Category: Figures of Dissent

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

Black Audio Film Collective, Handsworth Songs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 October 2013 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane event.
introduced by Stoffel Debuysere

“I believe in committed cinema… committed to that contemporary reality, to the daily acts of heroism in that reality. No important work can be created without this commitment, I think… Because this commitment presupposes a desire for change of that reality.”
– Ritwik Ghatak

Jukti Takko Ar Gappo (Reason, Debate and a Story)
1974, 35mm, b/w, Bengali with English subtitles, 120′

In 1947 Ritwik Kumar Ghatak (1925–1976) was one of the over 10 million refugees who left behind their homes in East Bengal, fleeing from the surge of communal violence and human devastation that erupted in the aftermath of the Bengal famine and the partition of India. The terrible specter of this tragedy would continue to haunt Ghatak’s life and work, until his body and mind finally gave up thirty years later, ravished by illness and alcohol. Thirty years of struggle, against the postcolonial establishment, against the political and intellectual corruption of the middle class, against the crumbling appearance of a divided Bengal, against a world denying its own people their dignity and humanity. A struggle he began in the realms of literature and militant theatre, before taking up the camera and making his foray into cinema, the only medium he saw capable of reaching a mass audience – a wish that, in regards to his own work, sadly never came true during his lifetime. In his quest to express his pangs and agonies about his suffering people and reawaken the suppressed powers of Bengali culture and history, he chose to experiment with one particular form: the epic melodrama. But rather than looking towards the obvious example of Hollywood for inspiration, Ghatak found his touchstones in the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein and Ray Satyajit, the theatrical traditions of Bertold Brecht and Constantin Stanislavski, and especially the poems and songs of Rabindranath Tagore, considered by many as the pinnacle of Bengali culture. One of the most accomplished and heart-rending uses of Tagore’s music can surely be found in Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, Ghatak’s final, most autobiographical and allegorical film, in which he himself played his own role: that of a tormented leftist intellectual, burdened and ultimately broken by the weight of history.

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

2 May 2013 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane event.
introduced by Stoffel Debuysere

“Rather than being our own, the labors of our days are merely a series of things we are made to do by those outside ourselves. We live lives that are even more evanescent than the bubbles floating along the stream – and even more meaningless. The reason we show an abnormal interest in crime and scandal is that a life, which usually drifts by, thereby appears caught up by a pole in the river’s flow. A drowning man grasps at straws. For we find, in crime and scandal, a tiny trace that reminds us of human dignity.”
– Nagisa Oshima

Kôshikei (Death by Hanging)
1968, 35mm, b/w, Japanese with English subtitles, 119’

“I must cultivate this painful bitterness and make it explode”, wrote Nagisa Oshima (1932 – 2013) in 1965. And so he did. The filmmaker who would later gain worldwide fame with films such as Ai no Korīda (In the Realm of the Senses) and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, witnessed with great disquiet how postwar Japan, under the guise of nationalism and conformism, rendered itself increasingly guilty of imperialism and racism. His boundless outrage resulted in a series of fiery cinematographic accusations, in which he mercilessly dispensed with the hypocrisy of the Japanese “police state”. The eternal recalcitrant hardly found support or congeniality within the bastion of his native cinema – which he despised – but it didn’t take long before he was taken in by the movements that were emerging in the European film landscape. No wonder Oshima was called the “Japanese Godard” (a platitude he wittily countered by calling Godard “the French Oshima”) and his films were catagorized as part of the Japanese “New Wave” (a label he obviously rejected). However, he himself rather found inspiration in the Japanese underground theatre (“Ungura”), which tried to reconcile the politically engaged ideas of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertold Brecht with premodern Japanese traditions. The majority of Oshima’s films from the 1960s are the result of his efforts to translate the characteristic game with constrained space and dynamics between language and form, to cinema. Of these films Kôshikei (Death By Hanging) is undoubtedly his most “Brechtian” work, not only by implicitly refering to the Threepenny Opera, but also in making extensive use of “Verfremdung” techniques. Not for nothing this radical and complex indictment of the Japanese legal system, based on the so-called “Komatsukawa incident”, was called “the most fantastic scenario in the history of cinema” by Luc Moullet. Oshima described the stakes of the film as follows: “As long as the state makes the absolutely evil crime of murder legal through the waging of wars and the exercise of capital punishment, we are all innocent.”

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

Thursday, April 18 2013 20:00 KASK cirque, Gent. In the context of the Courtisane Festival 2013.
introduced by Stoffel Debuysere

Resistance. If there is a single word that characterizes the work of Marcel Ophuls, this is it: resistance to every form of injustice and banalisation, resistance to the prevailing dogmas of documentary cinema. It is an attitude that is marked both by a whole-hearted abhorrence (for indifference) and by passionate love (for narrative film). The one is a response to his experiences during WW II, the other a legacy from his father, the famous director Max Ophuls. The result is an uncompromising cinema that for four decades has had no equal in blazing a trail through the 20th century’s shadowy realm: occupation and collaboration during the Vichy regime in Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1969), the Troubles in Northern Ireland in A Sense of Loss (1972), war crimes in Nancy Germany and Vietnam in The Memory of Justice (1976), the siege of Sarajevo in Veillées d’armes (1994). Time and again, like a roguish Inspector Colombo, Ophuls makes his way through the heart of the conflict zone, in search of witnesses, in search of the story. Because Ophuls’s work primarily brings to mind the fact that the word “documentary” is always followed by the word “film”. This is a cinema that places structure above content, subjectivity above objectivity, discussion above pedagogy, a cinema that recognizes that documentary always equals “fiction” – a construction, a presence, a form. It is a cinema, finally, that refuses to make a distinction between “history” with or without a capital “H”, between a politics of the commonplace and the politics of the power apparatus, because that distinction, according to Ophuls, “forms the worst escape in life itself, the avoidance of every responsibility.”

A conversation between two accomplished advocates of documentary film, about cinema and history, montage and narration, and the role and responsibility of the filmmaker. Eyal Sivan already participated in a DISSENT ! session in december 2012. Marcel Ophuls is one of the Artists in Focus on the Courtisane Festival. The talk will be preceded by a screening of The Memory of Justice and followed by a screening of A Sense of Loss.

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.