Category: Figures of Dissent

16 February 2014 18:00, Wiels Brussels

“There are works interested in the representation of war, whether fiction or documentary, and others interested in the tectonics of storytelling, writing history, and identifying and producing documents taking the war situation as a case or a base, because war is one of rare situations where notions of common logic collapse, and the notions of evidence in relation to documents and history have to be challenged.”
– Akram Zaatari

How to represent the ongoing struggles in the Middle East, a region in the throes of successive wars, excessive division, and abundant stereotyping? How to displace the dominant vision of never-ending violence, destruction, occupation, resistance, suffering, deeply entangled in what Jean-Luc Godard has referred to as the endless circulation of “brand images”? In his work Akram Zaatari tries to provide some possible responses to this challenge, particularly in regards to the legacy of conflict in his home country, Lebanon. Like many other Beiruti artists who have grown up during the Civil War (1975-1991), Zaatari is concerned with the construction and narrativization of its history and its present day reverberations. A substantial part of his work in film, photography and performance investigates the multiple tensions between memory and history, fiction and document, the public and the private, as a way to intervene in the dominant representation of history. With the use of archival images – partly drawn from the collection of the Arab Image Foundation, which he co-founded – attention is drawn to its constructedness, as well as to its gaps and fissures. In this Dissent! session we will mainly discuss Akram Zaatari’s cinematic work and his use of counter-narrative and docu-fictional strategies, which tend to prompt a fresh perspective on the forms and politics of fiction itself. Perhaps, as Jacques Rancière has suggested, it is above all in situations of radical uncertainty that “the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.”

Akram Zaatari has been invited by Wiels in the context of his forthcoming exhibition (21.02 – 27.04.2014)

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

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About DISSENT!

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

6 February 2014 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. In collaboration with Courtisane.

My Childhood (1972, b&w, English spoken, 46’)
My Ain Folk (1973, b&w, English spoken, 55’)
My Way Home (1978, b&w, English spoken, 71’)

“Strangely enough, my trilogy is not about a dream world, but about the real landscape I had wanted so badly to escape from. But the making of these films could not be a cathartic exercise. There had to be a distance. I had to be objective so that the characters could come to life, so that the work could have shape.”
– Bill Douglas

He wouldn’t have liked his work being associated with the notion of the political. Certainly, although this trilogy portrays the life of a boy growing up in a poverty-stricken mining village in post-war Scotland, it does not shed any light on the circumstances of the economic and industrial devastation that would lead up to the widespread misery of the Thatcher years. And although the largely autobiographical films are clearly rooted in a deepfelt empathy for the hardship and loss endured by many, cries of suffering and injustice remain shrouded in silence, while signs of struggle and revolt seem stifled in bleak monochrome shades. But perhaps this mutism is exactly what defines the poetics of Bill Douglas’ work, which is also a politics. In contrast to many works of militant fiction – including those categorised as “social realism” – his films do not consist of denouncing false promises and hidden agendas for the sake of constructing another future, one that is always already laid out. There is no predetermined scheme of cause and effect here, no fixed scenario that can show us a way out. There are only situations, composed of inter-weavings of glances and gestures, times and spaces. The “realism” Douglas was looking for means precisely this: to take distance from the narrative schemes that supposedly make up reality, and delve deep into the interior of the situations themselves, there where the events of the world become affects, enclosed in mute faces, mobilized in silent actions, finding expression in spare words. In this world of affects and intensities lingers the sense of another life and the dignity needed to pursue the dream of this other life, always unpredictable, far away from this “reality” where everyone, as the boy is told time and time again, is bound to a sole place and destiny.

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

18 February 2014 20:30, Argos Brussels.

“The dangers of didacticism, or the seemingly unbridgeable rift between cinematic drama and economic affectlessness, would seem to factor against attempting to film the crises of capitalism. Yet the works of past filmmakers and theorists struggling with the experience of economic collapse remain alive with lessons for the present, and the ongoing financial crisis has been the object of noteworthy, if rare, attempts to give narrative and visual form to its underlying causes and effects.”
– Jeff Kinkle & Alberto Toscano

“Representations of crisis need not be crises of representation“, wrote Alberto Toscano in ‘Filming the Crisis’, a piece he jointly wrote with Jeff Kinkle on various cinematic responses to the ongoing economic turmoil, from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel to Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and Hito Steyerl’s In Free Fall. The article rehearses some of the approaches that both authors have been exploring in view of their forthcoming book Cartographies of the Absolute, which aims to provide a critical survey and a series of reflections on the proliferation of works in the visual arts, cinema and literature which seek to tackle the representation of contemporary capitalism. The focus is on those works which in one way or another try to provide models or narratives that might allow us to orient ourselves around the global economic system, taking in account the associated dimensions that pose obdurate problems for plot and image: invisibility and connectivity, the immaterial and the systemic. The book promises to extend the already broad scope of Toscano’s work, which includes acclaimed books such as Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea and The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuality between Kant and Deleuze, as well as numerous translations of Alain Badiou and contributions to several journals of art and cultural criticism. He has also occasionally written on the entanglement of politics, aesthetics and political economy in cinema, notably in regards to the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu, amongst others. Recently his translation of Franco Fortini’s The Dogs of the Sinai was published alongside a new release of Straub-Huillet’s Fortini/Cani. In this DISSENT ! session we will mainly discuss his Cartographies project, in trying to get to grips with some of the common drives and shared impasses that seem to characterize the current wave of film and art works dealing with the logics of capitalism and its failures.

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

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About DISSENT!

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

13 November 2013 19:30, Flagey Brussels.
Talk with Avi Mograbi proceeded by a screening of his latest film.

Once I Entered a Garden
FR/IL/CH, digital video, color, Hebrew & Arab spoken, English subtitles, 2012, 97’

“Quand vous faites du documentaire, vous devez accepter que la réalité influe en tant que réalité. Cela signifie: accepter d’être surpris, avoir son propre input, ne pas imposer ses propres idées sur la réalité même si on impose ses choix. Je ne prétends pas être un reflet de la réalité, c’est un reflet de ma façon dont la réalité doit être montrée. La question centrale, c’est celle de intégrité.”
– Avi Mograbi

“Once I entered a garden to smell the scent of the flowers, and distract my sad soul.” So begins the song that gave Avi Mograbi’s latest film its title. Crooned by the Syrian singer Asmahan, it tells the story of a love that has withered, of hearts that have been violently broken with little hope of mending. The garden in the title turns out to be not a promised land of dreams, but a forbidden garden with no room left for the other. It is this irresolvable tension between dream and reality, hope and impossibility, that lies at the very heart of the film; a tension that goes to the core of the enduring conflict between Israel and Palestine, the issue Mograbi’s work has been fervently dealing with for over two decades. But in contrast to his previous films, here he does not start out from a situation of opposition and antagonism, but one of participation and complicity; and the search that drives him and his companion is not one for agitation or revelation but rather for consolation. A whisper, rather than a cry. As is true of all memorable journeys, its path was not the one initially chosen. In wanting to make a film about some of his family members who used to openly cross the border between Israel and Lebanon, Mograbi calls upon his friend Ali Al-Azhari, a Palestinian who has been living most of his adult life in Tel-Aviv. As their partnership develops, the family tale of crossing borders makes way for a story about crossing identities: between “me” and “we”, “us” en “them”, Arab and Israeli. The bittersweet account of “sad souls” seeking refuge – at one point quite literary – in a forbidden garden prompts a surge of hope, as a bilingual dialogue on a history in common leaves us pondering the possibility of a common future. Perhaps that is what makes this, as Mograbi himself has argued, his most radical film yet: one proposing, like all tender tales of love and friendship, an experience of a world lived through the perspective of difference, rather than identity.

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

As part of a Avi Mograbi programme, Flagey will also be showing Z32 (2008) and Avenge but one of my two eyes (2005).
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About DISSENT!

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

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

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

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

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

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

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
About DISSENT!

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