Figures of Dissent – Page 7 – Diagonal Thoughts

DISSENT ! Jean-Pierre Rehm

6 February 2015 20:00, Bozar Cinema, Brussels.
Carte Blanche to Jean-Pierre Rehm, in collaboration with erg (école supérieure des arts) and FIDMarseille, in the framework of erg séminaire 2015.

“Moi je pense que l’humain a besoin pour naître de faire naître cette chose incompréhensible qu’est l’art, parce que c’est incompréhensible. L’art est la preuve même de l’inhumanité de l’homme, dans un double sens : d’abord, que l’être humain ne s’appartient pas, et aussi la preuve de son côté horrible, terrible. Dans les films qui m’intéressent, je fuis le militantisme hérité des années soixante-dix où on assène des soit disant vérités sans contrepoint. Les films, ce sont des aventures artistiques, l’art n’y est pas une plus value.”

Cinema as adventure of time and movement? Cinema as potential encounter with the inhuman within the human, as an experience of the intolerable that can release us from ourselves, allowing us to imagine our world differently? These ideas seem to have some kind of hold on our thinking about the emancipatory potential of cinema, ever since a brilliant thinker proposed to think of art as an exceptional sensorium that allows us to pass over to the other side, there where the truth of being resides, from which one returns with “bloodshot eyes”. But if political emancipation is indeed about exceeding the limits of our vital and social determinations, isn’t there a way of thinking about the potential of cinema without collapsing into metaphysics, without drowning politics and art into one grand ethology in common? If cinema is indeed an art deprived of linguistic palpability or certainty of expression, how can we find words to talk about the operations, figures, resonances, metaphors, attractions and inversions that constitute a cinematic world? And yes, since we seem to have no more patience for the “isms” that prospered so well in the past “short century”, how can we grasp and further the adventures that are happening in front of our eyes? Perhaps these are some of the issues that we can touch upon with Jean-Pierre Rehm, the spirited film enthusiast and, well, enthusiast tout court who has been running, since 2002, one of the most exciting film festivals in Europe, FIDMarseille. For the occasion of this Dissent ! session he has chosen five films, which are on the surface as disparate as the background of its makers. But isn’t the blurring of borders between what is traditionally called “documentary” and “fiction” or what is neurotically categorized as either “art”, “film” or “artists’-film” (sign of the times: the coupling or hyphen) precisely what makes it possible to rekindle cinema’s sensible force of heterogeneity, counter to the consensual tendencies that try to pin everything and everyone down to specific plots and places? As long as we keep up the struggle with easy determinations, then, perhaps we can allow our eyes and ears to drift in unforeseen directions. Who knows, in a time when the real is claimed to be completely disbarred from any form of illusion or utopia, when every divergent standpoint is easily dismissed as “unrealistic”, perhaps cinema, this art of appearance, still might have something to say.

Jean-Pierre Rehm will introduce each film, followed by a discussion.

Salomé Lamas, No Man’s Land (PT, 2012, 72′)

“Is Paulo a mythomaniac? We will never know, but it is his stories that lead the danse macabre of an existence guided by arms. Through fixed shots, in a unique and stripped-down interior, the camera records his words and his laddish mask. Starting out as a simple soldier in Angola, he says, but keen to cut off the ears of black people during the war for independence from Portugese colonisation, he then worked as a mercenary here and there, and finally for various European states against the Basque movement. Paulo calmly boasts of his evilness, his efficiency and his skill as a Samurai killer, until the camera cuts away to show him in the middle of African immigrants, cooking under a bridge, a typical pathetic tramp, suddenly disarmed to play housemaid. The real career path, whatever the details, of someone who has always confused horror with the ordinary, and has been fed on obscene and conquering mythologies.” (JPR)

Pere Portabella, Mudanza (ES, 2008, 20′)

“Mudanza, Grenade, the family home of the poet Garcia Lorca. We see no one there, except the ballet of movers who empty one by one all the rooms of their furniture, pictures, etc. It will remain an empty dwelling, filled with light and traces, that has become the cenotaph for the poet murdered by the Fascists in 1936, and whose corpse was never found. Portabella, with a camerawork of an impressive virtuosity, composes here, seventy years later, more than homage: a funeral elegy.” (JPR)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Phantoms of Nabua (TH, 2009, 11′)

“It’s night, a neon lamp throws light onto a deserted playing field. Off to one side, on a makeshift open-air screen can be made out the image of a village struck regularly by lightning. As night finally falls the outlines of a group of young boys appear. Each one takes turns at kicking a burning ball that makes glowing lines in the grass. All the light, the neon lamp, the lightning and the fire echo each other in the midst of smoke that rises from the ground. The game continues quickly until the ball hits the screen and sets fire to it, causing a new spectacle that the little group will gaze at, stripping away the projector’s beam, a ray without image.
In extremely simple terms, the film aims at evoking a precise historical event: the war and the destruction of a village called Nabua. A short –Thai, if you will – version of an apocalypse of old. That the soldiers represented here by young carefree boys and that the memory of a village are combined with a cinema projection speaks amply of the refusal to simplify that runs through all the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Because these are not so much the events described or the stylised characters that are ghostly, as the title indicates, than the horror itself. One will easily understand that to find today a cinematic form to this massacre, to light up the dark, is to surmount – as much as images can – that which has already been destroyed. It is no doubt worth pointing out that this film was initially part of a group of projections called Primitive Project.” (JPR)

Benjamin Tiven, A Third Version of the Imaginary (KE/US, 2012, 12′)

“In this very short, very intense film, we see and understand, as we so rarely do. In a place that acts as a film library in Nairobi, guided by the manager of the site, we follow a presentation of the archives shot in Kenya. From the real difficulties inherent to conservation, we suddenly move on to others. The question of language, of the representation of a language such as Swahili, shapes it into those motifs associated with censure, it is the links between image, language and censure that appear. And yet Benjamin Tiven does not consider this complex ensemble as the subject of his work — but as the very material of his very own judiciously enigmatic film.” (JPR)

Lee Lynch & Lee Anne Schmitt, Bower’s Cave (US, 2008, 14′)

“Bower’s Cave” deals with the history of the Indians and their archives. How to pay tribute to their culture, their history? How to film their handicraft and artistic production? The couple show great rigour here in their treatment of the museography and cinematography. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)

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.

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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.

DISSENT ! Noël Burch

18 February 2015 20:00, Bozar Cinema, Brussels.
Noël Burch in conversation with Stoffel Debuysere, preceded by a screening of Red Hollywood (Thom Andersen & Noël Burch, 1996-2013, 120’)

“To the mass of filmgoers, after all, what is in focus is, indeed, the diegesis, the illusory “world experience” of film. The work of the signifier, however sophisticated, so long as it keeps a low profile, so long as it does not draw a curtain of semantic noise between that “world beyond the screen” and the “average spectator,” is invariably so out of focus as to be quite invisible.”

At a time when corporatists and politicians alike all seem to have a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on their nightstand, at a time when her self-styled brand of “radical capitalism” is promoted as a revolutionary and emancipatory force to be reckoned with (after all, aren’t the unreasonably persecuted one-percenters ultimately the symbol of a free society?), it’s pretty daunting to watch her demented testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. Fulminating against the Hollywood movie Song of Russia – a bland melodrama about a symphony conductor who visits the Soviet Union, falls in love and joins the anti-Nazi resistance – Rand refuses to see the film in relation to the wartime alliance and furiously dismisses it as communist propaganda, because it shows too many Russians “smiling”. This is just one of the many scenes in Thom Andersen & Noël Burch’s Red Hollywood that illustrate the anti-communist hysteria in the throes of Mccarthyism. But who remembers the victims of the Hollywood blacklist, even the notorious “Hollywood Ten” who paid time for their refusal to give in to the coercion? In their film, Andersen and Burch reconstruct this faded period in the history of American cinema and give these screenwriters and filmmakers their due, not by simply confirming their historical status as non-talented martyrs or rejecting the allegations of the witch hunters, but by suggesting how they were actually able to express their ideas in the films they wrote and directed. The film recasts some of the arguments that Thom Andersen already made in his groundbreaking essay ‘Red Hollywood’ from 1985 and that he expanded upon in the book Les communistes de Hollywood. For the making of both the book and the film Andersen found a natural ally in Noël Burch. After all, who else could match the historical knowledge and aesthetical insight of this fellow dissenter? Ever since his Praxis du Cinéma (1969), Burch has explored – both in his writings and films – the cinematic tension between presentation and representation, statement and articulation, showing and telling, a tension that at one time used to be designated as “ideological”. The heyday of ideology critique may be long past by now, but some of its underlying questions keep on lingering today, not in the least in regards to the relation between appearance and reality, form and politics. To paraphrase the beautiful title of one of Burch’s books: how do we give life to those shadows? This Dissent! Session will take the ventures of the “left front” in Red Hollywood as a starting point to address this stubborn conundrum.

On 19 February Noël Burch will also present ‘The Forgotten Space’, a film he made with Allan Sekula, at KASKcinema.

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.

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About DISSENT!

Figures of Dissent: Allan Sekula & Noël Burch

19 February 2015 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. In collaboration with Courtisane.

The Forgotten Space (2010, NL / AT, 112′)

In the presence of Noël Burch. In conversation with Stoffel Debuysere

“If there is a single object that can be said to embody the disavowal implicit in the transnational bourgeoisie’s fantasy of a world of wealth without workers, a world of uninhibited flows, it is this: the container, the very coffin of remote labor-power. And like the table in Marx’s explanation of commodity fetishism, the coffin has learned to dance.”
– Allan Sekula

The last paragraph of ‘Dismal Science’*, the essay that is at the heart of Allan Sekula’s legendary Fish Story project – comprising photographs, slide projections and a book – does not provide closure of any kind. Rather, in all its haunting and taunting, it provokes further interactions and interventions. It activates, which is perhaps what all forms of activism aspire to. If the cargo container, this metal box that is at the same time ever-present and never-disclosed, really is the coffin of remote labor-power, then there is still much digging left to do. Sekula himself never abandoned his quest over the world’s oceans and his investigation of the labour aboard its ships and in its harbours: twenty years after commencing the monumental work of Fish Story (1989 – 1995) he made The Forgotten Space, together with fellow companion Noël Burch. While the first project was still haunted by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the latter resonated with the economic crisis of 2008. In the aftermath of this crisis it was made clear for all of us that, in twenty years time, capitalism had lost nothing of its “vampiric vitality”. On the contrary: it has learned to make the exploited pay for its crises, all the while rendering the fact of exploitation itself invisible. In the dominant image of the world economy as fully integrated, globalized, dematerialised and “friction-free” there is no place for old industrial relics such as sea trade, this ancient world of rusty metal and creaking ropes, of slow motion and ponderous weight. To all appearances, the “on the waterfront” culture of sailor bars and ship chandlers, as depictured in Elia Kazan’s eponymous film, is now of the past, and so is the class struggle that coincided with it. Who remembers the struggles of dockers, seafarers, and shipyard workers, which were so fundamental to the formation of trade-unionism and labour movements? Watch today’s news and see how easily this world is denounced as an anachronism that merely stands in the way of progress and prosperity. How easily we forget. In these “liquid”, post-industrial times of ours, we have no trouble floating in mid air, riding the global waves of capital, surfing the fluid flows of information, but we forget how globalization wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the forgotten space of maritime realms. And we forget that what the shipped coffins contain is manufactured by workers on the other side of the globe. Because, in contrast to what we are being told, Marx’ gravediggers have never disappeared – they have just vanished from sight, forced into ever more precarious circumstances, oftentimes on the far side of the sea. Should we be surprised to learn that the same shipping containers are increasingly used for human transportation and habitation? No, but we should be all the more outraged. As Noël Burch and Allan Sekula were when they made this film, which can only begin to suggest the extent of the horror caused by globalized capitalism.

Allan Sekula passed away in 2013, but the course he set out will undoubtedly be taken up by others. In all its activating force, The Forgotten Space, as Noël Burch reminds us, “is a film which has to be continued by other means”.

Born in the USA (San Francisco) in 1932, Noël Burch has been living in France since 1951. He graduated from the Institut Des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in 1954. While primarily known for his theoretical writings, he has always positioned himself as a filmmaker and has directed over twenty titles, mostly documentaries. Burch has been publishing since the 1960s. Among his numerous publications are his first and best known book ‘Theory of Film Practice’ (New York: Praeger, 1973) and ‘To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema’ (Berkeley, 1979), which remains the most robust history of Japanese cinema written by a Westerner. From 1967 to 1972, he collaborated with Janine Bazin and André S. Labarthe for the celebrated series, ‘Cinéastes de Notre Temps’, and directed seven programs which are considered to have renewed the “film-maker portrait” in the heroic years of French public television. It was during that same period that Burch was co-founder and director of the Institut de Formation Cinèmatographique, an alternative film school associating theory and practice.

* The essay ‘Dismal Science’ developed from a paper first presented at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 1992. Versions of the original paper were subsequently presented over the next two years at various venues. The completed version was included in the book that accompanied the Fish Story project. Unfortunately, the book has gone out of print, and the current cost of copies ranges from $500 to over $1000. However, you can find a PDF copy HERE.

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

DISSENT ! Jacques Rancière

POSTPONED UNTILL FURTHER NOTICE

17 December 2014 20:00, Aleppo (bâtiment Vanderborght, rue de l’Ecuyer 50), Brussels. In collaboration with ‘Phd in one night‘ project & Académie royale des beaux-arts de Bruxelles – École supérieure des arts (ARBA-ESA).

“There is no politics of cinema, there are only singular figures according to which filmmakers apply themselves to bring together the two meanings of the word ‘politics’, through which we can consider a fiction in general and a cinematographic fiction in particular: politics as what a film speaks about and politics as the strategy of an artistic approach (…) We could say: the relation between a matter of justice and a practice of justness.”

How to think about the ways cinema can put into action the relation between the certainties of injustice, the uncertainties of justice and the calculation of justness? This question has been stirring Jacques Rancière ever since he was taken in by the wave of cinephilia that churned through Paris in the 1960’s. From his first interview in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1976, via his own series of writings for the same magazine between 1998 and 2001, to the publication of La Fable cinématographique (2001) and Les écarts du cinéma (2011), cinema has been an important strain throughout his work, linking his dwellings on the shores of politics with his ventures into the realms of aesthetics. How can cinema be thought of as an overpass between these two ever shifting landscapes, as a terrain of struggle that bears the original responsibility of politics: the organization of dissent? If it’s true that we can no longer believe in the dreams of cinema as the privileged form of the identification of art and life, or as an enigmatic force that can give us new vision and awaken us to a new consciousness, how can cinema still make a difference? According to Rancière, we need to let go of those persistent expectations that consider cinema as an instrument to inform political strategies and mobilize militant energies. Instead, it has to be regarded as nothing but a surface where experiences can be organized in new figures and relegated into new trajectories, as a “distribution of the sensible” that can evoke a process of transformation, disrupting the dominant logic of representation and changing the coordinates of the given. Any political “efficiency” of cinema cannot be based on a link between cause and effect, or a bond between revelation and mobilization – on the contrary, it has to content itself with a loss of destination, inviting us to reframe the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible. The question that remains is then not what cinema can do for us, but what we can do with cinema… In this DISSENT! session we will take a selection of recent films as starting point for a discussion on how cinema and its culture can contribute to a reinvention of politics.

On 16 December Jacques Rancière will also be speaking at a Post-conference in the framework of the “Phd in one night” project at Arba-Esa, D.A.M. Gallerie (reserved for students of ISAC / ARBA-ESA).

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. The visit of Jacques Rancière is made possible with financial support of Kunstenplatform, Universitaire Associatie Brussel (VUB/EhB).

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About DISSENT!

DISSENT ! Ariella Azoulay

15 & 18 December 2014 20:00, Galeries Brussels. In collaboration with KU Leuven / Leuven University Press and Aleppo. Ariella Azoulay in conversation with Stoffel Debuysere, preceded by a screening of ‘Khirbat’ Khize’ (Ram Loevy, 1978, 48’) and ‘Al-Midya’ (Dani Gal, 2014, 26’)

“I was born in the early 1960’s, and for years took for granted the existence of the state of Israel. My political consciousness was formed by the 1967 occupation, the injustices it led to and the urgent need to reflect on them. As a young leftist, I was raised to believe that 1948 was a distant disaster, irreversible and less acute than the endless injustices that resulted from the 1967 occupation. Years of research on citizenship and photography made it clear that the occupation was part of the Israeli political regime, and that reconstructing its schema should start in 1948”.

Is it possible to break the deadlock of the present and imagine a different future through a revisiting of the past? The theoretical and curatorial work of Ariella Azoulay is grounded in an exploration of this possibility: using the events that occurred between 1947 and 1950 as a prism, she proposes a civil perspective on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, one that turns away from the framework imposed by the paradigm of an unavoidable and irreversible national conflict. It is a perspective that encompasses all the inhabitants of the territory, both Jews and Arabs, which allows to reconstruct the collision between them as a product of the war. The violence inflicted on the Palestinians positioned them as the enemy of the very people with whom they had previously shared their lives, which gave way to two distinct narratives – one culminating in the creation of the state of Israel, the other situating the nakba as the constitutive event of Palestinian identity – both of which are oblivious to the origins of this division. In order to reconstruct this past, Azoulay has created an archive of photographs that have been preserved by the same regime that has previously made great efforts to erase its traces, setting limits on what can be seen and what makes sense. But an image is always more and less than itself: it can not be reduced to the intention that has produced it, nor to the meanings that it supposedly reveals or conceals. The work of Azoulay consists of undoing the dominant connection between these images that speak and the discourse that keeps them silent, by making them speak in another way, linking them with eyewitness accounts, diaries, memoirs, minutes and memoranda. In proposing to think in civil terms about a place steeped in hopelessness, she tries to open up a new horizon of civil living for both citizens and those denied citizenship, as inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew.

This Dissent! session takes as starting point a selection of films, chosen by Ariella Azoulay, that deal with the impact of the events of 1948 on Palestinians and Jews. Documenting something that goes beyond the suffering of the victims and the glory of the victors, transcending more conventional expectations to either expose details of the catastrophe or veil it from view, these films enable spectators to witness a variety of forms of Jewish-Palestinian co-existence to which the event of 1948 put an end. These films will be shown on 15 December and 18 December. Ariella Azoulay will attend only on the 18th.

15 December 19:00, Galeries Brussels.

Kassem Hawal, Return to Haifa (1982, Palestine, Arabic spoken with English subtitles, 84’)
Return to Haifa is based on Kanafani’s novel the plot of which takes place in 1967, when Palestinian refugees living in the newly occupied territories had an opportunity to visit the places from which they had been expelled in 1948. Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple expelled from Haifa in 1948, visit the home that had been their own. Miriam, a Holocaust survivor and now a Jewish Israeli citizen who lives in their house, lets them in. She moved there with her husband shortly after the Palestinian couple had been uprooted. The Palestinian couple returns to Haifa hoping to discover something about their baby, Khaldun, whom they had left at home that April morning in 1948, not realizing that neither of them would be able to return. The abandoned baby had been adopted by Miriam and her husband who gave him a Hebrew name – Dov, now a soldier in the Israeli army. This tragic encounter depicted by the movie emblematizes the Nakba’s being not only the tragedy of the Palestinian people but also of the Israeli Jews who cannot escape confronting this past and becoming accountable for it.

Michel Khleifi, Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction (1984, Israel/Palestine, Arabic spoken with English subtitles, 30’)
Ma’aloul, located 6 kilometers from Nazareth was destroyed in 1948 and its residents were not allowed to return but rather declared by the State “present absentees,” not allowed to have their property back, just as were Palestinians expelled out of the country. This movie makes even more explicit the assumption that the history of Israel cannot be narrated without acknowledging the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians and their dispossession. The movie these internally displaced Palestinians’ testimonies about the destruction of their village Ma’aloul and their dispossession and the curricula taught in a history lesson in Arab schools, compelled by the state to teach the Zionist version of the events.

18 December 2014 20:00, Galeries Brussels. In the presence of Ariella Azoulay.

Ram Loevy, Khirbat’ Khize (1978, Israel, Hebrew spoken with English subtitles, 48’)
Khirbat Khize is a TV drama directed by Ram Loevy in 1978 based on a novel (bearing the same title) by S. Yizhar, published in 1949. The novel is a step-by-step depiction of the expulsion of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. One of the soldiers repeatedly questions their deeds. The moral voice recurds and so its rejection by the others, in ritual-like form. This ceremonial repetition, which the movie makes more explicit, can be read a a rite of passage through which Jews in Palestine became the masters of the land. Since the 1960s, the novel was included in high school curricula. In 1978, when the film was to be broadcast, the Minister of Education and Culture banned it and the workers of the Israeli TV turned spectators’ screens dark for 50 minutes, the duration of the movie.

Dani Gal, al-Midya (2014, Israel, Arabic/Hebrew spoken with English subtitles, 26’)
al-Midya was chosen as the location for shooting the film Khirbat Khize in the mid-1970s. The villagers did not see the movie until Dani Gal, the director of this film, went to the village and screened it. The film documents the encounter of al-Midya’s residents with the movie, but no less so, the way they experienced in the late 70s the arrival of a troop of actors dressed as soldiers to shoot a movie that revives the expulsion of 1948. In the absence of subtitles in Arabic (in Khirbat Khize) one of the local residents serves as a simultaneous interpreter. The Israeli soldiers’ words dehumanizing the Palestinians, repeated in Arabic by a Palestinian, produce remarkable moments of estrangement.

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.

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About DISSENT!