the camera is always static, and in a comedy, the camera has to move! And in groups, they all behave like babas. The fashionable intellectuals who already have a model of modern cinema in mind, in line with Godard’s work: Vent d’est will freak them out. And to the youngsters who have been imitating Godard for the last five years or so, I address a warning: they should move fast, because in his two next films, Jean-Luc is capable of reinventing everything and even the infernal bazar of tropicalismo won’t help them conceal their old-style soccer game, nor make the goals against the teams of their colleagues. Sadly, it seems, with Vent d’Est, the Godard fashion has come to an end, and it’s Jean-Luc who is ending it himself, horrified by his own brilliance. These are the last words I tell Ventura: 4 El Justicero by Nelson Pereira dos Santos (1967)
“The tragedy is that in all of Latin America, it will be wild imitation all over again, and just as the Africans should show all the white folks the door, we should prevent foreign films from coming to Brazil. Brazilian cinema can only evolve if the audience, the critics and the filmmakers only see Brazilian films. For Godard, cinema is over, and for us, cinema is only beginning. In Brazil, a cameraman like Dib Lufti makes a long shot à la main and the whole world vibrates; if Godard saw that, he would fall to the ground in tears.” In front of this man, skinny, bald, forty years old, I feel like an affectionate aunt who is ashamed to give sweets to a sad nephew. The image is silly, but Godard provokes a great sentiment of affection. Let’s talk seriously: it’s like Bach or Michelangelo eating spaghetti swamped with cockroaches, thinking that it’s not worth painting the Sistine Chapel or composing the Actus Tragicus. Because he is like that, Godard today, more humble than Francis of Assisi, ashamed of his own genius, excusing himself to the whole world, crying like a child when Barcelloni scoffed him, complaining of feeling abandoned, of being a wreck, the glory of being the greatest filmmaker since Eisenstein weighing on his Swiss bourgeois anarcho-right-wing shoulders. Please, let’s stop that. ‘I am only a worker in cinema, so don’t talk to me about cinema: I just want to cause revolutions, help humanity’. There he is, calling the merry May leftist club for help, using production money to pay for a nice holiday in Sicily, leaving Cohn-Bendit and his hysterical Mao-Spontec discussions behind and rushing to Paris to show some excerpts of his film on Czechoslovakia, coming back to Rome out of breath to declare that he doesn’t want to make money with the film, criticizing me of having a producer’s mentality. Then he asks me to help him destroy cinema. I tell him that what I’m into is something else:
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I tell him that my business is creating cinema in Brazil and the Third World. Then he asks me to play a role in the film and if I want to shoot a scene in Vent d’est and – being the old monkey that I am – I tell him to calm down, because I am only there for the adventure and I’m not clownish enough to embark in the gigolo’s collective folklore of the unforgettable French May. To simplify, Godard sums up all the questions of today’s European intellectuals: is art worth making? The question is an old one, Paulo Francis5 would say: Joyce has also destroyed the novel! And that’s what is so annoying in Europe today: the issue of the usefulness of art is old, but it is in fashion and, in cinema, it’s up to Godard alone to come to grips with the crisis. Godard is what Fernando Ezequile Solanas6 is to us in Buenos Aires. The truth, however, whether our intellectual fellow countrymen want to hear it or not, is that European and American cinema has gone up a road without hope, and it’s only in the Third World countries that there is a way left to make cinema. That’s where the crisis resides and why Godard (and co.) has a lot to do with us. In Vent d’est, he asks me what the roads of cinema are, and he himself gives the answer: “That way is the cinema of aesthetic adventure and philosophical inquiry, while this way is the Third World cinema – a dangerous cinema, divine and marvelous, where the questions are practical ones: production, distribution, training three hundred filmmakers to make six hundred films a year for Brazil alone, to supply one of the world’s biggest markets.” I repeat: That is the difference. On the one hand, there is a general exhaustion financed by big capital, and even Godard, in his desperation and as much as he wants to escape it, makes film after 5 Paulo Francis (1930-1997) was a Brazilian journalist, political pundit, novelist and critic. 6 Fernando Ezequile Solanas is an Argentine film director, screenwriter and politician. His films include La hora de los hornos (1968).
film, financed by the system itself that, from its side, doesn’t care if Godard attacks it with all his strength, because cinema is also exhausted and the whole world is collapsing in attendance of the Bomb. Vent d’est is financed by Ettore Rosbuck, and this young man represents Fiat. Because it’s Fiat that has been financing the most anarchist and terrorist films in recent times, and basically Ettore doesn’t care one way or the other, because for him Vent d’est is as inoffensive as any other work of art, and the great beauty of this film is just this: it’s desperate beauty, born – imperceptibly – of the exhausted intelligence of poetry. On the other hand, tired of running, but still devoid of reflection, we are here, we, the others from the Third World, and we ask permission to film. Godard and co. are above zero. We are below zero. We don’t have the big capital to back us up. On the contrary, we have vicious censorship on our backs. We also have an audience that hates our films because it’s drugged out on commercial foreign and national films, and on top of that market, we also have the intellectuals who hate our films because they are drugged out on Godard films, and who hate us because we dare to make films in a country that doesn’t have stars like Gary Cooper and doesn’t speak a language that knows how to say “I love you”. The difference is simply that, and that is why it’s worthwhile, I think, to say one last thing about Godard: The art in Brazil (or any other country in the Third World) makes sense, yes sir! The underdeveloped country that does not have a strong or madly national art is to be pitied, because, without its art, it’s all the weaker (its brain can be colonized), and it’s here that the most dangerous extension of economic colonization can be found. In the specific
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case of cinema, I want to let my colleagues know that they should endure the criticism, the slander and the contempt without wavering, because I am absolutely convinced that Brazilian cinema novo is currently producing images and sounds that are what we can call modern cinema. After seeing Vent d’est, I haven’t said these last words to the lawyer, because that doesn’t interest him, but now I would like to say to everyone, interested or not interested, in the faraway homeland I love so much: I have seen from up close the corpse of Godard, having committed suicide, up there on the screen, projected in 16mm. It was the dead image of colonization. My friends, I have seen the death of colonization! If I have been a privileged Brazilian, my apologies, but by spreading this news, I just want to let it be heard: WE HAVE TO CONTINUE TO MAKE CINEMA IN BRAZIL! Translated by Stoffel Debuysere, with the help of Mari Shields Glauber Rocha’s A Idade da terra will be screened on Sunday 6 April at Courtisane Festival, in the context of the film program Across the Margins, Beyond the Pale (Re-imagining the post-colonial)
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THE TESTAMENT THAT GODARD HAS NEVER WRITTEN Written in 2002. French version published in Le Bus de la révolution passera bientôt près de chez toi, edited by Nicole Brenez and Go Hirasawa (Editions Rouge Profond, 2012) 1 ABOUT THE BLACK SCREEN, ONCE MORE To be honest, until I watched Ici et Ail leurs (Here and Elsewhere), my memory of Godard’s cinema was merged in my head with all the other films of the Nouvelle Vague. They were mixed up in a blurry silhouette that seemed to erupt from a magic lantern. But then again, for those who know Godard’s films, this blur of memories isn’t all that surprising. And yet. While watching Ici et Ailleurs, my vague memories were going in all directions, and every image, every sound was mutating into a tidal wave, sweeping me away from all sides. Was I really watching Ici et Ailleurs, or was it my memory, in which I had buried all those memories and those intimacies, which was forced to open itself like an old book of magic spells with stuck-together pages? I was in the grip of a great confusion. Suddenly, in the middle of this wave of sounds and images, I could not help noticing once more that my memories of Godard and his group were above all tied to their force as militants, their capacity to evoke the agonies of their contemporaries. Ici et Ailleurs manifests a spirit that we shared with comrades all over the world, mobilized as we were by the march towards the creation of a new world. The film recounts the shadows of the historical time and space as we lived it back then. It is an account that demonstrates the painful road travelled by those who marched without halt in the middle of those shadows, towards a confiscated goal.
It is often said that Godard continued on this road with several other films, but it is above all in Ici et Ailleurs that he tried, through his own desperation, to narrate the problems of a whole era. In his inability to let himself whither away because of this desperation, he has left us this ultimate letter, addressed to all those who will survive him, a sort of “testament”. Twenty-seven years after being made, not a single word has aged. On the contrary, I think that these are words that resonate in the most lively way possible in today’s world, in 2002. They reflect the effervescence of agitators who were very much alive in the spirit of the time. In addition, the sorrow and the irritation of a Godard who was constantly in search of a new life force for cinema has reminded me of this era, and the zeal that emerged from it. I have also made a decisive discovery in Ici et Ailleurs. Godard’s group, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, used the method of the tableau noir, or “black screen”, in a perfect example of this cinematographic language that he and others developed, and which as he said, proposed to “make possible the realization of our images and sounds, our cinema”. In other words, they wanted to express a message by way of silence. At that time, I criticized that method, wondering if it wasn’t simply some sort of flight towards aphasia. But this time, while watching this black screen, I told myself that Godard was giving us an alarm call, warning us of danger, a trap: “We are being seen so we don’t see anything.” I was unable to sense this other message at the time, this despair of an era during which Godard, with such dedication, explored ways to make himself understood by all. I might be reproached for repeating the same things over and over again, but I really want to write Godard about this profound and new emotion that I felt while watching Ici et Ailleurs.
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2 THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE There are several points that link Godard and myself. The most obvious concerns our common commitment to the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Let us think, from our point of view, about what Godard and his friends were able to consider as possibilities to explore, and what has, in contrast, disappointed them, and then compare their positions with the actions and analyses that my comrades and myself conducted at the time. In other words, it is about asking, in the light of this commitment to the liberation of Palestine, of what this “despair of an era” contained in the black screen wants to tell us. We have to clarify the message that Godard tries to communicate, and the reasons that have pushed him to change the title from Jusqu’à la Victoire (Until Victory) to Ici et Ailleurs. We can already discern an answer in the process of self-transformation undertaken by Godard and his comrades. They indeed clearly adapted themselves to the characteristics of the process of development of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. After 1968, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) assumed the role of leadership of an ethnic movement. It passed from a political and peaceful activity to armed struggle. The PLO defined this “strategic defensive war” as the last stage of the resistance, and reinforced offensive armies against the Israeli occupier. When Godard travelled to Palestine in 1970, the organization was at the height of its activities and the Palestinians finally began to acquire an identity on an international level. The PLO imposed itself as the principal representative of the Palestinians. It is important to point out that the 1,500,000 refugees, who had been rejected by the bordering Arab countries, who lived in misery and suffering and
were asking for the liberation of their homeland, had become the principal actors in the struggle, and that it was because of them that the “Palestinian government in exile” was formed. Since then, the forces of the Palestinian liberation have led numerous military operations across the occupied territories. It was in this context that Godard, in collaboration with the PLO, decided to realize a documentary film about the reality of the struggle. Godard declared his position at the beginning of Ici et Ailleurs: “From February till July 1970, ‘we’ – ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘she’, ‘he’, go to the Middle-East, to the Palestinians, to make a film. And we have filmed things in this order and we have organised the film that way… saying: here is what was new in the Middle East. Five images and five sounds that had not been heard or seen on Arab soil. The people’s will + the armed struggle = the people’s war + the political work = the people’s education + the people’s logic = the popular war extended, until the victory of the Palestinian people.” To summarize, Godard here evokes the road of a war of the people. He declares his support for the armed struggle of the PLO, acknowledging that the liberation of Palestine had not been possible in a peaceful manner and that the Palestinians had no other choice than to engage in a long popular war against Israel, with an army in which equality between man and woman was considered necessary. Those were the principal themes, and they were as important for Godard as for the PLO. In substance, the method taken up by Godard can be summarized as follows: to use sound and image to paint a frontal portrait of the people in revolution. When Godard was getting ready to finish the film, Black September happened, the month in which there was a real massacre of Palestinian fighters. At that time, Israel was not the only one fearing the victory of the Palestinians. Various Arab countries also thought there was a risk that too great an influence
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Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, Ici et Ailleurs (1970-1976)
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of the Palestinian conscience in their respective countries could take down their own regimes. Then the government of Jordan found itself confronted with such nationalist slogans as “Let us transform Amman into Hanoi!”, launched by the Palestinians. Fearing a coup d’état, it in turn started to engage in its own oppression of the Palestinian forces. The violence of the coup inflicted on Palestine during this event certainly gave Godard’s group food for thought. Numerous collaborators were killed and the production of the film found itself in crisis. And that is not all. The extremely abrupt change of the conditions in which the Palestinian forces found themselves must have led Godard to completely rethink the form of the coproduction. The filmmaker was obliged to look for new possibilities to continue to work with the PLO. We cannot exclude the idea that in order to revive the production of Jusqu’à la victoire, the group was considering taking up the events of Black September in the film. The importance of this drama demanded a reworking of the strategy for the liberation of the Palestinians. Meanwhile, the PLO evidently did not want to increase its hostility towards the Jordanian government or worsen the antagonisms at the heart of the Arab population, already brought to light during Black September. The PLO could not go along with Godard’s proposition, as it advocated a reinforcement of the nationalist movement and the popular war to resolve the internal conflicts within the whole of the Arab countries. This information was given to us soon after we arrived in Palestine ourselves, where we were confronted with the same problem. So it seems to have been political issues that prevented the production of Jusqu’à la victoire from being finished.
3 SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES DESPITE COMMONALITIES In 1971, we started the production of a documentary film depicting the conditions of struggle for the liberation of Palestine, somewhat similar to what Godard’s team were doing. Then we had to face yet a new tragedy for the Palestinian camp: the battle of Jarash1. The royal Jordanian army, together with the Israeli army, launched a menacing attack, wiping out a whole Palestinian battalion on the mountains of Jordan, which was an outpost for the offensive against the territories occupied by Israel. In the middle of shooting the film, we witnessed the determination of the Palestinian forces who, far from willing to retreat, either militarily or politically, persisted on the road of armed struggle. Our film, Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army / PFLP: Decla ration of World War), reflects this situation. Realized in collaboration with the FPLP, it is a document that we later showed in Japan, as well as in certain Palestinian camps and in Europe. Our engagement with Palestine consisted above all in experimenting with militant cinema in the context of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, while at the same time supporting the struggle in Japan, in order to create a global solidarity in favour of armed struggle. Fundamentally, Godard’s engagement had the same starting point as our own. We had in common a position and a will to change the old system that dominated the era in which we were living. That is what led us to voice our support for the transformation of the struggle in popular war, by and for the people. But the shift in the politics of the PLO created a gap between our points of view, and it eventually imposed a change of method in our respective cinematic approaches. Godard and I have each drawn our own conclusions, and these 1 Referred to as Gaza Camp, Jerash is home to Palestinian refugees who fled the Gaza Strip after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
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have led to different responses. At the start, we shared with Godard a desire to experiment with the new possibilities of cinema. The events, however, led us to reconsider the fundamental question of our way of working on the resolution of the problems linked with the development of a cinematic activism, starting from zero. This question was crucial. We had to include in the global vision a common experience of the research of possibilities of the worldwide revolution, symbolized by the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. This is why the differences that separate us have given birth to films underlining those differences, despite the proximity of our commitments. It is also about questioning to what extent our films, or rather the similarities and the differences between our approaches to cinematic activism, could be linked to the worldwide revolutionary movement. Our differences are not determined by our vision of the revolution, but rather concern our respective conceptions of the strategy that the movement of worldwide solidarity had to adopt. This being said, the particularities and the contradictions that distinguish us are well and truly discernable in Ici et Ailleurs and Sekigun-PFLP. At the point when we were working on the production and distribution of our film and when I joined the international forces for Palestine, Godard and his group abandoned their film. After five years of tormented reflection, they decided to rework Jusqu’à la Victoire into Ici et Ailleurs. It is perhaps not pertinent to compare the results, but as we finished our film and engaged with an activist movement, we couldn’t help wondering why Jusqu’à la Victoire was not completed in collaboration with the PLO and why a hiatus of five years separated this first draft from Ici et Ailleurs. Could Godard and his group have refused to finish the film for uniquely political reasons, because of a difference of opinion with the PLO? Or perhaps the independent financial
resources dried up, making the continuation of the shooting impossible? Until I finally watched Ici et Ailleurs, I thought all these reasons were possible. Today, I don’t think I was completely wrong, but I have to admit that I wasn’t completely right either. Actually, during the period when the production drew to a halt, Godard and his comrades did not question the spatial and temporal void that separated Palestine and France. They had instead given priority to a reflexion on the transformation of existence at the heart of our societies. Later, they reformulated their reflection in regards to their commitment to Palestine, which was failing. They acknowledged the weakness of their subjectivity and integrated this in a new structure that constitutes the principal message of Ici et Ailleurs. Godard said it himself: “And then we came back home. I came back, you came back. In fact we haven’t recovered yet. We finally came back. She, he, you, I. I came back to France. It wasn’t working out. And then days passed, months passed. It’s not going well anywhere. Nowhere. I can’t do anything. In France, you soon don’t know what to do with the film. Very quickly, as they say, the contradictions explode and you with them.” He rather openly confesses being torn between France and Palestine, suffering after having stopped the production of the film. This means that the disputes concerning the content of the film and the lack of funding were not the only reasons. What then were the other motives? I think that the filmmakers were asking themselves how to build a bridge to the new stage of the struggle: going beyond their belonging to society, even though they were socially and politically divided. If this is the case, one has to ask in which way the team and Godard himself proceeded to sublimate their desire, so far away from Palestine. Did they maybe take some distance, during some time, from their involvement with Palestine? In truth, this was not at all the case.
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In fact, Ici et Ailleurs reveals itself as an experimentation with new methods susceptible of responding to and coping with a new context for the struggle. These are valid not only in regards to the commitment to Palestine. Ici et Ail leurs also constitutes a tipping point, after which Godard began a change in his cinematographic methods. 4 THE DESIRE TO PASS THE BORDER AGAIN What stimulated Godard to take up the project again? At what point, while being so far removed from Palestine, did he pick up the abandoned Jusqu’à la Victoire film, to deconstruct it and recompose it in the form of Ici et Ail leurs? From the remaining material, Godard chose five images and five sounds: “The people’s will + the armed struggle = the people’s war + the political work = the people’s education + the people’s logic = the popular war extended.” He has not been able to alter them. In Ici et Ailleurs, the authors become attached to “elsewhere” (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan). The words of this language, in spite of the events that have struck Palestine, do not change. “Here”, that is to say in France, such words are considered non-existent. Godard says it himself in the film: “Probably, in attempting to add hope to dreams, we have made adding errors,” “It’s true that we never listened to silence in silence. We wanted to crow victory right away. And what’s more, in their place. If we wanted to make the revolution in their place, it’s maybe because at that time, we didn’t really want to make it where we were, and preferred to make it where we weren’t.” Godard continually poses the question of knowing what is keeping them at a distance from this “elsewhere”, these scenes of struggle in the Arab and Palestinian liberation, in which he and his team had invested in the past. The films
from the US and the Soviet Union were what plundered the images and sounds. It is capitalism that seizes the time of life and relations between humans. It is Godard and his friends themselves who are alienated and buried “here”, under the numerous “zeros”, the coefficient of capitalism in France. Godard and his friends wanted, once again, to go beyond the “zeros” and once more face the battlefield of Palestine and other places, from “here” to “elsewhere”, from “elsewhere” to “here”. But what pushed them to take this turn? This is only my hypothesis, but I am certain it has to do with what happened during the Olympic Games in Munich in September, 1972. After the massacre of Palestinians during Black September, after the “massacre of Mount Jerash” inflicted on the Palestinian guerrillas, it was during the Olympic Games in Munich, just after the battle of Lydda in May 1972, that members of the Palestinian guerillas broke into the athletes’ village. They occupied the village, taking Israelis hostage in order to demand the release of Palestinian prisoners of war. Television stations interrupted their broadcasts of the games and relentlessly filmed the village where the guerillas barricaded themselves in with the hostages. It was a moment of tension that Godard described as follows: “In Munich, the force of imperialism was exerted through television. Two billion spectators wanted a program.” While watching these broadcasts, Godard undoubtedly thought of a way to counter the powerful imperialist message of television. If I am able to formulate such a supposition, it is because we had exactly the same experience. In February 1972, when we were in Japan, working on Sekigun-PFLP, the Japanese Red Army had taken hostages and entrenched themselves in a chalet in Asama.2 This event was baptized the 2 During nine days, the Japanese population could follow live television broadcasts of the spectacular progress of this hostage-taking, which turned popular opinion against the leftist movements.
While watching Ici et Ailleurs
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THE FIRE NEXT TIME
“Battle of Asama”. Television unceasingly turned its cameras on the event. The authorities distilled a message that impelled spectators to expect “the great scene of the arrest of the guerrillas and the liberation of the hostages”. The whole of Japan was nailed to their seats. This message was more powerful than any sound or word. We can assume that what had awakened Godard and the others, torn between here, Europe, and there, Palestine, and what led them to take up the challenge to make Ici et Ailleurs, may have been the continuous broadcast of “the scene of pitched battle between the Palestinian guerrillas and the special forces” that unfolded in Munich. This hypothesis seems acceptable to me. Godard’s comment in Ici et Ailleurs is extremely radical: “Take advantage of the fact the world is watching to say: ‘show this image from time to time’. If they refuse, take advantage of a worldwide TV audience to say: ‘You refuse to show this image’. At each final, for example. Ok, we’ll kill the hostages and be killed afterwards. And for them as for us, it’s silly to die for an image. And we’re a little scared” These words, full of bitterness, are spoken as a counterpoint to the moment when we see the group searching for a way to show Jusqu’à la Victoire on television, with the authors carrying out a critical analysis of their own counter-information film: “Looking back, the things that are described in these images are not all that different than those we can see in whatever American or Soviet films.” What takes place is a singular process of sublimation that allows for a reversal of the field of possibilities. Let us reconsider Godard’s words: : “If we wanted to make the revolution in their place, it’s maybe because at that time, we didn’t really want to make it where we were, and preferred to make it where we weren’t.” Godard thus reconsiders his counter-information film in order to definitively conclude the impossibility of its succeeding.
We can guess the meaning of the other message brought about by the black screen. The black screen of the Godard cinema, combined with another crucial term, the “memory” of the filmmaker, suggests a smothered howl stemming from the author’s soul. The “memory” that transcends time is both a past and a future. It accompanies us towards a conscience of the present. It is most probably in this way that Godard wanted to cross the border between here and elsewhere. It is not about going “forwards” or “backwards”. It is not about being “here” or “elsewhere”. The border depends on the positioning of “forwards=backwards” and “here=elsewhere”. Do Godard and his comrades mean to imply that the equal sign (=) allows for the infinite accumulation of “zeros” that links Soviet and American films? What is really happening? I try once again to take time for an inner reflection in front of this black screen. I don’t know how much time I will be able to concentrate. I have to say that while hearing the news about Palestine and seeing Ariel Sharon urging the butchers to continue their indiscriminate murder of Palestinians, the interior of my mind already colours whiter and whiter with anger. Thinking about it, the ultimate, heartbreaking message that Godard has sent us in Ici et Ailleurs does not reside in the black screen, but in a screen made of the purest white. Translated by Stoffel Debuysere, with the help of Mari Shields Ici et ailleurs and Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen will both be screened on Thursday 3 April, in the context of The Fire Next Time.
AFTERLIVES OF THE MILITANT IMAGE
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Backcover image Santiago Alvarez, Now! (1965) Graphic Design Studio Jurgen Maelfeyt